The Enneagram with Helen Palmer

This interview was first published in "Moving Words",  a monthly newsletter published by Moving Books, Inc.

TO LOVE BETTER, TO WORK BETTER

Helen Palmer Discusses the Use of the Enneagram in Relationships

The Enneagram is a psychological and spiritual system with roots in ancient traditions. Traces of it can be found in Sufism, Judaism, and specifically, in the seven capital tendencies of early Christianity. These seven capital tendencies, anger, pride, envy, avarice, gluttony, lust, and sloth, along with two general traits everyone shares, deceit and fear, make up the nine personality types of the Enneagram. Each personality type on the nine-pointed star of the Enneagram can be seen as a pointer to a constellation of tendencies, perspectives, and habitual perceptions characteristic to each type. In Enneagram study, these constellations of motivation are called passions, and each one colors how we experience ourselves, our relationships and the world around us. The purpose of Enneagram studies is gain insight into how these passions and compulsions operate in ourselves and others, thereby fostering self-understanding and empathy, giving rise to improved relationships.

Although the Enneagram's roots are in antiquity, it has undergone a flowering of growth and appreciation in the twentieth century. The Enneagram's teachers have included G.I. Gurdjieff, at the turn of the century, Oscar Ichazo beginning in the 1970's, and various Catholic priests, including the Rev. Richard Rohr. But none of these proponents have gained the recognition or developed the model as far as Helen Palmer.

Palmer's first book, The Enneagram (MB: 21144), published by Harper San Francisco in 1988, became an American bestseller and continues to be a standard in the field. Systematically laying out each of the nine types of the Enneagram, this book has sold more than 150,000 copies. Palmer has now followed it up with a book focusing on relationships, The Enneagram in Love and Work (MB: 32334). This second book presents a directory of relationships, both intimate and working, for each of the nine personality types according to the Enneagram. The purpose of The Enneagram in Love and Work, according to Palmer, is to give people a tool, helping them do what is necessary for a happy life, to love better and work better.

by Mark Privett

For our readers who are unfamiliar with it, can you give a brief description of the Enneagram?

It's a model of human development that is based on nine personality types. The types have a very long history in sacred tradition, which has a far longer track record than psychology, with its history of less than a hundred years. The study of type in the ancient framework of spiritual development has roots in antiquity in every mystical tradition. The mystics are the individuals who are not so involved in formal religious affairs, as in the experiential union with the divine. The reason type plays a part in the agenda of spiritual experience is because the personality stands in the way between ordinary life and the realms of spiritual life. So there was a lot invested in seeing how type can keep us from spiritual experience. We don't see it this way in our current, modern venue. We see type as a set of preoccupation's of thought and emotion and we're interested in the content of type. How to make people's relations better, how to make people more productive, so that they can lead happier and better life, and have better interactions with people. The agenda is quite different but it's the same focus on type. From the spiritual perspective, it's in the way, between ordinary and spiritual life, and from the psychological perspective, it creates the glitches and the blunders and the misperceptions through which we stop ourselves from maximizing our ability to love and work well.

The roots of the Enneagram are in the mystical wings of all sacred traditions. We find it in Sufism, the mystical wing of Islam. The study of type also appears in the Judaic tradition, and especially in the Christian tradition through the study of the seven capital tendencies, which are types. The seven capital tendencies, in company with two generic or general tendencies that all types hold in common, bringing the total to nine. This is the basis of the Enneagram. The center point of the Perfectionist, the ONE for example, is anger, one of the seven capital vices. The center point of the Giver, the TWO, is pride, also one of the seven capital vices. And so on around all of the nine types. The center point is identified as the capital vice, which has a history in Christianity all the way back to Chaucer. The first description we have of types is in Chaucer's Pilgrim's Tale. In this metaphor, the characters are going toward the city on a pilgrimage to discover themselves. The vices are revealed in a metaphor of what impedes one on the path or journey. Dante has a list of the seven capital vices, including advice, the generic spiritual perspective that once you discover your type or vice, the whole point of it is to convert it to its opposite tendency. In [Dante's] metaphor, you are climbing a seven story mountain. He also describes the two generic types, which are fear and image, or deception, which is being addicted to an image. He describes the journey up the mountain and the discovery of the protagonist's type in the Purgatorio section of The Divine Comedy. Those are the only two clear descriptions of the types that we're discussing in the modern Enneagram.

I can see all of the nine types as a model for my behavior or as parts of my personality. Can the nine types represent a progression of personality development, a stair-stepping of sorts?

