From 27 Personalities in Search of Being
For those who have never read or heard of the enneagram, it will suffice to say for now that it is a geometric figure that was made known by G. I. Gurdjieff, who referred to it as a symbolic representation of certain universal laws and attributed it to certain esoteric tradition still unknown today in the Western world.
The enneagram of personality, however, comes from Oscar Ichazo, who presented the enneagram of passions, as well as the enneagram of fixations and other applications of this geometric map, before the Association of Psychologists of Chile in 1969. Ichazo said that the set of notions related to this subject —which he called Protoanalysis— constituted a discipline transmitted by a “Christian esotericism” with which he had had contact in Afghanistan.
Later, after having participated in a study period of a few months with Ichazo in the company of forty colleagues near the city of Arica, in northern Chile, I felt prepared to integrate my previous experience in the world of therapy (as well as Buddhist meditation and other elements) with what I had learned from him. In the context of the work that originated from such integration, I understood better and better and explained in more detail a set of notions that I have been referring to as the Psychology of Enneatypes.
From Dramatis Personae
At Ichazo's suggestion, in 1970 I organized a group of just over forty people who traveled with me to the Arica desert, in northern Chile, and we stayed there for just under a year with him, who guided us through an intense spiritual retreat. Ichazo considered me at that time as a privileged heir to his specialty, protoanalysis, about the application of the Enneagram to personality, and he foresaw that through me a synthesis would emerge between his psychological vision (inherited from an esoteric Christianity, actually pre-Christian) and Western psychology; I also foresaw that this understanding would constitute a great gift to the world, but at that time I did not know whether to believe him. And when he himself later traveled to the United States, he only associated with a small group, and the world considered him a rather doubtful man, somewhat talkative and bombastic.
I did not come to Ichazo to learn something about personality (although I had already become a specialist in the field),1 but in search of spiritual advancement, and in this he did not disappoint me, sending me on a long retreat in the desert that in turn it triggered in me a spiritual birth from which all my subsequent work would proceed. Although I later distanced myself from Ichazo, I can say (after several decades) that his prophecy has been fulfilled, since, without meaning to, I have been increasingly understanding the work on personality that he called protoanalysis and that I myself have preferred to call psychology of enneatypes.
When speaking of enneatypes, I want to allude to the types of ego recognized by the application of the enneagram to personality, and when speaking of the enneagram, I mean a geometric figure of which we in the Western world knew nothing until he spoke of it Georges I. Gurdjieff, a kind of Russian Socrates who appeared in Saint Petersburg shortly before the Revolution and who was later recognized as a teacher by many notable intellectuals of the last century. In his autobiographical book Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff explained that his own knowledge of the Enneagram derived from an esoteric school then located in Afghanistan, and many of us who considered ourselves his followers hoped that his prophecy would come true that after he, another emissary of this secret school would appear in the West.
I seemed to recognize such an emissary in a Bolivian named Oscar Ichazo who transmitted to me what he called protoanalysis and predicted that, through me, this knowledge would reach the Western world, which would now be ready, thanks to the development of psychology, to receive it and take advantage of it. . This prophecy has only been partially fulfilled, since, in effect, I have ended up developing Ichazo's ideas and these have aroused interest, but they have not been accepted by the academic world, which, faced with the literature produced by many charlatans, has taken the position of believing that everything related to the enneagram is pure quackery. I find such a reaction understandable, and it also seems understandable that the Vatican has considered the many religious enthusiasts of the Enneagram sectarians; but I do not doubt that the academic world will end up realizing that the insight transmitted by those who have learned about the subject in an experiential way! through my experiential-theoretical seminars, he communicates a more healing understanding than the DSM' or factorial studies about personality.
From Character and Neurosis
I will speak here about personality in general and also about the process of what we may call the degradation of consciousness-what is technically called the "theory of neurosis"-and which finds symbolic echo in the spiritual traditions in the mythical stories of the "fall from paradise." I will not make a distinction between the spiritual "fall" of consciousness and the psychological process of aberrated development.
Let me just point out, as a beginning, that this degradation of consciousness is such that in the end the affected individual does not know the difference, i.e., does not know that there has been such a thing as a loss, a limitation, or a failure to develop his full potential. The fall is such that awareness comes to be blind in regard to its own blindness, and limited to the point of believing itself free. It is in view of this that Oriental traditions frequently use, in connection with the ordinary condition of humankind, the analogy of a person who is asleep-an analogy that invites us to conceive that the difference between our potential condition and our present state is as great as the condition between ordinary wakefulness and dreaming.
