Enneagram

The Enneagram is a personality model built on a nine-pointed figure, and the figure does analytical work rather than decorating the model.

Nine types are numbered and commonly named: the Reformer or perfectionist, the Helper, the Achiever, the Individualist, the Investigator, the Loyalist, the Enthusiast, the Challenger and the Peacemaker. Each is defined not by behaviour but by a core motivation, a basic fear and a basic desire, which is why two people of the same type can behave quite differently and why the system resists questionnaire diagnosis more than most personality instruments.

The figure supplies three further structures. Wings: each type is shaded by one or both of its neighbours on the circle. Lines of integration and disintegration: the internal lines connect each type to two others, and practitioners read a person as taking on the qualities of one under stress and the other in growth. And the centres: the nine group into three triads of three, body or instinct at eight, nine and one; heart or feeling at two, three and four; head or thinking at five, six and seven, each with a governing emotion, anger, shame and fear respectively.

Most schools add instinctual subtypes, self-preservation, social, and sexual or one-to-one, giving twenty-seven variants, and levels of development describing how healthily a type is being lived.

What practitioners claim for it is self-knowledge: that identifying a habitual motivational pattern makes the pattern visible and so loosens it. Determining one's own type is treated in most schools as a process of extended self-observation rather than a test result, and the published questionnaires are generally described by their own authors as indicative only.

The Enneagram is routinely presented as ancient wisdom, often as Sufi, sometimes as desert-father. The documented history does not support that, and the history is not obscure.

The figure enters the modern West through G. I. Gurdjieff, who taught it in Russia and then in Europe from around 1915. Gurdjieff described the nine-pointed figure as a symbol of cosmic process, built from the law of three and the law of seven, with the circle divided by the repeating decimal of one-seventh, and used it for that. He attributed it to an esoteric brotherhood in Central Asia. He did not attach personality types to it, and no personality system appears in the Gurdjieff literature. The fullest published account is Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous.

The personality typology was mapped onto the figure by Oscar Ichazo in Chile in the 1960s, drawing on the classical vices and virtues and on his own synthesis. Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean psychiatrist, learned it from Ichazo around 1970, correlated the types with psychiatric categories and his own clinical observation, and taught it in Berkeley in small groups under a confidentiality agreement that was not kept. From those groups it passed to Jesuit teachers at Loyola and into Catholic retreat work, and from there into the general public through the books of Riso and Hudson, Helen Palmer and others from the late 1980s.

That is a lineage of about sixty years for the typology and a little over a century for the figure in the West. Ichazo himself objected in print to the attribution of his system to Sufi or other ancient sources.

Academic psychology has given it limited attention; the studies that exist give mixed support for the reliability of type assignment, and the model is not part of mainstream personality research, which works with trait dimensions rather than types.