Personality Machines

An Essential overview of the Enneagram

I’ve been toying with the Enneagram (loosely a personality typing system) for about 25 years. I’ve gotten a lot of value from it. People often find it captivating, and my impression is that it’s been growing in popularity over the last decade or so.

I have several things I’d like to say about it. Some clarification about what it is and how to view it (in my opinion), some of what I’ve learned about how to use it, and quite a lot about how it relates to scientific thinking.

So, in this post I’ll give my overview of it.

To spell out my reasons a little more:

• People often get a lot out of how I introduce systems. I tend to rejigger the logic until the whole thing makes a simple kind of sense to me. The result is often something that makes good sense to others too.

• I find that most overviews of the Enneagram miss what in my opinion is the core point. They talk about it like it’s a God-given classification system of personality traits and/or souls. I think it’s more useful than that. I’d like to hint at how.

• The Enneagram was my introduction to what I might call “subjective structures”. That idea has become central to what I do and think about, independent of personality types. I hope the idea can click for some of my readers too.

• The usual logic of the Enneagram is pretty bad, and I don’t think it has to be. I want to show what I think a slightly cleaned-up version looks like. Both for its own sake, and also as an example of how I clean up spiritual or mystical tools.

I’m not going to be able to get to all of the above in this post. It’d be too lengthy and take too long to write. So here I’ll just give my overview of the Enneagram, in part to give a lens through which to view other descriptions of the system (whether from me or others). I hope to dig into the other parts above in future posts.

The Essence

The Enneagram is a theory about how personality works.

It’s most often used to talk about which “personality type” each person is. It names nine strategy types a personality can use, meaning you can kind of categorize people by which strategy they most rely on. That’s usually the part people are most interested in.

But I think that application alone misses the core point. The Enneagram isn’t a classification scheme, even if people like to use it as one. It’s actually a map of suffering.

It’s a very negativity-laden map. It’s talking about the ways in which we torment ourselves by how we try to escape our misery. I often tongue-in-cheek summarize the Enneagram as asking:

In which of these nine ways are you most screwed up?

The core idea of the Enneagram is that there’s a structured relationship between your deepest nature (usually called “Essence”) and your habitual ways of navigating the world around you (“personality”). The personality is necessary to some extent, but by default it kind of takes over for Essence, sort of like an overly helpful dog that “protects” its owner from a love interest. To the extent that personality lives our life for us, its shortcomings get baked into everything we do, and Essence painfully withers.

Intuitively you can think of Essence as something like your soul, or the way that conscious awareness arises in you in particular. It’s the nature you had (but hadn’t yet developed or given much structure) when you were born. It’s what makes babies so different from one another and yet still so radiantly present and aware and innocent. When someone has an innate gift, like a gift for music, we can view that as an expression of their Essence.

Essence is naturally capable and wonderful and caring, but it still has to learn how to interface with the world as part of being born and growing up. Sometimes it encounters a challenge that’s too great for it to handle “nakedly”, so it creates a kind of machine to stand between it and the challenges of life. That machine is kind of like a mech suit with an AI. The more power it’s given, the more complicated it becomes, and the more of life it tries to robotically take over for Essence.

That machine is the personality. Some people use the word “ego” here, but that word gets applied to too many things and isn’t in standard usage in Enneagram literature, so I’ll keep using “personality” to talk about this mechanism.

It’s actually really helpful to have machines or autopilots in us. I like not having to think about keeping my heart beating for instance. I’m also grateful for my ability to walk without having to remember how. (That’s especially present for me right now as I watch the 10-month-old child I live with trying to figure out how to walk.)

But sometimes automatic habits can create problems, which those habits then try to solve using the same methods that created the problem in the first place. It’s like the runaway issue that can happen with alcoholism: if you start drinking too much, your life could start becoming really difficult, which creates stress, which you might try to deal with by drinking more.

