Who Am I? Personality Types for Self-Discovery

Why Do We Need to Type One Another? 

In my book, Nine Lenses on the Word: The Enneagram Perspective I found that it is instructive to reflect on why we spend so much time assessing and classifying one another. Here’s a hunch. Human beings are born with the expectation of finding regularities. Cognitive theorists inform us that our mind likes regularity and has a natural tendency to search for recurring patterns (1983). We need to discover or create a certain amount of order so we can predict and control what is going to happen in our environment as well as assess what effect our own actions will have on our surroundings. The most important objects in our environment are other people. It might be anticipated, then, that we look for regularities in people and seek to categorize them. Understanding ourselves and others gives us some predictability, control and comfort which helps us relate better. We have been typing and stereotyping each other for ages. Some have sought to categorize others informally, as in “blondes have more fun.” Others have attempted to categorize people more formally, such as ectomorphs, endomorphs, and mesomorphs. Some typing has been life giving, like classifying different blood types so as not to mix them in transfusions. Other typing has been death dealing, for example, killing those of other tribes or traditions so as not to contaminate our blood or belief lines. There is both good and bad news about typologies. Like Everyone Else, Like No One Else, Like Someone Else Salvatore Maddi (1976) offered a scheme for studying various theories of personality. He noticed it was common for personality theorists to make two kinds of statements. One set describes the things that we all have in common and that are inherent attributes of human beings. These common features don’t change much over the course of living and they exert an extensive, pervasive influence on our behavior. So we are all searching for the good, philosophized Aristotle; or we all have a superego, ego, and id, analyzed Freud; or we are all motivated by a self-actualizing tendency, as Carl Rogers reflected. The other set of statements about personality refers to attributes that are more concrete, closer to the surface, and so can be more readily observed. These features account for the differences among people and are generally learned, rather than genetic. They have a more circumscribed, limited influence on our behavior. The concept of individual traits falls into this set of characteristics. In all the billions of individuals who have ever lived and ever will live there is only one Anne, the youngest daughter of John and Marie Jones with her distinctive temperament, experiences, and responses. As for those characteristics that are unique to each reader, we anticipate the publication of their autobiographies where those features will be properly extolled. Somewhere in between what we have in common with everyone else and what we share with no one else lies a partition of characteristics that overlap with some people but not with others. So we share our blond hair and blue eyes with some people but not with raven haired people with green eyes. Or we share a birthday range with people having the same astrological sign but not with others born in different months. Or we have some features in common with fellow extraverts that we don’t share with introverts. This is the realm of type. Typologies offer a taxonomy of the different styles of life that are possible.

To discover what your core values are, you might reflect on what you would do if you had only one year to live. Where you put your time and energy tells you what you value.

We organize our life around our values which lie at the root of who we are and who we are striving to become.

The Enneagram Perspective:

A typography I’ve found especially useful is the Enneagram (Any-agram) with its spectrum of nine personality styles. It’s quite comprehensive and provides a framework for pulling together many features we all share in common; it is remarkably perceptive in delineating the dimensions of nine different personality styles that we have in common with some people; and it leaves a lot of leeway for the particulars of our unique selves. With its numerous applications for personal growth, therapy, spirituality, education, business, etc., the Enneagram theory generates many helpful hypotheses.
In Greek Ennea means nine and gram means point. The word refers to a circle inscribed by nine points that is used as a symbol to arrange and depict nine personality styles. In its current formulations, the Enneagram brings together insights of perennial wisdom and findings of modern psychology. The figure itself is derived from arithmology while the nine personality styles are validated by experiential observations and, more recently, by experimental research.
Th e roots of the Enneagram are disputed. Some authors believe they have found variations of the Enneagram symbol in the sacred geometry of the Pythagorians who 4000 years ago were interested in the deeper meaning and significance of numbers. This line of mystical mathematics was passed on through Plato (who also contributed his ideas about higher and lower forms which become essence and ego or authentic self and compensating personality in the Enneagram system), Plato’s disciple Plotinus (who in the Enneads spoke of nine divine qualities manifesting in human nature), and subsequent neo-Platonists. Some believe this tradition found its way into esoteric Judaism through Philo, a Jewish neo-Platonist philosopher, where it later appears embedded in the branches of the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah. (Apparently to belong to this tradition your name had to begin with a “P”!) Variations of this symbol also appear in Islamic Sufi traditions, perhaps arriving there through the Arabian philosopher al-Ghazzali. Supposedly a group of Sufi s in the fourteenth century founded the Naqshbandi Order, known as the “Brotherhood of the Bees” (because they collected and stored knowledge) and the “Symbolists” (because they taught through symbols). This community is said to have preserved and passed on the Enneagram symbol.
Speculation has it the Enneagram found its way into esoteric Christianity through Pseudo-Dionysius, who was influenced by the neo-Platonists, through Evagrius and his catalog of logismoi and vices, and through the Franciscan mystic Ramon Llull, who distilled all philosophy and theology down to nine principles in his attempt to integrate Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions.
An Enneagram-like figure appears on the frontispiece of a textbook written in the seventeenth century by the Jesuit mathematician and student of arithmology Athanasius Kircher.
More recently George Gurdjieff , born in the 1870’s in the Caucasus region of what is now Russia, a teacher of esoteric knowledge and a contemporary of Freud, used the Enneagram to explain the laws involved in the creation and unfolding of the universe. He alludes to his acquaintance with the Enneagram in the 1920’s during his visit to Nine Lenses On The World: The Enneagram Perspective 20 the Sufi Sarmouni monastery in Afghanistan. Th is is the site of the Naqshbandi Order mentioned earlier. Quite appropriately, it is located near a great East-West trade route, where not only goods but also ideas crossed regularly.
In yet another culture and part of the globe, the Enneagram was taught by Oscar Ichazo (1976; 1982) as part of his Arica Training in South America. He found that the Enneagram (or Enneagon, as he calls the nine-sided figure) comprehensively organizes the various laws operating in the human person. So while Gurdjieff applied the Enneagram’s process to all of reality, including a rudimentary application to the human person, Ichazo made use of the Enneagram figure and dynamics to explain more fully the functioning of the human psyche. Ichazo claims to have arrived at his understanding of the Enneagram through his own independent studies and research.
Claudio Naranjo (1990; 1994), a Chilean psychiatrist, learned the tradition from Oscar Ichazo and brought the Enneagram further into Western psychology by elaborating and formulating in contemporary psychological language Ichazo’s explorations of the psyche.

Our values are the motivating and organizing tendencies that become central for each personality paradigm.

Aptitudes & abilities are energizing genies that reflect our values or ideals.

Each of the nine Enneagram styles represents a way of being in the world with a particular worldview and an accompanying manner of experiencing, perceiving, understanding, evaluating, and responding to the world.

Each of the nine styles represents a way of being in the world with a particular worldview and an accompanying manner of experiencing, perceiving, understanding, evaluating, and responding to the world.

Philosophers have long reflected that Being is One,True, Good, and Beautiful.

While each person, as a child of God, contains all of the characteristics of divinity, it is our destiny to manifest one or a few of God’s features in a particularly clear fashion.

We look for and move towards what’s important to us. Viewed through the lens of the Enneagram, nine clusters of values appear.

Our perspectives and motivations are infl uenced by the values we are
attracted to and prize.