by Jeff Kitchen
The real power of the Enneagram is that it presents a complex and thorough understanding of how people work and what they’re made of, ranging through the full spectrum from their very best to their very worst. It’s like having a professional psychiatrist on staff who can provide personality profiles for your characters in the same way that an FBI specialist provides profiles on serial killers. While I present a synopsis of each type in this chapter, there are a number of superb, highly comprehensive books that will take you much deeper into the intricacies of the nine personality types.
THE NINE TYPES OF THE ENNEAGRAM
The word Enneagram comes from the nine-pointed star used as a symbol and a working map in this study. There are several schools of the Enneagram, including Don Riso and Russ Hudson’s Enneagram Institute, Helen Palmer, Eli Jaxon-Bear, and Oscar Ichazo—to name just a few. Material presented here is from The Enneagram Institute, whose particular labels for the nine different personality types are: 1, The Reformer; 2, The Helper; 3, The Achiever; 4, The Individualist; 5, The Investigator; 6, The Loyalist; 7, The Enthusiast; 8, The Challenger; and 9, The Peacemaker. In general, the nine types are referred to only as a number, so you would be described as, say, a 1 or a 3. The numbers are value-free and have no connotations; the labels are assigned so that neophytes can get a handle on the system. Below is the nine-pointed Enneagram symbol on which are represented the different personality types:
Each type has three different aspects: Healthy,Average, and Unhealthy. If you’re moving toward integration (your life is coming together), then you will tend to exhibit Average to Healthy traits. If you’re moving toward disintegration (your life is falling apart), then you’ll tend to exhibit Average to Unhealthy traits. The Unhealthy traits are a fascinating and rich source of character material for a dramatist. They’re excellent for flawing, darkening, and deepening characters. It’s so easy to like your protagonist, for instance, that you won’t necessarily see the negative personality aspects—or if you do, you’ll let your protagonist off too easy and end up with a shallower, more predictable character.
Although a person will have traits within him or her from all nine types, one type tends to be dominant or primary. Each type is also described with its wing, which indicates shared characteristics with its adjacent type. For instance, a 1 with a 9-wing can mean the person is a Reformer with some aspects of a Peacemaker. For your script, building a persona with this in mind will create a more accurate and believable character. The discipline of the Enneagram is quite sophisticated, providing a wealth of organized and insightful material on how real people behave. Writers can play with and draw from this in creating indelible personalities for screenplays.
The descriptions below of the nine personality types come from The Enneagram Institute’s Web site (www.enneagraminstitute.com), a rich source of information that will take you further into the knowledge of human behavior.
1. The Reformer
Enneagram Type One
The Rational, Idealistic Type:
Principled, Purposeful, Self-Controlled, and Perfectionistic
Basic Fear: Of being corrupt/evil, defective
Basic Desire: To be good, to have integrity, to be balanced
Enneagram One with a Nine-Wing: “The Idealist”
Enneagram One with a Two-Wing: “The Advocate”
Profile Summary for the Enneagram Type One
Healthy: Conscientious with strong personal convictions: They have an intense sense of right and wrong, personal religious and moral values. Wish to be rational, reasonable, self-disciplined, mature, moderate in all things. / Extremely principled, always want to be fair, objective, and ethical: truth and justice primary values. Sense of responsibility, personal integrity, and of having a higher purpose often makes them teachers and witnesses to the truth.
At Their Best: Become extraordinarily wise and discerning. By accepting what is, they become transcendentally realistic, knowing the best action to take in each moment. Humane, inspiring, and hopeful: The truth will be heard.
Average: Dissatisfied with reality, they become high-minded idealists, feeling that it is up to them to improve everything: crusaders, advocates, critics. Into “causes” and explaining to others how things “ought” to be. / Afraid of making a mistake: Everything must be consistent with their ideals. Become orderly and well-organized, but impersonal, puritanical, emotionally constricted, rigidly keeping their feelings and impulses in check. Often workaholics—“analcompulsive,” punctual, pedantic, and fastidious. / Highly critical both of self and others: picky, judgmental, perfectionistic. Very opinionated about everything: correcting people and badgering them to “do the right thing”—as they see it. Impatient, never satisfied with anything unless it is done according to their prescriptions. Moralizing, scolding, abrasive, and indignantly angry.