Obligatory questionable Einstein quote

Essential qualities & toxic mimics

The whole point of a personality mech suit is that it isn’t Essence. It’s acting as a kind of shield, sort of like oven mitts. But it still has to act as though it’s Essence sometimes. So it ends up robotically mimicking some Essential qualities. And yet it lacks the fundamental creativity of Essence, so the robotic imitation often ends up being a kind of toxic and kicks off a downward spiral akin to alcoholism.

For reasons I’ll get into in a bit, the Enneagram focuses on nine self-reinforcing problems that result from toxic mimics of nine Essential qualities. I’ll give them the classical numbering here, but don’t worry just yet about what the numbers mean or why there should be nine of them. Just treat them as nine painful mistakes every personality makes to some degree or another. You can also treat this as an overview of the nine personality types along with their central themes in bold (whose origins I’ll explain when I get to why the numbers are the way they are):

1. Perfection: Essence is just so. Exact. Precisely as it is. And there’s a fundamental rightness to that precision, due to its perfect alignment with all that is. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to make things right. The focus is on right & wrong, condemnation, judgment, and perfectionism. It’s imposing an idea of how things should be. The more this imposition happens, the better the personality gets at noticing things that could be fixed or improved, and the more distant is the Essential perception of everything already being just so.

2. Love: Essence is caring, kind, loving. When personality mimics this quality, it notices that affection is the main social sign of love, so it focuses on both giving affection and eliciting it from others. There’s a degree of fakeness in targeting affection directly, though, which throws the value of that affection into question. The personality tries to sort of overwhelm the value question by being even more “loving” and getting more “love” from others. This creates a downward spiral of manipulation, codependence, and an ever more empty meaningless illusion of pride.

3. Achievement: Essence is inherently valuable and practically made of potential to grow and become. (Think of how children naturally develop into adults, or how acorns grow into oak trees.) When personality mimics this quality, it seeks value via signs of growth, i.e. accomplishment. Yet accomplishment achieved via a mechanical personality alone doesn’t develop Essence, so it’s recognized as hollow and meaningless, and therefore devoid of inherent value. That spurs even more striving and an ever deepening sense of worthlessness.

4. Preciousness: Essence is precious. When personality mimics this quality, it focuses on being special and unique as a source of worth. It recognizes that only Essence can be truly creative, but its task is to keep Essence from coming into contact with the world, so it instead fixates on the “negative space” where Essence isn’t — which is to say, the painful apparent lack of preciousness and inherent worth. The result is a deep sorrow and melancholy, which it sort of mines in order to create an impression of specialness and uniqueness — which it recognizes as hollow, thus reinforcing awareness of the (apparent) lack of inherent preciousness.

5. Understanding: Essence sees clearly. It recognizes the true nature of what’s real. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to build mental models and understand instead. It’s doing so in a mechanical and therefore fragmented way, though, so there’s always room to miss something. So the urge arises to keep everything at a distance and examine it from afar until it’s completely understood in a mental way, which can never happen.

6. Safety: Essence is inherently secure. It naturally has a kind of innocent trust in all of existence. When personality mimics this quality, it operates from distrust (due to the absence of Essence) and tries to find a sure thing. But what should it rely on to determine what it can rely on? That puzzle repeats endlessly in a downward spiral of anxiety.

7. Freedom: Essence is free, in the sense of the freedom of the wide open road. All action is available. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to generate possibilities and avoid restrictions. Obligations and internal negative feelings can feel constraining, so the personality tries to distract from them with stimulation and optionality. This leads to addiction: doing things to distract from a sensation without addressing the sensation’s cause, thus requiring ever more distraction.

8. Power: Essence is real. It’s not some ghostly phantasm. It’s in the contact our fingertips make with the world around us for instance. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to be solid and feel its realness via the impact it makes. It wants to affect while resisting being affected. This tends toward violence (in the sense of “a tendency to violate”). That causes others to try to intervene, which is the opposite of the personality’s strategy of “affect without being affected”, so it doubles down on applying violent force to stop the intervention.

