Mapping the Self
What are personality tests testing, anyway?
Humans love designing systems to better understand themselves. Each system, despite its esoteric or academic mystification, is simply a dividing of a pie (The Human Experience) into a pie chart and then naming and defining each slice. Whether the pie slices are ancient - such as the Zodiacal archetypes in astrology or the hexagrams of the I Ching - or modern - such as Freudian psychology’s id ego and superego or trauma-based psychotherapeutic models idea of “complexes” and “developmental stages” - what makes a system work for someone is if the slices are cut in such a precise way and the scope of the whole pie is big enough to serve as a map of their previously incommunicable inner experience. Last week, a friend and reader was introduced to a relatively new system of self-understanding called The Enneagram and asked me to write about it on here.
I first encountered the enneagram back in college, nearly ten years ago. A particularly emotionally volatile and nosy member of my friend group had just started going to therapy – which is how most people today, myself included, begin their Inner Journey– and her therapist had given her a copy of an enneagram book the size of an encyclopedia describing the 9 distinct but interrelated personality types. She would lug this tome around with her everywhere with the goal of guessing our friends’ enneagram number and would read passages from the corresponding section to psychoanalyze them.
I’m all for personality tests. They’re fun, and usually just ways to discuss surface level behavioral patterns you’ve observed in yourself and others. Does someone work better as a leader of the group, a follower, or alone? Are they more extroverted or introverted? Analytical or emotional? Are they a perfectionist or do they go with the flow? If you reflect on the,. even surface level questions like this will lead to self discovery and growth. But the passages my friend read out of the Enneagram book seemed like they were trying to reach far deeper into my psyche, right off the bat. My friend also did a lot more talking than listening. It felt a bit like someone who’d only ever walked by the outside of your apartment building telling everyone how the furniture was arranged within your unit. Still, the interest was refreshing.
Her zeal was also intriguing. So eventually I took the roughly 100-question online test myself – if my memory serves I got a type 4 (“The Individualist,” who “has a relentless drive for authenticity” subtype 6 (“The Skeptic,” who “seeks to gain security and avoid risk”). As I was reading about my personality type I remember feeling like I was reading a horoscope or looking at ink blots. I could convince myself that it was uniquely “me” - but I could also convince myself it wasn’t. I felt like the true value was in the reflecting, parsing through which parts of the long paragraphs of descriptive text really reflected the way I behaved and which didn’t. I thought that I could have had similar experiences no matter what numbers the quiz had given me.
To me, self-identity was a malleable, transient thing – not something you were truly stuck with. Personality was something that was largely created by the environment you were in and as you changed environments your personality evolved. While two people could react differently to the same environment, a lot of that could be written off by their past experiences or their genetic makeup. That is to say, I believed people lacked an immutable core personality or identity. But of course, we all wished we did have one. That’s why it was so appealing to do things like assign yourself a number or a string of letters or an astrology sign that explained your worst and best behaviors.
I can remember being in the middle of that thought process and then, strangely, stumbling upon a passage in the 4 section along the lines of:
Your biggest struggle is with a sense of self. You notice that selfhood was everchanging and therefore don’t know how to define yourself in the world. You will flourish when you finally accept that there is no permanent self and to simply go with your flow.
I was startled by the accuracy. But even then – what was so unique about noticing a basic truth of the human condition? I didn’t explore it further.
I mentioned earlier that I started my inner journey with talk therapy. Although I couldn’t communicate it at the time, I was mostly there to find a way to relieve myself of emotional baggage and gain more control of my actions. While it was quite helpful to “learn” how to express repressed emotions (by which I mean, as a man I had been conditioned that it was extremely unsafe to do so and within therapy we reconditioned my nervous system), I felt the ceiling on its usefulness rather quickly. While psychotherapy has advanced quite a bit since Freud, his quote “the aim of psychoanalysis is to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness” [and keep them talking about their issues forever] is relevant here. All a good therapist does is give you just enough of a push and direction to get the process going yourself, anyway.