To speak of a degradation of consciousness, of course, implies the idea that the process of the "fall" is one of becoming less aware or relatively unconscious; yet the "fall" is not only a fall in "consciousness" proper; it is also, concomitantly, a degradation in the emotional life, a degradation in the quality of our motivation. We may say that our psychological energy flows differently in the healthy/enlightened condition and in the condition that we call "normal." We may say, echoing Maslow, that the fully functioning human being is motivated out of abundance, while in a sub-optimal condition, motivations have the quality of "deficiency": a quality which may be described as a desire to fill up a lack rather than as an overflowing out of a basic satisfaction.
It is not difficult to conceive of the notion that we have all been hurt and, perhaps unconsciously, martyred by the world in the process of our childhood, and in this way we have become a link in the transmission of what Wilhelm Reich used to call an "emotional plague" infecting society as a whole. This is not only a modern psychoanalytic vision: a curse visiting generation after generation is something that has been known since antiquity. The notion of a sick society is the essence of the old Indian and Greek conceptions of our time as that of a "dark age," a "Kaliyuga"-an age of great fallenness from our original spiritual Condition.
I am not saying that mothering is everything; fathering is important too, and later events may have influenced our future development such as is evident in the traumatic war neuroses. Also early events, such as the extent of birth trauma, can have debilitating effects on the individual. Certainly the way in which children are brought into the world in hospitals constitutes an unnecessary shock, and we may conjecture that one born in the twilight and not slapped on the back to stimulate breathing may be better prepared to resist later traumatic conditions in life-just as a child who has been adequately mothered at the beginning of life may be better prepared to take on the traumatic situation of poor fathering.
Surely the human needs, in order to develop into a fully functioning adult, are more complex, and there are many things that may go wrong, or saying it in an alternative way: there are many ways in which the requirement for good enough parental love is frustrated or betrayed. In some cases parental self- involvement may result in neglect, for instance, while in others too strong a need to lie on the part of the grown-ups may result in the invalidation of the child's experience; still, in other instances, tenderness may be overshadowed by the expression of violence, and so on.
Let us say that the way we have come to be in this lower world that we inhabit after the fall from Eden-the personality that we identify with and implicitly refer to when we say "I"-is a way of being that we adopted as a way of defending our life and welfare through an "adjustment," in a broad sense of the term, and that usually is more a rebellion than a going along. In the face of the lack of what he or she needs, the growing child has needed to manipulate, and we may say that character is, from one point of view, a counter-manipulative apparatus.
In this state of affairs, then, life is not guided by instinct but through the persistence of an earlier adaptational strategy that competes with instinct and interferes with the "wisdom" of the organism in the widest sense of the expression. The persistence of such early adaptational strategy may be understood in view of the painful context in which it arose and the special kind of learning which sustains it: not the kind of learning that occurs gratuitously in the developing organism, but a learning under duress characterized by a special fixity or rigidity of what behavior was resorted to in the initial situation as an emergency response. We may say that the individual is not free anymore to apply or not the results of his new learning, but has gone "on automatic," putting into operation a certain response set without "consulting" the totality of his mind, or considering the situation creatively in the present. It is this fixity of obsolete responses and the loss of the ability to respond creatively in the present that is most characteristic of psychopathological functioning.
While the sum total of such pseudo adaptive learning as I have described is commonly designated in the spiritual traditions as "ego" or "personality" (as distinct from the person's "essence" or soul), I think it is most appropriate to give it also the name of "character."
To clarify
The Enneagram is a method of measurement and analysis of unconscious cognitive and instinctual mechanisms that we begin to develop at a young age. These are beliefs and patterns we believe are defending us, especially from something that hurt very early on, when in actuality they only perpetuate the pain. This is known as the Backwards Law, “the more you pursue happiness, the more you emphasize that you don’t already have it.” The more we try to defend ourselves, the more we affirm that we are fragile.
In many ways it is difficult for people to come to terms with what appears to be a negative approach to self-improvement, but what is not understood here is Enneagram emphasizes negative aspects of our personality to bring clarity as to how to improve oneself. We cannot fix something that is already fixed.
Along that train of thought, it is also not necessary for someone to relate completely to every single detail proposed about a type. Everyone is at different degrees of neurosis, some people may be very healthy and relate to very few negative aspects, some may be very unhealthy and relate to all of them, what matters is at least a loose relation to a type that describes the way you may have adapted to life.
