The Enneagram is a Useful Fake Framework

I’ve been getting into the Enneagram lately (recent posts). I like it because it provides a useful framework, even if a fake one, for making sense of the mental processes that generate wide swaths of human behavior, and I have several more posts planned about it. But I wasn’t always excited about the Enneagram, and in fact spent many years bouncing off it, finding its model opaque and personality tests based on it random.

What changed my mind and made it useful was, first, reading, Michael Valentine Smith’s series of posts on the Enneagram (1, 2, 3, 4), and, then, spending a year working with the Enneagram to slowly free myself from some of my habituated, maladaptive behaviors. I’m now fairly convinced the Enneagram is useful, but before I say why, let me say a little about what the Enneagram is.

The central thesis of Enneagram theory is that we have an “essence”, which is our natural way of relating to reality. Depending on who you ask, our essence forms before or shortly after we’re born, and it’s the seed from which our values grow. In this way, the word “essence” oversells what essence is, because it’s not actually something essential, but rather a contingent feature of our development. Perhaps a better term would be “original nature”, as in the way we naturally let ourselves be prior to any behavioral conditioning. Alas, “essence” is the jargon of the Enneagram, so I’ll stick with it.

After our essence forms, we’re almost immediately separated from it by suffering. Maybe it happens when we’re hungry and not immediately fed. Maybe it happens when we want snuggles and Mom and Dad are across the room. Or maybe it happens when we flail, scratch our own face, and can’t escape the pain. Whatever the case, we want to express our essence through our experience, that desire is stymied, and from such repeated denials we open what’s called our “core wound”—our deepest, most fundamental desire that can’t be completely fulfilled.

In time, we learn to live with our core wound by developing habitual behaviors to cope with it. These habits protect us from the wound, but also prevent us from accessing our essence. The personality we develop, which is just a pattern of habits, tries to take the place of essence, but it can never fill the same role. We are left to catch glimpses of joy when our essence shines through, but mostly live separated from it in the prison of habits we built to protect ourselves.

The Enneagram categorizes the bundle of essence, core wound, and personality habits into 9 main types. It then expands this type system from 9 to 27 by adding the concept of “wings”, and then to more by adding various epicycles. And epicycles is a good way to describe a lot of Enneagram theory, because a lot of it is post-hoc rationalization that makes no predictions and explains everything. Which poses the question: why do I think the Enneagram is useful?

First, some Enneagram theory pays rent. Just because there exist people who have used it as the basis for creating a personality theory of everything doesn’t mean the core theory is bunk. I think if we only go so far as to include the core types, wings, and the integration/disintegration lines, we get a relatively predictive theory given we have accurately determined a person’s type (which is its own difficult problem that’s outside the scope of this post). It does have gaps, hence the additional theory that’s been piled onto it, but those gaps are what we would expect of any valid psychological theory that works with patterns drawn from the highly-variable distribution of human behavior.

Second, it has value beyond prediction. The Enneagram provides a language for talking about the forces that generate habituated behavior. When I say my type is 4w5, that conveys information about how I make sense of my own life, and when I learn that a friend sees themselves as a 6w7 or a 1w9, I learn something about what it’s like to be them. This isn’t objective science, but rather a subjective system of categorizing experience and conveying that experience to others, and in this way serves both to help us better understand ourselves and to understand others by seeing how they are truly different.

Finally, on this point of categorizing experience, I see the Enneagram as a parallel to stage models in adult developmental psychology. Whereas Kegan’s or Cook-Grueter’s models aim to explain how our minds become capable of handling greater complexity of sense making, the Enneagram can be used to model how we can become free of our habits and live our lives joyfully. Or, to put a Buddhist framing on it, if developmental psychology is the vertical dimension that takes us towards awakening, the Enneagram is the horizontal dimension that leads to liberation.

And aiding in liberation from suffering is where I think most of the value of the Enneagram lies. Liberation is a complex process that requires first understanding why you do what you do. From that understanding, you can learn to untangle patterned behavior by addressing the causes of it at the source, then learning new, more adaptive patterns that support your essence rather than protect it. In this way, you can reconnect with the simple joy of being.