Wanting more, I sought practices and techniques that promised personal transformation, evolution of consciousness and liberation from suffering. I endeavored to perform the act of spiritual alchemy, to turn the “lead” of my current inner self into “gold,” which was promised as a state of wholeness, peace, and power. I used a variety of techniques anchored by the principles of vipassana meditation which taught me to plumb the depths of my psyche and maintain a non-reactive acceptance towards anything I found therein.
During this time I became engrossed with esoteric systems that sought to map the totality of the Self and to give you the tools to “purify” it. The Western esoteric tradition begins with a simple pie-chart model—the four classical elements: air (mind), earth (body), fire (will), and water (emotion). While everyone’s elemental composition was uniquely out of whack to begin with, the goal of the practice was to bring them into balance rather than cope with (or make an identity out of) these imbalances. Then it subdivides them into ever-finer categories which you balance and purify again, and then into finer categories again. The process continues until you eventually “square the circle” and end up as one integrated whole—no longer fragmented by conflicting drives.
I liked the model, but found it a bit archaic and hard to latch on to. It wasn’t until reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising that I felt like things really began to click. In the book, Wilson explores Timothy Leary’s concept of eight escalating circuits of consciousness that are imprinted on us based on our interactions with our environment during development. These imprints (which could also be called imbalances) come to determine our basic personality. Most helpful to me, he mapped each circuit onto other notable psychological frameworks (Freud and Jung) and esoteric systems I’d studied, bridging the gap between the two.
The first two circuits house psychological imprints formed by our interactions with our environment growing up – an “oral” circuit formed by whether we were adequately fed and made to feel safe as a baby and an “anal” (territorial - think of a dog marking its territory) circuit based on whether we felt empowered as toddlers or scared and forced to submit. The combined imprints from these two circuits create four recognizable mammalian behavior patterns: the aggressor (advance/dominate), the sociable (advance/submit), the timid (retreat/dominate), and the submissive (retreat/submit). Humans are mammals and we operate under the same patterns - notice how perfectly the four trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) map onto the extremes of the grid.
We’ve seen these four types everywhere in our culture – the four elements, the suits in a deck of cards, the four Hogwarts houses, the four political alignments (see above), etc. While the top right “friendly strength” – the outcome for a person who is adequately cared for in the oral stage and then allowed to feel powerful in the anal (toddler) stage - sounds like the healthy psychological outcome, Wilson presents these behaviors as different gears to shift into. They each have their positives and negatives and the ideal, healthy individual is free to change depending on the situation and to be stuck in any one gear is a result of psychological sickness.
The third (Semantic/Symbolic) circuit (left brain, logos) include linguistic-cultural imprints (shaping how you make sense of and communicate reality) and the fourth Social-Emotional circuit (right brain, eros) is formed at the conflict between sexual development and taboos, where we derive our sense of morality. These are the last two programming windows involved in the development of the personality. Wilson claims that our internal “thinker” generates thoughts based on our combined circuit programming, then our internal “prover” seeks out evidence to support whatever it is that the thinker thinks. Our minds form self-reinforcing feedback loops around what is safe, how power works, what is sane/real, and what is moral. These loops are the filter through which we perceive reality. If you’ve ever watched sports (or watched someone watch sports) you should get this “feedback loop” concept immediately – are the referees and announcers ever on your team’s side when they are losing?
These feedback loops form a self-reinforced “reality tunnel.” It’s why most political “debates” are usually arguments over What Really Happened in the Past and end up changing zero minds. It’s a clash of two (or more) reality tunnels. Challenging someone’s reality tunnel is akin to calling them stupid, insane, or immoral - which are the most common ad hominems thrown out in debate. The reason these debates are not only entertaining but meaningful to the people who tune in is because it allows them to update, refine, and reinforce their reality tunnel, which is always an externalization of their personality.
The following four circuits involve various spiritual experiences and states (ecstasy, collective consciousness, near death experiences) and a metaprogramming circuit from which you can begin to reprogram your lower circuits. A reprogrammed, conscious individual can reach a state of emotional balance and flexibility (for the lower two circuits) and a more suitable sense of reality and moral compass (circuits three and four). Entheogens and other psychedelic substances activate these higher circuits for brief periods of time and an enlightened being, like a tibetan monk or a cave dwelling yogi, operates exclusively from these higher circuits.