There are two central features in the ego. The primary one, a cognitive defect known as the Fixation, and the other, an underlying motivation called the ruling Passion. We may think that character can be structured along a distinct number of basic ways, that result in the relative emphasis of one or another aspect of our common mental structure. We may say that the "mental skeleton" that we all share is like a structure that can, like a crystal, break in a certain number of ways that are pre-determined, so that among the set of main structural features any given individual (as a result of the interaction between constitutional and situational factors) ends up with one or the other in the foreground of his personality-while the remaining features are in a more proximate or more remote background. We might also use the analogy of a geometric body that rests on one or another of its facets; we all share a personality, with the same "faces," sides, and vertices, but (in the language of the analogy) differently oriented in space.
From Dramatis Personae
There is a triad of passions in specific positions in the enneagram, with laziness in the upper vertex, cowardice in the left corner and vanity in the right vertex of the central triangle. This central triad alludes to the basic structure of the ego or character neurosis. And in it we can find a synthesis of three psychological visions:
A foundation of neurosis is fear—transformed into anxiety (as Freudian and post-Freudian psychology affirms).
Another aspect of neurosis is narcissism, or excessive preoccupation with one's own image, as modern clinical psychology has affirmed.
The root of neurosis is unconsciousness, as yoga and Buddhism once affirmed, and existential psychology has re-emphasized when speaking of a loss of being that entails something like robotization.
We can observe a reciprocal feeding and interdependence between the unconsciousness that leads to anguish, which in turn leads to the elaboration of an idealized false self, which in turn perpetuates the unconsciousness.
These factors underlie (or, by combination with each other, generate) the rest of the passions, in the same way that primary colors combine to produce secondary colors, just as green arises from the combination of blue and yellow. But without dwelling on it now, I will call attention to how each of the sins can be considered a valid theory about neurosis, since for the irate the basic problem is anger, for the proud the vision of Karen Horney is valid that everything derives from pride, for the envious, the vision of Melanie Klein that gives priority to envy in her psychodynamic interpretation is true, etc.
From Character and Neurosis
Taking for granted that emotional deterioration is supported by a hidden cognitive disturbance (fixation), I will now examine this realm of passions, i.e., the sphere of the main deficiency-motivated drives that animate the psyche. It is logical to begin with them since, tradition tells us, they constitute the earliest manifestation of our fallenness process in early childhood. While it is possible to recognize the predominance of one or another of these attitudes in children between five and seven, it is not until an age of about seven years (a stage well known to developmental psychologists from Gesell to Piaget) that there crystallizes in the psyche a cognitive support for that emotional bias.
The word passion has long carried a connotation of sickness. Thus in his Anthropologie, Kant says that: "An emotion is like water that breaks through a dike, passion like a torrent that makes its bed deeper and deeper. An emotion is like a drunkenness that puts you to sleep; passion is like a disease that results from a faulty constitution or a poison." I think that one of the grounds on which passions have been regarded as unhealthy has been an observation of the pain and destructiveness that they entail-in turn consequences of their craving nature. We may say that they are facets of one basic "deficiency motivation." The use of the Maslowian language, however, need not blind us to the appropriateness of the psychoanalytic notion of orality: passions may be seen as a result of our retaining as adults too much of the attitudes that we all shared as infants at the breast: of a being stuck in a position of excessive sucking and biting in face of the world.
Not only is the word "passion" appropriate for the lower emotions in that they exist in interdependence with pain (pathos), but also because of its connotation of passivity. It may be said that we are subject to them as passive agents rather than free agents-as Aristotle predicated of virtuous behavior and modern psychology of mental health. Spiritual traditions mostly agree in regard to a potential disidentification from the passionate realm made possible by the intuition of transcendence. The enneagram of Passions:
From Dramatis Personae
It could be thought that each of the passions generates a type of character, and therefore the character could be represented by a circle with a series of specific character traits in different positions, and the fundamental passion in the center. But the vision transmitted by Ichazo is rather that of an ellipse around two focuses: an emotional one and an intellectual one. And just as destructive emotions are called 'passions', the name 'fixations' is given to a series of irrational assumptions that underlie passions and give them the stability that makes it difficult to overcome them. Next, I present the enneagram of fixations, although not with the names that Ichazo proposed for them, but with the ones that seem most appropriate to me through decades of experience on this subject.