9. Peace: Essence is deliciously blissful and effortless. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to resist any negative experience. It becomes numb, sleepy, repetitive, and passive-aggressive in a foot-dragging way. This approach tends to have negative problems pile up (since problems sometimes can’t just go away). These issues demand attention, which the personality responds to by ignoring them even harder.

The Three Centers

So why nine Essential properties and toxic mimics? And why these nine?

The main inspiration comes from viewing people as having three kinds of intelligence — what in Enneagram theory is usually called “the Centers”:

• The Head Center, which is about thinking and plans and figuring out what to do. When Essence shines through it, its function is awareness and clarity (in the sense of clear perception and clear understanding).

• The Heart Center, which is about value, preciousness, connection with others, love, and honesty. Its Essential expression is of inherent worth, innocence, and belonging.

• The Gut Center, which is about action and will and power. Essential Gut energy shows up as vivid presence, ease, naturally right action, and a simplicity of being.

I think these Centers are pretty intuitive. We talk about people being “in their heads” or really “heart-centered” or “open-hearted”. We at least used to say that someone’s “got guts” when they can take action in the face of fear, and that has a slightly different tone than saying the “have courage” (from French “cœur”, meaning “heart”).

The idea is that while each Essence is unique and grows up in a unique context, and therefore will create a unique personality, there are still some general trends. We can observe those trends by looking at how Essence sort of plugs the Centers into the automated machine that is a reactive personality.

When we examine personality from this angle, we can see something like types of personality design. It’s a bit like how different can openers might feel quite different to use, but the basic strategy is still to press a blade into the edge of a can lid. Its functional design is basically different from that of a knife, even though they both cut.

So the same way it’s helpful to have a mental category of “can openers” that’s different from “knives”, it can be helpful to have some mental categories for personality design.

Deriving the nine types

We can use the three Centers to derive the nine personality designs that the Enneagram focuses on.

If Essence focuses on just one Center for designing its mech suit, then you end up with what’s called a “primary type”. So you get a primary Head type, a primary Heart type, and a primary Gut type. The primary types are thus something like pure expressions of how each of the Centers behave when they’re used to toxically mimic Essence:

• Without Essence, the Head Center can’t see clearly and can’t serve as a source of orientation or guidance. This generates a lot of fear. That fear gets used to stir thoughts, which are mostly pointed at finding external sources of guidance (to replace the internal guidance of Essence). This is pattern 6 up above. (I’ll explain the numbering shortly.)

• Without Essence, the Heart Center creates a feeling of abandonment and shame. It cannot radiate with a sense of inherent value from within. So the personality machinery seeks value in external expressions instead. The way a distorted Head Center uses fear to generate thoughts, a distorted Heart Center uses shame to generate feelings. Those feelings drive action toward getting reflections from outside sources about the person’s value and nature. This is pattern 3.

• Without Essence, the Gut Center feels violated, which generates rage. That rage creates tension (the same way fear creates thoughts in the Head and shame creates feelings in the Heart). The result is fragmentation and enormous pressure. Issues of energy and resistance become very central. Actions become mechanical and the personality actively resists forces that try to change those actions. (Contrast with the attuned dance of mother and infant synching up, or two lovers dancing together.) This is pattern 9.

So those are the primary types.

We get six secondary types by starting with one Center and somewhat involving a secondary Center in the mechanical personality design:

• Gut with some Heart (pattern 1)

• Gut with some Head (pattern 8)

• Heart with some Gut (pattern 2)

• Heart with some Head (pattern 4)

• Head with some Heart (pattern 5)

• Head with some Gut (pattern 7)

Now it’s possible to put the nine designs on a circle, at which point the numbering scheme makes a bit more sense:

This is the eponymous “enneagram” (nine-sided figure). Ignore the inner lines for now; they’re the topic of a post’s worth of discussion, and we don’t need them to understand or use the system.

The circle can be split into three regions based on which Center is most involved:

From the Enneagram Institute. The Centers get lots of different names, like “Gut” is sometimes called “Body”. The names aren’t important as long as it’s clear to you which is which.