Reading this book was both mind blowing and vindicating for me. My initial feelings about the “personality” being an amalgam of environmental imprints that we are able to recalibrate (and thereby transcend) rather than an expression of Who We Really Are As People now had a framework to reside in. I was grateful I had gravitated towards techniques that allowed me to rebalance and reprogram these circuits on my own rather than further developing an identity around them. Wilson had given me a far deeper understanding of the “lower” personality and linked it to so many other systems of thought that I was starting to feel like I had a coherent understanding of the human experience.
So if not to the lower self, where do we go for our identity? Our “calling,” the True Will, the Higher Self, the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, our Soul Mission, the Tao, our True Purpose, God’s Plan are all terms used to describe (at least in part) an identity rooted in something greater than this lesser “personality.” The distinction between fate – which corresponds to the robotic programming I’ve outlined along with the greater chain of circumstantial cause and effect we experience in our lives – and destiny – the (optional) path God or the Universe or our Higher Selves have laid out for us – is relevant here. I believe it is the purpose of “Free Will,” suffering, challenges, and struggle to transform ourselves into the higher versions of ourselves and ascend from victims of fate to champions of our destiny.
But how would be know what this “destiny” or higher self was? For a while, I was sure it was something that would emerge in the purification process, like a gem buried beneath layers of grime, something so distinct from the flawed individual I was at the time. But as I gradually transform into this “higher self” I’ve begun to understand it as an emergent process where the development of this impression-driven robotic personality was a vital first step. I saw how an acorn must crack and sink its roots deep into the earth before it begins to grow upwards as a tree, and how its heavenward branches were a perfect mirroring of the root system descending towards Hell. While we are not bound by the fate of our childhood experiences, we are also not meant to all become the same elementally balanced and purified individual. I believe that our souls (or God, or the Universe, or destiny, whatever you call the higher intelligence that organizes our reality) chooses the exact trials and impressions that will create the Higher Self and lead you to Your Destiny in the same way a gardener selects the proper greenhouse conditions for a specific plant.
When I think on it now, it feels rather obvious. Who We Are is inextricable from the Life We’ve Lived. We are a process. There is no other way to become exactly who you are now and who you are meant to be without first going through the journey you’ve taken to get there. And, if we want to get an idea for where we are headed, perhaps we should look around at the conditions that have shaped us and continue to shape us. The best place to find that, ironically, is within that “lower” personality – that perfect record of the events that have impacted us most – I’ve spent the previous 2000 words maligning.
Which brings me back to The Enneagram. While I was doing research for this article, I realized that I had drastically underestimated the system, dismissing it as a Meyers-Brigg-adjacent product of psychotherapeutic institutions. The enneagram, it turns out, may have roots in 4th century Christian mysticism, Sufiism, and the work of G.I. Gurdjieff, though its founders deny it. Bolivian born philosopher Oscar Ichazo is credited as the real brains behind it all. As part of his technique and school of thought he called “Protoanalysis” he had…
…described nine ways in which a person's ego becomes fixated within the psyche at an early stage of life. For each person, one of these "ego fixations" then becomes the core of a self-image around which their psychological personality develops. Each fixation is also supported at the emotional level by a particular passion. Ichazo described these passions as emotional energy in disarray, much like a sickness. The principal psychological connections between the nine ego fixations can be mapped using the points, lines, and circle of the enneagram figure.
Ichazo's teachings are designed to help people transcend their identification with — and the suffering caused by — their own mechanistic thought and behavior patterns. His theories about the fixations are founded on the premise that all life seeks to continue and perpetuate itself and that the human psyche must follow universal laws of reality. The study of the fixations does not produce a typology. Rather, it analyzes the characteristics of the human ego based on the three instincts known as conservation, relation, and adaptation, and the two poles of our psychic life: our sexuality or sense of life continuation, and our spirituality, or sense of internal unity.