From Character and Neurosis
Though not identical to what Freud meant by it, the word "fixation" brings to mind that it is through cognitive disturbance that we are most "stuck" -each fixation constituting, as it were, a rationalization for a corresponding passion. While the passions are the early core of psychopathology out of which the realm of the fixations has emerged, according to this view the fixations are the ones that structurally underlie the passions in the present.
Ichazo defined the fixations as specific cognitive defects-facets of a delusional system in the ego-yet the names he gave to them sometimes reflect either the same notion as the dominant passions do or associated characteristics that failed to satisfy his own definition.
We may say that any of the interpersonal styles into which the passions can crystallize involves a measure of idealization; a hidden view to the effect that such is the way to live. In the psychotherapeutic process sometimes it is possible to recover the memory of a time in life when a decision was made to take revenge, never to love again, to go it alone and never to trust, and so on. When this is possible, we can still make explicit many computations that a person has been taking as truths ever since and which can be questioned; computations of a child in pain and panic that need to be revised, as Ellis proposes in his Rational-Emotive Therapy
Perhaps we may say that each cognitive style is shaped by the characteristic already described in the enneagram of chief features or fixations, yet a number of assumptions exist within the domain of this cognitive style, and each of these assumptions, in turn, is something that we take for granted, and each generates perceptional distortions and false judgments in the course of ordinary life, such as Beck has proposed with his concept of automatic thoughts. The enneagram of Fixations:
From Dramatis Personae
The word 'instinct' has been practically abandoned by psychology since the time when ethologists described the operation of instinct in various animal species; Specifically in psychoanalysis, the Freudian view of behavior as driven by an instinct for self-preservation and a sexual instinct was replaced by one in which explanatory priority is given to the search for relationship rather than the search for instinctual satisfaction. The vision transmitted by Ichazo, however, invites us to consider three motivations that, without having the fixity of animal instinct, constitute goals and motivational factors of psychic life: the search for conservation (reflected in the search for security, health, and money), a sexual instinct (which when it dominates leads the person to concentrate on the couple and the family) and a social instinct (in which the most important thing is contact and communication and the relationship with the world in general, more beyond oneself and family).
From Dramatis Personae
It raises the psychology of enneatypes that combines the dominant passion with the dominant instinct in the person, and thus three specific varieties of each of the nine personalities are generated. And although to understand each of these subtypes the explanation that the same energy can invade one or another area of life due to its passionate nature, each of the twenty-seven human types is also distinguished by a specific trait that can be explained as an overflow of the instinctive area contaminated by a compensatory instinctual derivative. In the following figure I show, through brief terms, these specific characteristics of the subtypes, which are conceived as secondary passions beyond the nine basic passions.
From The Enneagram of Society
The symmetry between the left and right side of the enneagram is not only one of social introversion/extroversion: it also constitutes a polarity of rebellion/seduction. The right side is more social or socialized (seduction); the left, more antisocial (rebellion). This is the same polarity that exists between hysterical and psychopathic, both studied by Eysenk.
From The Enneagram of Society
There also exists a polarity between the upper and lower parts of the enneagram of characters. We may speak of a polarity of tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness in relation to the degree of intraception or inwardness. Characteristically, the lower region of the enneagram is that of the “poor of spirit”; i.e. of those who are in contact with their sense of lack at the heart of their being. At the opposite (upper) pole are to be found those who have turned a deafer ear to their inner hurting, and who therefore feel immensely more satisfied. In contrast, Enneatypes IV and V (in the lower region of the enneagram) are those who are fashionable in psychoanalysis: borderline and schizoid personalities. These are, one could say, the “borderline,” the most problematic. Or more precisely, the problem-ridden, in contrast to the characters of points VIII, IX and I, whose secret problem is not having problems. The case of these characters that science considers so pathological serves to illustrate the theoretical formulation of equivalence among them. The “poor of spirit” (a term which in the original Aramaic would translate literally as “lepers”) are those who seek more intensely—and those who seek a lot, find.
From Character and Neurosis
Finally, there is a contrast to be observed between the top and the bottom of the enneagram. While type IX, at the top, represents a maximum of what I have called a defensive extraversion-i.e., an avoidance of inwardness-that goes hand in-hand with contentedness, the bottom of the enneagram represents a maximum of inwardness and also discontentedness. We may say that those at the bottom of the enneagram never feel good enough or satisfied enough, regard themselves a problem, and are also identified as pathological by the outside world, while type IX is a position where the individual is least likely to make a problem of himself or appear pathological to others. A common feature links type IX to both type IV and type V, however: depression. Between type IX and type IV depression proper is the common Ennea-type V may be regarded as depressed too, in terms of apathy and unhappiness, yet the most visible commonality between type IX and type V is that of resignation: a giving up of relationship in V, a resignation without the outer loss of relationship in IX (a resignation in participation), that gives the character its self-postponing and abnegated disposition.