No. Quite correctly you'd say that you have a recognition of all of the types because they're built on a common emotional reaction that everyone has, or at least has had at some time in their life. Anger, pride, envy, avarice, which is withholding, we've all done these things, but one strategy is more hardwired into your psychological structure than the others. And the reason for that is we all try out all of these strategies because they're based on ordinary human reactions. We all have them when we are young but one is more effective than the others so we tend to adopt that style. We're in complete agreement with psychology about this, about the formation of psychological type. You try out different strategies. In some families, anger doesn't work, or the child doesn't have the constitution to maintain anger; their neurological system doesn't hold it. In some families, running away and hiding or disappearing was a successful strategy. You could maintain privacy that way. Some people would find that to be the most successful childhood strategy and they would also find that their neurological system supported withdrawal and dissipating emotion, detaching from emotion rather than standing and fighting. So, there's some collusion between nature and nurture in this. This is how a type is formed. We all have them all. A NINE is not better that a ONE, there is no TEN, and nobody's perfect in this game. We all try out all of them but one of them is more familiar to us and is acted out on a daily basis, although we may not be aware of it. Each is a very successful strategy, there are high-functioning people of every type, but they very much differ in their point of view.

How has the Enneagram evolved over the last several years as your understanding of it has grown?

Well, I knew about the mystical proposition of type as a factor in spiritual development and I knew of the Enneagram well over twenty years ago, but the interest now is so much in trying to identify our participation in difficulty, our personal participation in aggression or disharmony, which is operating on a worldwide basis. The well intentioned individual wants to be able to do something about this, they don't want to feed into it. The well intentioned individual is who this material is aimed at, somebody who can look inside themselves and see that it's not just the other guy, that you can't just point fingers at the enemy, and say that there's something I'm doing here too. I think [the Enneagram] is here because we need it, on a global basis, to take more responsibility for our thoughts and emotions and to consider, deeply, how to stand in someone else's shoes, and see the decision or the event from very different sets of eyes and see the validity of it. Standing in someone else's shoes, seeing ourselves through the eyes of others, this is kind of like a directive one might hear in church, but we have no way of implementing it. This is a way of implementing that search or directive to see through the eyes of others and take on their agenda and see the validity of it, to be able to have an empathic relationship with others. We need it very much on a worldwide basis.

And the other reason I think it's here is that it has been worked by so many thousands of people who have taken classes in the system, passed their hand-written notes around, who have studied it and found value in it, that it's just the time. It used to be just a grassroots interest, especially in California. It became very attractive to the Jesuits, who used it in their seminary trainings because of the seven capital tendencies. The Jesuits moved it all around the world in their missionary "hotline," and the Californian people just kept teaching it to thousands of people. In August, I co-directed a conference at Stanford University that was co-sponsored by my organization and the Stanford School of Psychiatry that drew 1,600 participants. It was incredible. They came from all around the world. We discovered the Tokyo Enneagram Society...

Did the Japanese have a different spin on the types?

No, they had the same spin. They had learned of it through the missionary "hotline." There's a book by a Catholic sister in Japanese on the Enneagram system. That's how they picked up the study. The only thing I could read on the gentleman from Tokyo's card was the Enneagram symbol.

I know you developed the body of your work and your vision of the Enneagram through your workshops. Can you talk about this process?

I am an exponent of a way of teaching called the oral tradition. And in the oral tradition we rely on the self-disclosure of people who have recognized their type. The set-up, usually, I will go into a setting, and people will have read the books or studied the materials or studied with one of my students, and they know their type. They usually have the correct type, although sometimes I have to weed them out. And there will appear: five ONE's, Perfectionists, five TWO's, Givers, etc. I place them on a panel. So you see a bank of five individuals who share the same point of view, and I interview them for the benefit of the audience. Then there are interactions and questions between the audience and the speakers. It's a very fast way of delivering extremely high-powered, intimate psychological material to people who may not have looked into themselves very deeply, or have not considered themselves interesting or important enough as a source of information to study themselves. But they recognize their family, their work associates, people who they interact with in their own life, they recognize from the stories of the nine types the point of view of people who are close to them. And then they recognize themselves. And so they leave, let's say after a weekend, with a great deal of information about how to interact more successfully with these nine different types of people.

I've taught this in addiction and recovery centers, I've taught it in dance halls, I've taught it in high schools, and in business settings. I also teach it in religious retreat centers, in all manner of settings. And all that's different is the particular embodiment of the type. In an addiction/recovery center for example, the content or the disclosure might be different than it would be in a religious retreat center, but the types are consistent. It's a very powerful insight, at least for me, into the study of type, that it holds up all around the world. I've taught it in Singapore, Hong Kong, I've taught it in Germany with translators, in Switzerland, and in the U.K. And there are the types, alive and well. Although the way they manifest themselves are definitely different from culture to culture.

How can the Enneagram be used in business, therapy, or education?