Unhealthy: Can be highly dogmatic, self-righteous, intolerant, and inflexible. Begin dealing in absolutes: They alone know “The Truth.” Everyone else is wrong: very severe in judgments, while rationalizing own actions. / Become obsessive about imperfection and the wrongdoing of others, although they may fall into contradictory actions, hypocritically doing the opposite of what they preach. / Become condemnatory toward others, punitive and cruel to rid themselves of “wrong-doers.” Severe depressions, nervous breakdowns, and suicide attempts are likely. Generally corresponds to the Obsessive-Compulsive and Depressive personality disorders.
Key Motivations: Want to be right, to strive higher and improve everything, to be consistent with their ideals, to justify themselves, to be beyond criticism so as not to be condemned by anyone.
Examples: Mahatma Gandhi, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Paul II, Sandra Day O’Connor, John Bradshaw, Bill Moyers, Martha Stewart, Ralph Nader, Katherine Hepburn, Harrison Ford, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, George Harrison, Celine Dion, Joan Baez, George Bernard Shaw, Noam Chomsky, Michael Dukakis, Margaret Thatcher, Rudolph Giuliani, Jerry Brown, Jane Curtin, Gene Siskel, William F. Buckley, Kenneth Starr, The “Church Lady” (Saturday Night Live), and “Mr. Spock” (Star Trek).
Copyright 2005, The Enneagram Institute. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.
2. The Helper
Enneagram Type Two
The Caring, Interpersonal Type:
Generous, Demonstrative, People-Pleasing, and Possessive
Basic Fear: Of being unwanted, unworthy of being loved
Basic Desire: To feel loved
Enneagram Two with a One-Wing: “Servant”
Enneagram Two with a Three-Wing: “The Host/Hostess”
Profile Summary for the Enneagram Type Two
Healthy: Empathetic, compassionate, feeling for others. Caring and concerned about their needs. Thoughtful, warm-hearted, forgiving, and sincere. / Encouraging and appreciative, able to see the good in others. Service is important, but takes care of self, too: They are nurturing, generous, and giving—a truly loving person.
At Their Best: Become deeply unselfish, humble, and altruistic: giving unconditional love to self and others. Feel it is a privilege to be in the lives of others.
Average: Want to be closer to others, so start “people pleasing,” becoming overly friendly, emotionally demonstrative, and full of “good intentions” about everything. Give seductive attention: approval, “strokes,” flattery. Love their supreme value, and they talk about it constantly. / Become overly intimate and intrusive: They need to be needed, so they hover, meddle, and control in the name of love. Want others to depend on them: give, but expect a return: send double messages. Enveloping and possessive: the codependent, self-sacrificial person who cannot do enough for others—wearing themselves out for everyone, creating needs for themselves to fulfill./ Increasingly self-important and self-satisfied, feel they are indispensable, although they overrate their efforts in others’ behalf. Hypochondria, becoming a “martyr” for others. Overbearing, patronizing, presumptuous.
Unhealthy: Can be manipulative and self-serving, instilling gu
ilt by telling others how much they owe them and make them suffer. Abuse food and medication to “stuff feelings” and get sympathy. Undermine people, making belittling, disparaging remarks. Extremely self-deceptive about their motives and how aggressive and/or selfish their behavior is. / Domineering and coercive: feel entitled to get anything they want from others: the repayment of old debts, money, sexual favors. / Able to excuse and rationalize what they do since they feel abused and victimized by others and are bitterly resentful and angry. Somatization of their aggressions result in chronic health problems as they vindicate themselves by “falling apart” and burdening others. Generally corresponds to the Histrionic and Factitious personality disorders.
Key Motivations: Want to be loved, to express their feelings for others, to be needed and appreciated, to get others to respond to them, to vindicate their claims about themselves.