Notes for Interpretation - Not from Naranjo
The top triad are extroverts in that they don’t look inward, but this is differentiated from social introverts and extroverts. The social extroverts lie on the right side of the Enneagram with the Heart triad, and the social introverts lie on the left side of the Enneagram with the Head triad. This is why E4 may commonly be introverted characters, as is the case with SO4, because they are also at the bottom and thus hyper-intraceptive. This is also why E7 is known as a “secret introvert” despite their hyper-manic nature. They are introverted by nature of being a Head type, but their proximity to hypo-intraception creates a more extroverted disposition.
In Enneagram each type is the make-up of the types that are adjacent to it, and as such, will share traits and properties of these adjacent types. This means that each triad of passions is first driven by its central parent type, and every type in that triad will relate to the parent type. In the heart triad the parent type is E3, in the head it is E6, and in the gut it is E9. Then the types next to the parent type will have aspects of another triad, like an E4 will be a part of the heart triad and then share some aspects with the head triad because of it’s adjacence with E5.
For example, the position of ennea-type I between ennea-types IX and II in the enneagram invites a consideration of how perfectionistic character is not only “anti-intraceptive” but also proud. Indeed the word pride is sometimes used specifically to describe the aristocratic and haughty attitude of the perfectionist rather than the attitude of the type here designated as “proud,” whose priding is not so much to be respectable and admirable but to be needed, loved and exalted as very special.
In addition to the relationships of neighborhood and those mapped by the lines in the enneagram's "inner-flow," we may see also relations of opposition in the enneagram: just as types I and V stand at opposite ends on a straight line, so do the characters type VIII and type IV, and along the horizontal axis, type VII and type II
Pseudo-Social Pole - EII and EVII
Social, in name only, and antisocial, in a hidden way. These are rebellious and hedonistic characters who put on a compliant front, while secretly enacting their rebellion through inappropriate seduction. The II-VII axis is called the oral-receptive, for true as it may be that it is type VII that best corresponds to Abraham's oral-optimist, histrionics are not only "oedipal" but oral-receptive as well.
Sado-Masochistic Pole - EIV and EVIII
The IV-VIII axis is called the oral-aggressive axis; for true as it may be that it is mostly the frustrated and complaining type IV character that has been called oral-aggressive, the characteristics of ennea-type VIII are deserving enough of the appellation.
Opposite to envy on the enneagram, lust may be said to constitute the upper pole of a sado-masochistic axis. The two personalities, VIII and IV, are in some ways opposites (as these terms suggest), though also similar in some regards, such as in the thirst for intensity. Also, just as a masochistic character is in some ways sadistic, there is a masochistic aspect in the character of lust; and while a sadistic character is active, a masochistic disposition is emotional: the former reaches out without guilt towards the satisfaction of its need; the latter yearns and feels guilty about its neediness.
Just as the envy-centered character is the most sensitive in the enneagram, ennea-type VIII is the most insensitive. We may envision the passion for intensity of ennea-type VIII as an attempt to seek through action the intensity that ennea-type IV achieves through emotional sensitivity, which here is not only veiled over by the basic indolence that this ennea-type shares with the upper triad of the enneagram but also by a desensitization in the service of counter- dependent self-sufficiency.
Possessive Pole - EI and EV
I am calling the I-V axis the "anal" axis of the enneagram, inasmuch as both the schizoid character and the obsessive compulsive character may be said to be "anal" in terms of the descriptions of Freud and Jones, as I am discussing in the first and second chapters of this book respectively.
If the gesture of anger is to run over, that of avarice is one of holding back and holding in. While anger expresses greed in an assertive (even though unacknowledged) way, greed in avarice manifests only through retentiveness. This is a fearful grasping, implying a fantasy that letting go would result in catastrophic depletion. Behind the hoarding impulse there is, we may say, an experience of impending impoverishment.