We have a professional training. I'd say maybe fifty percent are psychotherapists, and another twenty-five percent are human resources and organizational development people, usually from companies, and the remaining twenty-five percent are from the general public. People who are interested in depth material. The purpose of the professional training is to deepen the understanding of the system. I teach it in conjunction with a psychiatrist who has a deep interest in the Enneagram. The psychotherapists want it as a very useful, hot tool to work with normal, high-functioning people. You see, there is no psychology for the normal and high functioning person, specifically. Most psychology is about pathology. And it's not about the person who isn't pathological who is stretching for new goals. For this reason the Enneagram is a bridge. The bridge is that people with those same nine center points, or vices, can also be well along the conversion process to its opposite tendency. The fearful type for example, can in fact present in a high-functioning person, as a very brave and courageous person who's full of trust, not paranoid. That same fear platform, which can be converted to faith and trust, can really slide down the scale into deep paranoia. So it's a tool that's applicable both to the treatment of the pathological end of the bell curve but also as a way of facilitating at the high end of the bell curve the normal and the high-functioning individual.

Business consultants love it because it deeply facilitates conflict resolution. It really helps in negotiation style and especially in team building. Most of my consultations have been in team building workshops where they have to learn how the other team members think, they have to anticipate their responses, they have to be able to know what their strengths of attention are.

Besides self-awareness, what kinds of processes or exercises can one do to determine one's type and then convert the passion?

That's the third book [laughs]. Once you've discovered it, what are you going to do about it? But you know, if you can transform it ten percent, you're way ahead. If you can transform it completely, you're walking on water. The transformation process is very personal, is very deep. It involves both spiritual meditation work, self-observation, being able to witness yourself, etc. It also involves good psychotherapy, in the sense that you have to integrate these insights about you into your ego, your personality. Sometimes people can be very evolved in certain sectors of their lives but it isn't very well integrated. In other words, it only comes out every now and then, or under special circumstances, and then it goes away. I really feel that the third book, the one I'm working on now, is really the best book. Although it probably won't have as much general public interest. It will be for the sincere individual who is saying that the buck stops here, I really have to change, I can't point the finger at others. These aren't the ordinary kind of people.

Will you, as an example, pick a type and its vice and talk about some of the things a person with this type might experience in trying to convert it to a virtue?

For example, one of the two general types, not of the seven tendencies, is the Performer. The Performer is based on deception, that's the vice, and that's not named in the seven capital tendencies of spiritual tradition, but it is in Dante's Purgatorio, recognized as the component that's necessary to form a type. What it means is, you become your role or your image, become identified with it. The focus in deception isn't on lying, the deception is a form of self-deception, where the child has been praised for performance, product, goals and results, and that becomes a lasting impression. In order to get that validation in childhood, that you are a successful performer, that you can produce goals, make the project happen, "there are no cookies for losers," you only get recognition when you're outstanding. So the kid learns to ace the piano recital, to be photographed, get his/her picture on the bulletin board, to be known, to be seen, and to be applauded. A great many public figures are of this persuasion, where it's very important to be number one and it's terrible to be number two. So there is an urgency which is much more outstanding in the Performer type than in the other eight, to be that winner, that leader, and to get up on stage. Pertinent to that, a whole lifestyle is organized around status, performance, recognition, material manifestations like money, title, and appearance. Those kinds of matters are important to everyone, but outstanding to this type. Everyone has it, but this one has it in spades. So, that central preoccupation doesn't seem deceptive, it just seems like the American ideal. But you deceive yourself when you are inhabiting an image that you are that winner. There is a lot riding on other people's approval. You can deceive yourself by thinking you are the image when you are projecting this appropriate persona. So, the THREE becomes a chameleon. They can sense what is wanted, adjust, alter themselves to fit the prototype, get the job done, and believe that that's who they are. In that sense it's a deception. You believe your role, you believe your image, you believe your persona is who you really are. And this is devastating [to the Performer] if this [image] is dismantled, like through a job loss; often it's a mid-life or health crisis, when feelings that are genuine start to arise. When you are projecting an image to get a job done, your personal feelings about what you really want, not what others want, is suspended. Feelings are suspended in the interest of getting the job done. The job is the image that you hold up to the world, and that's what you think you are. This is the summation of this type.

Now, to dismantle this, and we all know people who are stars, and who insist on being stars, and they probably are outstanding, but there's so much riding on it. We can see this throughout life. We can see the difference between the persona a person projects, and who they really are. So the conversion has to be recognition on the part of this THREE of their own feelings, when their feelings are different than their image, when they don't want to perform, when they are sad, when they have their own emotions that stand in the way of success and efficiency. This transformation process is not always pleasant. This is why it is often difficult. Often, the THREE comes into the Ennegram work, or any kind of therapy, when there has been a breakdown of some kind, when they just can't keep the pose up any longer. Losing a job, becoming ill, and then their feelings come up. That can be devastating, but it has also been described as a very transformational time for many THREE's. They observed their tendency to please others, get approval, be the winner, but then they start to let it go, and become more themselves.

