Type Four, the Individualist or Romantic, is placed in the heart triad with Two and Three, and is the type the system regards as most in contact with shame and most inclined to make an identity of it. Its basic desire is to find itself and its significance, its basic fear is of having no identity or personal significance. Its passion is envy, in the specific sense of a persistent sense that something essential is missing which others possess, and its virtue is equanimity. Its wings are Three and Five. Under stress the system places Four at Two, becoming clinging and over-involved with others; in growth it moves to One, becoming principled, disciplined and able to act on what it feels rather than only to feel it.
In the Hornevian groups, Riso and Hudson's second classification drawn from Karen Horney's three neurotic trends and set out in The Wisdom of the Enneagram (1999), Four falls among the withdrawn types that move away from others, alongside Five and Nine, since its search for identity is read as an inward turn rather than an assertive or compliant strategy. A later addition again, Katherine Chernick Fauvre's tritype theory, developed in 1994 and 1995 from scattered remarks by Ichazo and Naranjo, holds that a person carries one dominant type from each of the three triads, body, heart and head, so a Four's fuller tritype combines it with one number from each of the other two; like the rest of the system's internal machinery, it has a named modern author and no older source.