The Enneagram
The Enneagram (pronounced any-a-gram) figure is a circle inscribed by nine points. In Greek, ennea means nine and gramma means point. Each point portrays a distinctive personality style that has its own way of viewing, construing, and responding to people and events. Each style has both adaptive or resourceful and non-adaptive or non-resourceful cognitive, emotional, and behavioral strategies for self-maintenance and enhancement, for interpersonal relating, and for problem solving.
This array can be compared to a wheel of colors. If you shine light into a prism, it fans out into a spectrum of the basic colors. Following this metaphor, every person contains all the hues of the spectrum although one color particularly stands out or characterizes each individual. From a psychological perspective, human nature is expressed in nine natural fundamental ways; from a philosophical viewpoint, being is disclosed through nine essential characteristics; from a spiritual point of view, divinity descends and shows itself through nine earthly manifestations.
Within all of us, there are certain universal qualities that express the essence of the human person. We prize these essential characteristics as values and strive to realize them in ourselves and in the world. These principles, such as goodness, truth, and compassion, have an adaptive function whereby if we follow them, we will have an objective vision toward ourselves and others, using adaptive cognitive schemas, and we will live in a virtuous state of being with adaptive emotional schemas.
If our values and visions are threatened or discounted, we experience vulnerability and may develop a personality strategy to protect our sensibilities and to compensate for characteristics in our selves we fear might be lacking. This personality is usually an overly exaggerated expression of some valued quality of our true person. It attempts to defend and maintain our self in the face of our critics, to appease them, to gain their attention and approval, to win them over to our side, or to defeat them. Personality relies on repetitive thought, feeling, and behavioral patterns giving us a distorted subjective vision with maladaptive cognitive schemas that are driven by maladaptive emotional schemas or vices.
When we are functioning from our natural person, our values and vision are clear and our problem-solving capacities are optimal. When we operate from the strategies of our personality, our values are conflicted, our vision is narrow and opaque, and our actions are impulsive, compulsive, scattered, and less effective.
The Enneagram is a useful tool for understanding both the “upside” and “downside” of our personality styles.
What’s Your Enneagram Type?
Nine Lenses on the World
by Jerome Wagner, Ph.D.
We typically view the world through lenses but usually don’t examine the lenses themselves. From time to time we need to check our glasses to see if they are filtering the world cleanly or are distorting our vision. Nine Lenses on the World: the Enneagram Perspective provides a lens check to discover whether we are viewing the world accurately as it is or altered, like our world view believes it should be.
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Enneagram Spectrum of Personality Styles
by Jerome Wagner, Ph.D.
Intended for a general audience, this thorough yet brief guide through the Enneagram system provides a clear common sense outline of each of the nine styles. The resourceful characteristics and ideals of each style are contrasted with their non-resourceful idealizations. For example the Good Person’s passion for excellence can become a maladaptive pursuit of perfectionism. The adaptive energy, or virtue, of each style is contrasted with its maladaptive energy, or vice.
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