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.