The Enneagram: Human's Fear

I've never been big into personality tests. Their popularity has always seemed similar to the Zodiacs; they allow people to feel like there is meaning to their life's circumstances. While I am sure a framework will eventually be developed in which we will be able to accurately group personality types, Psychology is too young and ineffective of a field currently to be able to accomplish that. However, it's difficult to completely disregard their value. While perhaps they are not a perfect or near-perfect framework, they at least create some accurate associations that continuously bring people back to them. They have value to them in understanding the subconscious mind, yet, I still question how valuable the information they present is. As Psychology develops further, I'm sure one day we'll create/find an effective framework to sort most human beings into. However, none of the ones prevalent today seem to come close to doing that.

The most popular one, the 16 personalities test has always personally irked me. For those unfamiliar, the 16 personalities (based on the Myers-Briggs test) test attempt to ask four binary questions to sort the spectrum of human behaviour. These are as follows:

1) Introverted or Extroverted?

2) Intuitive or Observant?

3) Feelings or Thinking based?

4) Prospecting or Judging? (This tends to refer to organization styles, with judging being more organized of the two) The end result gives you a four-letter combination which is based on which side of which these questions you fall under (The bolded letters above are the letters that are used). For example, if my result in the questionnaire suggested I was more introverted than extroverted, more intuitive than observant, more thinking-based than feelings based and more judging than prospecting I would be an INTJ.

I have often gotten different results in every attempt since my introvert-extrovert and feelings-thinking results are usually right around the middle ground. The fact that Myers-Briggs has personality types that are determined by where you lie on extreme scales feels like it misses a large chunk of personality types in that grey area. There are a lot of people close to the middle on any of the four indicators, and being in the middle is a completely different human experience than being on any of the extremities. This framework feels inherently flawed due to its need to shoehorn human behaviour into only two possible answers in these categories. There are more than two answers to the question 'Are you introverted or extroverted' alongside the other three questions that the 16 personalities test asks.

Most mainstream personality tests seem to fall into this style of questionnaire and categories. While they can bring some level of introspection which is productive, they fail to create what I believe is a 'strong' framework for human nature.

After stumbling across the Enneagram, the test felt like any other to me. However, the result struck me deeply. It mentioned ideas of my self-identity that I had only scratched the surface of. There was a level of complexity there that I did not quite understand. How did this test achieve what so many other tests had seemingly failed at? This piqued my curiosity and began a deep dive into understanding the Enneagram itself. I attempted to make everyone I could take the test understand its nuances. While reading up as much as I could. This eventually led to me reading Personality Types by Don Richard Riso.

The 16 personalities test attempted to diagnose four different personality traits into 2 possible outcomes. The Enneagram at its core, seems to focus on one defining human feature, which then cascades and impacts the rest of human development; fear.

Most of the human brain is developed by the time we are 5. The roles we fill socially would logically flow from that development. So our early fears should result in pre-determined behaviour as we grow. Since the types of fears should be limited to a certain number, it seems a strong basis for personality typing. The strongest fear we experience in our prime developmental years leads us to display predictable behaviour based on our adaptation to the fear. The Enneagram believes that there are 9 basic developmental fears that lead to distinct personality types.

Type 1 - Fear of being corrupted (Morally incorrect) Type 2 - Fear of being unloved or unworthy of love

Type 3 - Fear of being perceived as useless

Type 4 - Fear of not having any significance or personal identity

Type 5 - Fear of being useless

Type 6 - Fear of being without support

Type 7 - Fear of pain

Type 8 - Fear of not having control over one's environment

Type 9 - Fear of loss

The flow of one's personality from these fears seems logically sound. For example, if a parent is unable to effectively express love for a child, it makes sense for the child to feel unloved and therefore make the assumption that they must be unworthy of love, this is the journey of a 'Type 2'. Since our minds are hardwired to adapt to our surroundings to bolster our survivability, and being liked in society is a core part of how societal human beings have survived, it makes sense that the Type 2 will spend their life looking for acceptance and the belief that they can be loved. They undertake actions to receive validation, and their actions are driven by that fact. This could obviously be frustrating to others whose actions are based on ideals such as feeling useless (Type 3,5) and would feel as if the Type 2's are performative, or needy. This is why some fears would cause people to naturally develop an aversion to other people who grew up with specific fears that are natural counters to theirs. However, while I do see the wisdom in this system, I do not believe it infallible, or even particularly beneficial due to the way the test has been framed.

Once again, just like the 16 personalities, it has an issue with how rigid its definitions are. There's no flexibility on which fears influenced us at that age. We can only have one, it can only send us down one path. This is where it starts to lose its relevance for me. I do not believe everyone has one main fear and their whole journey leads off from that. We all have these 9 fears in us, but because of how we grew up, we're more susceptible to some. Those fears do affect our development and that is where the Enneagram holds so much value, by understanding the fears that we established at an age where we do not even have great memory or comprehension ability, we can understand how they formed around our family structure and by understanding the path it would lead us on we can make the right adjustments and changes in our lives to avoid the toxic aspects of it. Following the Enneagram as gospel seems to only hold strong value if one of those fears is overbearing in your life, but that is not how most people live. From my personal vantage point, people grow up with multiple fears to different degrees, and their position on the Enneagram is irrelevant. They could have a 7 and a 9, or a 4 and an 8, or a 1 and a 2 AND a 3. The possibilities are endless, but limiting people to only having developed one major fear in their childhood is shortsighted. By understanding which fears we hold, as well as which fears we do not, we will have a much stronger understanding of our subconscious and unconscious mind than blindly believing we follow the path of one type. I do believe that those with a very strong fear will follow the path Personality Types by Don Russo set out for them, almost to a T, yet that will not be the norm for most people who come to the theory looking for guidance.

I am no expert on the Enneagram, and I do not claim to have an overarching knowledge of what it is. However, from my own observations, the Enneagram is most effective when you understand how many of the nine fears you're susceptible to, what it means for your behaviour and how to fix it.

I do think the Enneagram asks a better question than the premise of the Myers-Briggs/16 Personalities, instead of 'Who are you?' it seems to ask 'Why are you this way?' this gives it an inherent structural advantage and I believe any advanced framework in understanding human personality will need to be built off a similar question.

To close this off, I have a question I have been posing to myself. What does it mean to believe that human beings are fear-driven creatures? It does feel like a pessimistic view of human nature. That our development is mostly driven by fear, and not a more positive aspect. It tracks, however, with evolutionary theory, fear and anxiety cause our bodies and minds to adapt, change and assimilate.

It seems as if the simplest solution to why we are the way we are, is that our instinct to survive within a society, our social evolution, is driven by social fears we develop before we're even old enough to understand their impact on us.