Yet, holding on is only half of ennea-type V psychology; the other half is giving up too easily. Because of an excessive resignation in regard to love and people, precisely, there is a compensatory clutching at oneself—which may or not manifest in a grasping onto possessions, but involves a much more generalized hold over one’s inner life as well as an economy of resources. The holding back and self-control of avarice is not unlike that of the anger type, yet it is accompanied by a getting stuck through clutching at the present without openness to the emerging future.
Just as it can be said of the wrathful that they are mostly unconscious of their anger and that anger is their main taboo—it may be said of the avaricious that their avarice is mostly unconscious, while consciously they may feel every gesture of possession and drawing up of boundaries as forbidden. It might be said that the avaricious is internally perfectionistic rather than critical of the outer world, but most importantly the difference between the two ennea-types lies in the contrast between the active extroversion of the former and the introversion of the latter, (the introversion of a thinking type that avoids action)
Also ennea-type I is demanding while ennea-type V seeks to minimize his own needs and claims, and is prone to be pushed around in virtue of a compulsive obedience. Though both types are characterized by a strong superego, they are like cops and robbers respectively, for the former identifies more with its idealized superego-congruent self, while ennea-type V identifies with the overwhelmed and guilty sub-personality that is the object of super-egoic demands.
The polarity between pathological detachment and the attachment of holding-on echoes the polarity in ennea-type I between anger and an over-civilized compulsive virtue. Neediness in ennea-type V is deeply hidden in the psyche, behind the veil of indifference, resignation, stoic renunciation. And just as perfectionism nurtures the anger that sustains it, we may also say here that the prohibition of needs (not simply from their satisfaction but even from their recognition within the psyche) must contribute to the impoverishment of life that underlies the urge to hold on.
Phallic Pole - EVI and EIII
In contra-distinction to the characters discussed thus far, I think that ennea-type VI and ennea-type III may be called phallic-though all but the counter-phobic type VI can also be regarded as inhibited phallic, while type III is, in its cockiness, a form of a converse, "excited" version of the phallic disposition.
Reckless, resolute, self-assured, and narcissistic--excessively vain and proud. The failure to resolve the conflict can also cause a person to be afraid or incapable of close love.
The characters mapped in the six and nine corners of the enneagram stand, each of them, like in point three, between a polarity. While it is a polarity of sadness and happiness at the right side corner (IV-II), it is a polarity of aloofness and expressiveness at the left side (V-VII), and one of amoral or anti-moral and over-moral at the top (VIII-I).
Morality Pole - EVIII and EI
We shall now tackle a third group—which includes Enneatypes I (Anger) and VIII (Lust)—made up of two aggressive characters: recognized aggression in one case (EVIII) and negated aggression in the other (EI). Both EI and EVIII are domineering and are driven by a desire to conquer. But whereas EVIII takes an antisocial stance, such that rebellion against social norms acquires a positive value, the aggression in EI is rationalized.
The view of the “anatomy of neurosis” that the enneagram presents us demonstrates that the fear of the Freudians and the “lie” of the ancient rabbis are equally highlighted in importance; anxious inhibition and falsification of self, inauthenticity or vanity.
This view is highly consistent with what is implicitly present in the minds of modern psychotherapists—who have received the inheritance of Freudian and Humanistic psychology. Freud’s theory of neurosis essentially has anxiety as its core concept, so that behavior may be defined as neurotic when it signifies an expression of something motivated by anxiety. The existentialist current in psychotherapy, on the other hand, is based on its vision of neurosis as a loss of authenticity. These two viewpoints are difficult to separate, however, since there would be no motivation for covering up if there were no wish to flee from anxiety via this mechanism, and it is difficult for fear not to be accompanied by treason against oneself, i.e. a loss of authenticity. This relationship is acknowledged in the representation of fear and falseness as symmetrical points that are joined by a line on the enneagram.
But these two pillars of neurosis—fear and inauthenticity—are understood according to the enneagram as components of a triad. A third cornerstone in the building of neurosis—as we have already seen—is inner laziness, a cognitive inertia, indolence. To call it, following Gurdjieff, “the devil of self-calming” has the virtue of making the person responsible for his or her unconscious.
The interconnections shown between these three points (in the form of sides of the triangle) constitute what we may call psychodynamic connections, so that each may be said to underlie the next in a sequence mapped by arrows between them in a counter-clockwise direction. If we read this psychodynamic sequence starting at the top, we may say that a lack of the sense of being (implicit in the psychological inertia or "robotization" of sloth) deprives the individual of a basis from which to act, and thus leads to fear. Since we must act in the world, however, as much as we may fear it, we feel prompted to solve this contradiction by acting from a false self rather than (courageously) being who we are. We build, then, a mask between ourselves and the world, and with this mask we identify. To the extent that while we do this, we forget who we truly are, however, we perpetuate the ontic obscuration that, in turn, supports fear, and so on, keeping us in the vicious circle.