You can think of it as, we specify the regions of the circle by Center, and put the primary types in the middle of each corresponding region. Then if we sort of “lean” a primary type toward a secondary Center, that creates a secondary type.

So for instance, type 1 is what you get when you start with the primary Gut type (9) and “lean” a little toward distorting the Heart. So pattern 1 is defined by tension and forceful action focused on questions of value and worth — hence the type One emphasis on right & wrong and perfectionism.

Themes from the Centers

This bit about “leaning” can be used to explain where the nine themes I listed up above come from. Like how pattern 1 is about perfection. Here’s the logic:

• Of the Gut types:

  • When Essence withdraws from the Gut, the action is tension and resistance — the opposite of harmony, even though it’s used to try to mimic harmony. Hence pattern 9’s theme of peace.

  • Essence withdrawn from the Heart results in questions of value. When lack of peace get pointed at questions of conditional worth, the focus becomes about how to suppress evil and fight for good to arise. This yields 1’s theme of perfection.

  • Essence pulled away from the Head creates distorted vision and lack of orientation. Pointing lack of peace at the question of how to orient creates a forceful “carve your own path” kind of focus. Thus 8’s theme of power.

• Of the Heart types:

  • Pattern 3 most purely expresses Heart without Essence: value comes from external reflections. Thus the theme of achievement.

  • Adding a dash of distorted Gut focuses on how to achieve (and get your value reflected back to you) via forced effort. This creates pattern 2’s theme of love, emphasizing the way in which “love” is a verb.

  • Instead adding a bit of distorted Head results in trying to figure out how to achieve reflections of value (in a way that’s divorced from the Gut’s domain of action). The immensely internal and personal theme of preciousness for pattern 4 comes from this one.

• Of the Head types:

  • Non-Essential Head can’t orient on its own and seeks external guidance, but can’t tell which external guidance to trust. This defines pattern 6’s theme of safety: how do you find a sure thing to rely on?

  • An abandoned Head with a dash of Heart distortion means seeking safety in some externally perceived sense of conditional value (and as with 4, in a way that’s divorced from action due to not involving the Gut). This creates an at-arms-length mental examination pattern, i.e., type 5’s theme of understanding from afar.

  • Instead adding some Gut distortion means seeking safety through forceful action. The ability to move freely the way thoughts can move overwhelms the strategy here. Thus pattern 7’s theme of freedom.

Here I’m emphasizing the themes from the negative side. I could just as well have emphasized the positive sides — what it’s like for Essence to skillfully use each combo.

But as I said earlier, I think the main benefit of the Enneagram is actually how it’s a map of suffering. It’s certainly good to know what you’re aiming for! But you don’t create the Essential qualities by trying for them.

My hope is to talk more about how to use the Enneagram this way in a future post. But for now I’ll focus on tying up some loose ends:

Some leftover questions

You might wonder why we start counting with the Gut-with-some-Heart type as “pattern 1” and go Heart-wise. Why start there? Why not start with a primary type? And given that we’re starting with a secondary type, why not move toward the middle of its own Center’s triad?

The short answer is, I don’t know. No one talks about this choice as far as I know. It’s simply the convention. It’s an extremely universal convention in the Enneagram, so it’s what I’m going to keep using.

Second, you might wonder what’s up with all those lines in the middle of the diagram. That’s a good question. I’m hoping to dig into it in a future post. It’s actually the main reason why I started writing a post about the Enneagram to begin with: the situation with these lines is a wonderful case study of scientific logic. (I just realized I needed to give a lot of context first, and that the context works better as its own post.)

The short answer for what’s going on with the lines is: people think they know why they’re there, and what they say might turn out to have some value, but it’s also clear that basically no one knows what they’re talking about here. If they’re right about what the lines mean, it’s because they’re repeating something they’ve been told that was once worked out somehow. The reasoning doesn’t seem to have survived.

Third, why are the only two options for personality design (a) involve one Center or (b) involve a main Center and a secondary Center? Why can’t there be two equally involved Centers? Why can’t there be some of all three Centers?

