Why revise our understanding of the Enneagram? Because the STRUCTURAL underpinnings of the Enneagram have not previously been known.

 

Most books on the Enneagram are packed with detailed descriptions of the nine personality types. I compare those descriptions to nosography. Nosography is the systematic classification and description of diseases. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association is a nosography listing the psychological disorders, identified by number, with a description of each. Psycho­therapists and physicians use the number of the disorder to indicate a diagnosis.

 

Nosographies are useful for doctors and other therapists in treating diseases because they can help them organize their thinking around a paradigmatic set of symptoms, causes, and treatments. But since a nosography is only a categorized list of signs and symptoms, it does not in itself explain causes or point to cures.

 

Although personality is not a disease, it is analogous to a disease in that both can be approached either “nosographically,” through their surface-level descriptions, or from some deeper level.

 

As a set of nosography-like descriptions, the Enneagram is already highly useful. Knowledge—whether of oneself or others—is power. Merely calling attention to personality patterns can certainly help an individual to both capitalize on personal strengths and dial down bad experiences due to weaknesses. And learning to understanding one’s friends, family, and co-workers through their personality types can improve communication in relationships.

  

But Enneagram-as-nosography tells us neither the origin of personalities nor the ways to overcome them when they are overly binding.  Furthermore, even when not undertaken solely as nosography, current Enneagram practice is diverse and conflicting. For example, Enneagram authors offer varying advice for ameliorating personality fixations. Some of their advice amounts to, “Stop doing that!” The most intriguing advice says, “Move to the next point.” In other words, adopt the characteristics of the type in the “Direction of Integration.” But if attempting to move, or integrate, to the next point gave consistent results, wouldn’t this advice form more of a theme in most Enneagram books?

 

The Enneagram 2.0 diagram looks the same

as the conventional Enneagram … it’s just

interpreted differently.

 

Moreover, current thinking on the Enneagram leaves several questions not only unanswered but, even more disturbing, unasked. For example, Why are there 9 types? Why do the 9 types fit into the Enneagram configuration? and, in particular, Why do they form a circle?

 

The answers to these questions form the basis of Enneagram 2.0—an interpretation and a practice that go far beyond Enneagram-as-nosography.

 

Enneagram 2.0 lays out and demonstrates the Deep Structure of Personality.