These are, therefore, the three cornerstones of the structure of the ego or personality: fear, vanity, and indolence or inertia of consciousness, presented as a loss of inwardness; also known as schizoid, hysteroid, and anti-intraceptive. The vicious circle of the three constitutes a dynamic theory of neurosis. “Dynamic” because each of these entities constitutes an energy focus from which a certain type of action proceeds, as well as because the tripartite theory includes the metadynamic view: a dynamic of reciprocal transformation among the three basic neurotic motivations.
With an orientation to thinking.
The angle on the left entails an introverted disposition (V, VI and VII)—although in Enneatype VII (EVII), the underlying introversion is compensated by superficial sociability.
As in all the characters of the mental area of the enneagram, the nuclear defense mechanism is splitting, which produces a disconnection between feeling, thinking and instinct. Splitting derives from a need to process everything on mental planes and territories, creating a mental separation of these areas of life into mental objects so that they can be managed properly. It is as though they are deliberately and consciously elaborating all areas of life to themselves, so what they want to know is what information everything communicates (and to know in general). However, the fields of emotion (heart) and corporeality (gut) become distorted because they are not meant to be transmuted into mental territories, causing the head type to be disconnected from these areas of life and submitting them to an unnatural conscious program.
In the corporeal territory, there is a split between the mind and the body, as if the body obeyed automatically and abruptly to mental commands and to the tyranny of thought, without a true sensory awareness of actions. It is disconnected from the action necessary to experience the world as it is.
In the emotional territory, they avoid contact with their emotions and repress their natural instinct, relying on the ability to understand intellectually. The fact that schizoids seem less loving is valid both for those who experience this from the outside and for schizoids themselves. While hysteroids, the right wing of the Enneagram, find it easy to fool themselves with respect to their own capacity to love, it is more difficult for the more schizoid of the characters to fool themselves than anyone, and they may suffer acutely as a result of their incapacity truly to relate to others. It is true that, nuclearly speaking, all the mental enneatypes (5,6,7), in the face of affective frustration, prefer to withdraw into their own self-sufficiency and give up, unlike the emotional characters, who impulsively seek the relationship, in an ambivalence more or less conscious between clinging and hatred towards the beloved affective figure
Their defense moves away from the other two triads, and their schizoid introversion becomes more noticeable as they go to their mental caves to relax by not having to act (gut) or serve the other (heart).
Their primary neurotic issue is their gazes are turned inward, to their thoughts, and they do not use their sight too much because they are afraid of not seeing enough. Contemplation is a fundamental aspect of transformation: looking without thinking, investing energy in an aesthetic sense in nature, in others. Obviously it is less easy with people, since the encounter with the other unleashes the false idea that we should act, that we cannot be there and simply stare. They must "lose their mind", reconcile with the instinctive part and need to place pleasure at the top of the altar of his values.
Social Ill
Points V and VII, on the left, have to do with information, since schizoid characters devote themselves to the acquisition of knowledge and oral-optimists to communication. Experts on social change say that the great change in our age (the “third wave” that Toffler spoke of, which he compares in importance with the revolution of the neolithic period) is that which has developed in the information sphere, a power that has entered into competition with the anciens régimes. The world cannot stay the same with the information we now possess, since just as the truth is liberating for the individual, so knowledge can cure us of myths and collective superstitions, as well as of the inertia of the system itself. Hence the theme of the ills of the world seems to me to be worthy of this exploration; to remedy them, as in the case of the ills of the soul, we need to know them.
With an orientation to feeling.
The dramatic and socially extroverted characters (II, III and IV) are located in the area of the angle on the right.
The primeval fear, even before not being worthy of being loved, is to not be seen. Disappear from the sight of the other, it means death. At the same time, your homework is to see the other, who he only takes into account in relation to himself. The heart triad is concerned with whether or not attention is being directed towards them, and falsify their identity through a “mask” whose survival is more imperative than the real person, and this is done by selling the image to look good. In doing so, real identity begins to die. This entails an unconscious notion of insignificance which is often called an avoidance of shame, because they do not think they are worthy to be loved for who they really are, and need the false identity to gain this love. However, the love one receives from disingenuity must also be disingenuous itself, creating a dimension of deceit. They deceive the other with their image, and themselves with the belief that their image is real.