Examples: Mother Teresa, Barbara Bush, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leo Buscaglia, Monica Lewinsky, Bill Cosby, Barry Manilow, Lionel Richie, Kenny G., Luciano Pavarotti, Lillian Carter, Sammy Davis, Jr., Martin Sheen, Robert Fulghum, Alan Alda, Richard Thomas, Jack Paar, Sally Jessy Raphael, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Ann Landers, “Melanie Hamilton” (Gone With the Wind), and “Dr. McCoy” (Star Trek).
Copyright 2005, The Enneagram Institute. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.
3. The Achiever
Enneagram Type Three
The Success-Oriented, Pragmatic Type:
Adaptable, Excelling, Driven, and Image-Conscious
Basic Fear: Of being worthless
Basic Desire: To feel valuable and worthwhile
Enneagram Three with a Two-Wing: “The Charmer”
Enneagram Three with a Four-Wing: “The Professional”
Profile Summary for the Enneagram Type Three
Healthy: Self-assured, energetic, and competent with high self-esteem: they believe in themselves and their own value. Adaptable, desirable, charming, and gracious. / Ambitious to improve themselves, to be “the best they can be”—often become outstanding, a human ideal, embodying widely admired cultural qualities. Highly effective: Others are motivated to be like them in some positive way.
At Their Best: Self-accepting, inner-directed, and authentic, everything they seem to be. Modest and charitable, self-deprecatory humor and a fullness of heart emerge. Gentle and benevolent.
Average: Highly concerned with their performance, doing their job well, constantly driving self to achieve goals as if self-worth depends on it. Terrified of failure. Compare self with others in search for status and success. Become careerists, social climbers, invested in exclusivity and being the “best.” / Become image-conscious, highly concerned with how they are perceived. Begin to package themselves according to the expectations of others and what they need to do to be successful. Pragmatic and efficient, but also premeditated, losing touch with their own feelings beneath a smooth facade. Problems with intimacy, credibility, and “phoniness” emerge. / Want to impress others with their superiority: constantly promoting themselves, making themselves sound better than they really are. Narcissistic, with grandiose, inflated notions about themselves and their talents. Exhibitionistic and seductive, as if saying, “Look at me!” Arrogance and contempt for others is a defense against feeling jealous of others and their success.
Unhealthy: Fearing failure and humiliation, they can be exploitative and opportunistic, covetous of the success of others, and willing to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the illusion of their superiority. / Devious and deceptive so that their mistakes and wrongdoings will not be exposed. Untrustworthy, maliciously betraying or sabotaging people to triumph over them. Delusionally jealous of others. / Become vindictive, attempting to ruin others’ happiness. Relentless, obsessive about destroying whatever reminds them of their own shortcomings and failures. Psychopathic, murder. Generally corresponds to the Narcissistic personality disorder.
Key Motivations: Want to be affirmed, to distinguish themselves from others, to have attention, to be admired, and to impress others.
Examples: Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Pauley, Michael Landon, Tony Robbins, Tom Cruise, Barbra Streisand, Sharon Stone, Madonna, Shirley MacLaine, Sting, Paul McCartney, Dick Clark, Whitney Houston, Ted Danson, Michael Jordan, Shania Twain, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Billy Dee Williams, Kathie Lee Gifford, Truman Capote, and O. J. Simpson.
Copyright 2005, The Enneagram Institute. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.
4. The Individualist
Enneagram Type Four
The Sensitive, Withdrawn Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed, and Temperamental
Basic Fear: That they have no identity or personal significance
Basic Desire: To find themselves and their significance (to create an identity)
Enneagram Four with a Three-Wing: “The Aristocrat”
Enneagram Four with a Five-Wing: “The Bohemian”
Profile Summary for the Enneagram Type Four
Healthy: Self-aware, introspective, on the “search for self,” aware of feelings and inner impulses. Sensitive and intuitive both to self and others: gentle, tactful, compassionate. / Highly personal, individualistic, “true to self.” Self-revealing, emotionally honest, humane. Ironic view of self and life: can be serious and funny, vulnerable and emotionally strong.