You actually can have a pattern with all three Centers, but it doesn’t create a separate personality type. Once you’ve specified the first two Centers, you’ve determined the Enneagram type. Involving the third Center means that the personality has become so thick that Essence doesn’t shine through basically at all. It’s a state of immense psychological dysfunction — stuff like being suicidal, homicidal, schizoid, catatonic, etc. (The details of which dysfunction depend on the Enneagram type.)

“Wings”

As to why you can’t have two Centers equally involved… well, this is basically a flat assertion on the part of the theory. Some Center will be primary. In principle we could maybe find someone who really is running something that’s equally (say) type 1 and type 2 strategies. But in practice it’s usually anti-helpful to think of this situation as being possible. It’ll tend to mislead you about where your suffering is.

That said, it’s often helpful to view personalities as having a “wing”: usually someone whose personality is mostly of one type will still borrow heavily from one of the two adjacent types. Like a slightly 5-flavored 6 would be called “a Six with a Five wing” (or “6w5”). This is a personality that’s mostly about pure safety (i.e. Head issues) but will sometimes systematically add a bit of Heart distortion.

When a personality is of a secondary type and its wing is from a different triad, that basically means the personality sometimes switches which Center is its main focus. So for instance, an Eight with a Seven wing (8w7) mostly withdraws Essence from the Gut but also involves the Head. But at times the priority switches: the Head gets so involved that the personality sort of “pops” into a Seven pattern temporarily.

However! An 8w7 and a 7w8 are notably different. Their lives will look different. 8w7 is still basically an Eight, their life defined by themes of power. 7w8 is still basically a Seven, focused on freedom and stimulation. In practice it’s helpful to view these as very different types even if they have a structural similarity. (E.g. they’re both powerhouse types, arguably the two most aggressive and energetic of the Enneagram.)

I don’t think Enneagram theory says why this discrete difference should be the case. But I do find the tool more useful if I kind of go along with the claim.

What’s next

Hopefully the above acts as a good introduction/overview of the system. I doubt it’s enough to get a really rich feel for each of the nine types. But if you want to dig into the Enneagram more, hopefully this framework will help highlight the right things.

If you take just one impression from this whole post, I hope it’s this:

The Enneagram is a map of how each of us creates and re-creates our own suffering.

The point being, if we understand what’s going on, we might be able to observe how we’re recreating our suffering in real time, and then do something different in the moment. The tool is meant to be useful, not just a cute framework for classifying people.

I see this point missed so, so often with this tool. Basically everyone who gets into the Enneagram starts trying to classify everyone by what type they are and then explain all interactions within the framework. That kind of play can be helpful, especially to get familiar with a new toy. But I think it tends to do something unkind when used this way.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. That’s one of the topics I want to talk about in a future post: how to use the Enneagram well, and what some common pitfalls are, and how I think we might avoid them.

There’s also a question of how valid the system is. That question deserves some attention. I think we, collectively, are pretty incoherent when talking about models of subjective experience and what affects our behaviors. We mix up science and engineering all the time without noticing, which leaves us collectively very confused about what’s even real. I see what I think is a better way to explore this domain. The Enneagram is a case study I happen to know quite a lot about, so I might use it to demonstrate what I mean.

I also want to talk about those inner lines. Like I mentioned earlier, that’s actually what had me start writing this post to begin with. I just noticed that I needed to give all this context to even start talking about the inner lines. I think they’re interesting because their history is a fantastic example of pre-scientific engineering, only it’s about engineering subjectivity. I hope to explain what I mean by that and why it’s interesting.

I also hope to name something general about “subjective structures”. It’s unclear whether that’ll be an Enneagram-specific post though. I consider self-deception as a telepathic defense to be an example of a subjective structure, and it’s not at all dependent on personality type.

But maybe most pragmatically, I have several things to say about how to use the Enneagram. I’ve found it personally quite touching. It helped massively expand my sense of how varied people are, and it improved several of my closest relationships. It also made me more annoying in some of my relationships due to misuse of the tool. I’m hoping I can help folk benefit from my own experiences with the Enneagram.