Disconnect from the other two triads creates a disposition more concerned for the way things appeal, whether that be the appeal of their own image or the images of others, because they play a social game with personas as tokens, and this perception of appeal also provides insight into the emotional dimension of life. This can make them empathetic characters, but can also lead to oversensitivity, manipulation, and even insensitivity (‘indifference’ is still a feeling state). They think in emotions and waves of feelings, such as the emotional facets of neediness, desperation, aggrandizement, approval, and love which become the emotional reactions of hurt, anger, and sadness with the confrontation of rejection and invisibility.
Their primary neurotic issue is that their gaze is turned outward to the social world of which they are very personally involved, being unable to consider it from a rational and detached mental dimension and for what it really is in the corporeal. Thoughts and beliefs are distorted into only thinking and sharing the things that would get them approval, and the body is distorted into trying to create an appearance that conveys the inner idealized image to other people. This can be seductive movements, expressive dressing styles, professional styles, fluid intonations, abrupt intonations, loud intonations, etc. they are focused on the image each of these things convey.
In order to cultivate their real self they must be able to get rid of their deceitful image and dissolve it with themselves, they must identify with and realize the body as independent, as well as develop a detached rationality to really consider truth.
Social Ill
Points II and IV, together on the right wing of the Enneagram, correspond to female characters, and given the fact that the millennial character of our establishment is patriarchal, a great deal may be expected from the actual process of balancing of the sexes. The political balance between both will surely contribute to balancing our inner world, the family world of the generations to come—and vice versa. The moment the family evolves from a quasi-tyrannical model to a heterarchical structure of beings that relate to one another healthily, we shall have taken the most significant step—I believe—towards a democratic and balanced political world.
With an orientation to action and kinesthetics.
What is characteristic of the three characters that are represented at the top of the enneagram (I, VIII and IX) is their interest in not looking towards the subtle world of life experiences; a non-inwardness that goes hand in hand with active extroversion.
The defense mechanism of all the gut types is forgetfulness through action. The impulse to action allows them not to be in contact with their emotions and not to allow himself time for the psychic elaboration of what happens in their inner world and in the relationship with the external world. This derives from an excessive identification with the body, and the body's instinctual impulses, becoming lazy towards cultivating subjectivity. They have a special attunement to the wisdom of the body and the natural rhythms of life. Because the body thinks in a realm of impulse, they are operating at a non-verbal and irrational level, moving towards pleasure and away from pain, or the transmutation of pain into pleasure, and the awareness of this dynamic in the real world creates an awareness of justice and morality based on effect.
Laziness of consciousness may be expressed either as spiritual sloth or more broadly as psychological sloth: a not wanting to know what is happening, not wanting to realize. It is expressed as a chronic self-distraction from oneself, accompanied at the same time by paying exaggerated attention to the outside world. An indolent position with respect to life is that of a heavy or excessively inert, over-stable psyche; its loss of subtlety and spontaneity culminates in robotization. On the behavioral plane, this lack of inwardness results in excessive inertia, phlegm, or passivity; at the most intimate level, alongside the forgetting of self, a loss of life. This is an act of self-dehumanization.
They don't often abstract things into complex mental and emotional objects, but regard the world of motion and instincts as the decisive factors of reality. Even though what they are most dissatisfied with lies in the unconsciousness, their inner self, there is a subtle dissatisfaction with reality in the sense that their experience of it is “incomplete.” In this way they are subtly resisting the effect the outside world has on them by separating the self from what is not the self, creating a thick insular barrier nothing passes through, and they mistake this freedom from intellectuality and emotionality as giving them the autonomy to act.
With every type on the enneagram there is an ontic-obscuration of being, but the gut has an added anti-ontic disposition due to an ignorance of the two triads necessary for looking at things from a top-down perspective. They have difficulty considering their position in the mental and emotional dimensions, they simply exist in the corporeal. In order to cultivate themselves they must open up to their own subjectivity in order to create a true appreciation and saturation of their experience.
Social Ill
If we look panoramically at the sphere of capital social pathologies, we see that those characters situated at the vertices of the triangle of the Enneagram, as well as the neighboring points to IX (sociocultural inertia), find their institutional echo in the world, constituting its establishment. We may talk of the social system that the “patriarchal system” as a whole supposes: a corrupted military-industrial-bureaucratic-financial complex that has turned more and more against life.