The power of the Enneagram is in the shape of the interacting lines. Paradoxically, the more secure the life situation is for a THREE, like a job that really works, or a relationship that really works, the more the Performer becomes fearful, moving into their security point, which is at the SIX, what I call the Trooper, or Devil's Advocate. That position is uncomfortable for a Performer because feelings come up. They become afraid, "Maybe people won't like me as I really am, so let me impress them further." Paradoxically, in this secure life situation, the Perfomer becomes more tentative and afraid because they have to be seen for themselves, not for their produced image. Under stress, on the other hand, moving in the direction of the other arrow, the THREE moves in the direction of a NINE, or the Mediator. So when one says, "Which type am I?" I would have to say he or she is made up from three different types. There are three basic aspects to one's personality. The way you are under stress, the way you are when you're secure, and the way you are normally. The placement of the types on the nine pointed star gives very precise predictions about this.

Will you go around the diagram and point out the base motivation for each of the three triads of type?

Yes. On the left hand side of the Enneagram are 5, 6, and 7. These are three very different appearing fear types. They all have a basis in paranoia, that's the core, at 6. The Trooper, or Devil's Advocate. But they sure look different. They manifest differently. On the right side, are 2, 3, and 4. The core point of this central triangle is 3, the Performer, and these are three image types. Taking approval from others. And up on the top, you have three anger types, 8, 9, and 1. These types manifest anger in very different ways. If you're dealing with an EIGHT, NINE, or ONE person, anger is sitting in the room at some level. So NINE is the first of the seven capital tendencies, which is sloth, inaction. So the higher call of the transformed NINE is right action. Obviously, if you're slothful, action is a valuable asset in your life. The thing about this transformation process is whether people want to transform or not, they really have to because they're really hungry for the higher tendency. For NINES, it's, "My God, when is my life going to start? I may be a late bloomer, but why can't I remember what I really want to do? Why am I always doing someone else's agenda, why not my own?" It's a constant inner question so they can hardly not look for right action because they suffer from it's absence. The SIX can hardly not look for trust in other people since they're afraid of other people. And its the same with a THREE; it gets kind of burdensome to always be out there being a star, it takes a lot of energy. Eventually, they say that they want to be themselves, they get tired of always projecting an image. We suffer from the absence of the higher tendency, and whether we like it or not, we're all trying to look for it.

Is there a type that denies its identity more than another?

No, not really. I've had FOUR's that want to be special and so they don't think they're FOUR's, and I've had ONE's who have so repressed their anger that they don't think they're angry, but everybody else does. It isn't a matter of type, it's a matter of degree of self-observation.

So, self-observation is the key to any kind of work with the Enneagram.

Everything in life depends on witnessing it. Otherwise you're just out there doing it, on automatic, but you're not able to see the consequences of your life.

What do you see as the future of the Enneagram?

I feel that in my grandchildren's time that this can be a very positive system that incorporates both psychological and spiritual work. It will be very helpful for the normal and high-functioning person. I think it's going to be a very impressive system in the next generation if we can unify it. Otherwise, it could deteriorate into another pop-psychology.

The psychological value is improved relationships, in being able to adopt eight radically different points of view, equally to one's own. The purpose of the Enneagram is to improve human relationships, as Freud said, "to have better love and work in the world." But the spiritual agenda is paramount, which is this conversion process. Whether we know it or not, we're all transforming, because we're hungry for the opposite of our vice. Even if we don't know about our vice, we suffer from lack of its opposite tendency. A fearful person needs faith and courage. Someone who is bogged down in someone else's agenda, need's to rally to their own position. Someone who is addicted to the applause of the crowd, needs to find their own emotions and follow that, instead of the way of the world. Whether or not we try to transform, we are. But that process is so slow and so mired, without good information and good tools, we could be here a long time. I hope that this new implementation of the Enneagram, which has been around for a long time, is successful in speeding on the process of transformation.

For more information about her work, conferences and workshops,
you may reach Helen Palmer at:

1442 A Walnut St.
Berkeley, CA 94709
Phone: 510.843.7621
Fax: 510.540.7626

QUOTES:

"I think [the Enneagram] is here because we need it, on a global basis, to take more responsibility for our thoughts and emotions and to consider, deeply, how to stand in someone else's shoes, and see the decision or the event from very different sets of eyes and see the validity of it."

"...you have a recognition of all of the types because they're built on a common emotional reaction that everyone has, or at least has had at some time in their life. Anger, pride, envy, avarice, which is withholding, we've all done these things, but one strategy is more hardwired into your psychological structure than the others."

"...they recognize their family, their work associates, people who they interact with in their own life, they recognize from the stories of the nine types the point of view of people who are close to them. And then they recognize themselves."

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Copyright © 1997 Jack C. High and Associates. All rights reserved.
Revised: March 24, 2002.