At Their Best: Profoundly creative, expressing the personal and the universal, possibly in a work of art. Inspired, self-renewing and regenerating: able to transform all their experiences into something valuable: self-creative.
Average: Take an artistic, romantic orientation to life, creating a beautiful, aesthetic environment to cultivate and prolong personal feelings. Heighten reality through fantasy, passionate feelings, and the imagination. / To stay in touch with feelings, they interiorize everything, taking everything personally, but become self-absorbed and introverted, moody and hypersensitive, shy and self-conscious, unable to be spontaneous or to “get out of themselves.” Stay withdrawn to protect their self-image and to buy time to sort out feelings. / Gradually think that they are different from others, and feel that they are exempt from living as everyone else does. They become melancholy dreamers, disdainful, decadent, and sensual, living in a fantasy world. Self-pity and envy of others leads to self-indulgence, and to becoming increasingly impractical, unproductive, effete, and precious.
Unhealthy: When dreams fail, become self-inhibiting and angry at self, depressed and alienated from self and others, blocked and emotionally paralyzed. Ashamed of self, fatigued, and unable to function. / Tormented by delusional self-contempt, self-reproaches, self-hatred, and morbid thoughts: Everything is a source of torment. Blaming others, they drive away anyone who tries to help them. / Despairing, feel hopeless and become self-destructive, possibly abusing alcohol or drugs to escape. In the extreme: Emotional breakdown or suicide is likely. Generally corresponds to the Avoidant, Depressive, and Narcissistic personality disorders.
Key Motivations: Want to express themselves and their individuality, to create and surround themselves with beauty, to maintain certain moods and feelings, to withdraw to protect their self-image, to take care of emotional needs before attending to anything else, to attract a “rescuer.”
Examples: Ingmar Bergman, Alan Watts, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette, Paul Simon, Jeremy Irons, Patrick Stewart, Joseph Fiennes, Martha Graham, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Johnny Depp, Anne Rice, Rudolph Nureyev, J. D. Salinger, Anaïs Nin, Marcel Proust, Maria Callas, Tennessee Williams, Edgar Allan Poe, Annie Lennox, Prince, Michael Jackson, Virginia Woolf, Judy Garland, “Blanche DuBois” (A Streetcar Named Desire).
Copyright 2005, The Enneagram Institute. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.
5. The Investigator
Enneagram Type Five
The Intense, Cerebral Type: Perceptive, Innovative, Secretive, and Isolated
Basic Fear: Being useless, helpless, or incapable
Basic Desire: To be capable and competent
; Enneagram Five with a Four-Wing: “The Iconoclast”
Enneagram Five with a Six-Wing: “The Problem Solver”
Profile Summary for the Enneagram Type Five
Healthy: Observe everything with extraordinary perceptiveness and insight. Most mentally alert, curious, searching intelligence: Nothing escapes their notice. Foresight and prediction. Able to concentrate: become engrossed in what has caught their attention. / Attain skillful mastery of whatever interests them. Excited by knowledge: Often become expert in some field. Innovative and inventive, producing extremely valuable, original works. Highly independent, idiosyncratic, and whimsical.
At Their Best: Become visionaries, broadly comprehending the world while penetrating it profoundly. Open-minded, take things in whole, in their true context. Make pioneering discoveries and find entirely new ways of doing and perceiving things.
Average: Begin conceptualizing and fine-tuning everything before acting—working things out in their minds: model building, preparing, practicing, and gathering more resources. Studious, acquiring technique. Become specialized, and often “intellectual,” often challenging accepted ways of doing things. / Increasingly detached as they become involved with complicated ideas or imaginary worlds. Become preoccupied with their visions and interpretations rather than reality. Are fascinated by off-beat, esoteric subjects, even those involving dark and disturbing elements. Detached from the practical world, a “disembodied mind,” although high-strung and intense. / Begin to take an antagonistic stance toward anything which would interfere with their inner world and personal vision. Become provocative and abrasive, with intentionally extreme and radical views. Cynical and argumentative.