Part I

THE SLEEPING GIANT

A DYNAMIC TYPOLOGY

The Enneagram is a very old typology that describes nine different characters. It shares with many other typologies the crude reduction of human behavior to a limited number of character types.

Astrology connects its twelve types of human being to the particular constellation "under which" one is born. The Greek physician Hippocrates (d. 377 B.C.E.) traced his four temperaments (sanguinary, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic) back to various "bodily fluids" (blood, black bile, bile, mucus). In the twentieth century Ernst Kretschmer (1888–1964) investigated the links between body build and the inclination to certain psychological troubles. He distinguished (1) pyknic (stocky), (2) leptosomatic (thin), and (3) athletic body types, and coordinated them with (1) cyclothymic (inclination to manic depressive illness), (2) schizothymic (inclination to schizophrenia), and (3) viscous (inclination to epilepsy) character features.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) starts from the assumption that there are three pairs of functions that are expressed differently in each person: extroverted-introverted; sensate-intuitive; thinking-feeling. In each case everyone prefers one of the two possibilities; this results in eight possible combinations or types, e.g., the extroverted-intuitive thinker or the introverted-sensate feeler.

The American Isabel Briggs Myers discovered a further pair of functions (judging-perceiving: the inclination to quick, clear judgments and decisions as opposed to receptivity to many influences and kinds of information). Following Jung she developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a test that distinguishes among the sixteen types and is widely used in the United States, both in industry and the churches.

Karen Horney (1885–1952) originally named three different ways that people try to overcome their fear of life: submission (turning to other persons); hostility (aggression against others); withdrawal (isolation from others). Later she developed a model pointing up four main ways by which people try to protect themselves from their fundamental anxiety: love, submissiveness, power, and distancing.

This last model matches to some extent the scheme worked out by the psychoanalyst Fritz Riemann (1902–79), who was influenced by astrology. He assumes four basic human fears: (1) fear of nearness, (2) fear of distance, (3) fear of change, (4) fear of permanence. This results in the four basic types: schizoid, depressive, compulsive, and hysterical.

All these models try — under different presuppositions — to account for the experience that people are different, but that some individuals are surprisingly similar to one another. Each one of these typologies can be compared to a map that has the purpose of facilitating the overview of the realm of the human soul. Just as there are topographical, political, and street maps, so each of the typologies mentioned pursues a particular interest, and hence has its special strengths and weaknesses. None of them is all-inclusive. None of them is the thing itself. In the most popular of all typologies — the astrological — we have seriously to ask whether its presupposition, that there is a correspondence between the courses of the stars and the patterns of human destiny, is at all tenable. In any case, the study of a map never replaces the "experience" of the country itself.

All typologies have the disadvantage of necessarily neglecting the uniqueness, originality, and peculiar nature of the individual. There is no overlooking the danger of forcing oneself and others, for example, into the pigeonhole of a specific "sign" and in that way freezing the individual in place once and for all. The discovery of regular patterns in human behavior has meaning only when at the same time the possibility of change and liberation from the pressure of determinacy comes into view. This possibility, I believe, is opened up by the Enneagram.

The Enneagram is a very old map. Like other typologies, it describes different character types. But that is only the beginning. Beyond the description of conditions, the Enneagram contains an inner dynamic that aims at change. It demands a lot and is exhausting, at least when it is taught and carried out as originally intended. The Enneagram is more than an entertaining game for learning about oneself. It is concerned with change and making a turnaround, with what the religious traditions call conversion or repentance. It confronts us with compulsions and laws under which we live — usually without being aware of it — and it aims to invite us to go beyond them, to take steps into the domain of freedom.

The starting point of the Enneagram is the blind alleys into which we stumble in our attempt to protect our life from internal and external threats. The person, as created by God, is according to the Bible very good (Gen. 2:31). This human essence (one's "true self") is exposed to the assault of threatening forces even during pregnancy and at the latest from the moment of birth. The Christian doctrine of original sin points to this psychological fact by emphasizing that there actually is no undamaged, free, and "very good" person at any point of an individual's existence. We are from the outset exposed to destructive powers and hence in need of redemption. Even the genetic material of which we are composed already contains programming that helps to shape our way of being from the moment of conception.

The external world meets the child first of all in the form of parents and siblings, and later though comrades, teachers, the values and norms of one's group and religion, and whatever the general situation of society may be. Many different factors come...