Ichazo understood the fixations as instinctual points that have been hurt. The primary difference between modern psychology and his theories is that he proposed a model of the psyche where the instincts, when affected, injured or handicapped, can be liberated to accomplish Unity, whereas modern psychology has preferred to focus on observed behavior.”1
So, quite a bit of overlap with the Leary/Wilson circuit model perspective, but with a different slicing of the pie. The Enneagram we know today was created by a student of Ichazo’s named Claudio Naranjo:
Naranjo had added defense mechanisms to the model developed by Ichazo: His contribution to the Enneagram successfully joined the insight and methods of a mystical path of transformation with the intellectual power of a Western psychological model. Nevertheless, Ichazo considered Naranjo's understanding of the Enneagram to be limited and incomplete.2
Another telling distinction is Ichazo referred to the nine characterizations as “fixations,” while Naranjo calls them “personality types.” So, depending on your perspective, Naranjo either watered down Ichazo’s mystical teachings to make them more marketable to a western audience or he made them more practical for said audience. There also appears to have been an extended legal battle over the copyright.
Either way, there is clearly something worthwhile going on there. It provides a framework to understand the unique personality created by your childhood imprinting (or “wounding” of the psyche), the higher purpose it was meant to lead you to, and some advice on how to get there.
I will admit that I haven’t ever paid for the official enneagram test or materials, and outside of flipping through my friend’s aforementioned comprehensive edition nearly 10 years ago, I haven’t accessed any official (paywalled) Enneagram content. The basics are all available online. Most of what I see available online seems rather slanted towards niching down into a personality type and giving you life advice based on that, not too different from the Meyers-Brigg or pop astrology. A multiple-choice quiz, whether 100 or 400 questions, is also a poor substitute for serious self inquiry. But it can be a good start.
I’d like to present the data in a way that’s aligned with Ichazo’s original intent: the classification of nine different types of psychological wounding we experience as children and where that is supposed to lead us. Hopefully you are able to find a few that resonate with you.
Type 1 – The Reformer
Core Wound: "I am only lovable if I am good/perfect."
False Belief: I must fix everything, including myself, to be worthy.
Drive/Obsession: Rightness
Path to Growth: Practice self-compassion, embrace mistakes as learning, release inner critic, meditate on the beauty of imperfection.
Transformed Self: A wise, peaceful moral compass.
Type 2 – The Helper
Core Wound: "I must meet others’ needs to be loved."
False Belief: I have to “rescue” others for them to be okay (and for me to be okay).
Drive/Obsession: Connection
Path to Growth: Set boundaries, meet your own needs first, give without agenda, sit with the discomfort of not being needed.
Transformed Self: A radiant wellspring of unconditional love, able to give and receive without strings.
Type 3 – The Achiever
Core Wound: "I am only worthy if I succeed."
False Belief: I must accomplish everything myself and can have faith in nothing else.
Drive/Obsession: Achievement
Path to Growth: Slow down, reflect on true motivations, connect with your deeper emotions, risk failure and vulnerability.
Transformed Self: An authentic leader.
Type 4 – The Individualist
Core Wound: "Something is wrong or missing in me."
False Belief: I must suffer to be real or special.
Drive/Obsession: Authenticity
Path to Growth: Stay grounded in the present, stop comparing, create without self-reference, accept ordinariness as sacred.
Transformed Self: A deeply creative, emotionally resonant soul who reveals the beauty of the human experience.
Type 5 – The Investigator
Core Wound: "The world is overwhelming—I must withdraw to stay safe."
False Belief: Life doesn’t teach me everything I need to know just through the process of living. I must withdraw from life and study it until I feel safe enough to act.
Drive/Obsession: Understanding
Path to Growth: Re-engage with the world, trust others, express feelings, experience rather than just observe. Develop wisdom (derived from experience) rather than just knowledge (derived from information).
Transformed Self: A deep well of knowledge and wisdom.
Type 6 – The Loyalist
Core Wound: "The world is unsafe—I must find something or someone to trust."
False Belief: If I don’t submit and attach myself to someone or something greater than myself, I will die.
Drive/Obsession: Security
Path to Growth: Develop inner authority, embrace uncertainty, take action without full guarantees, trust gut wisdom.
Transformed Self: A courageous guardian who trusts inner knowing and anchors others in truth.
Type 7 – The Enthusiast
Core Wound: "Life and its pains are too overwhelming and chaotic, there is no one to guide me through it.”
False Belief: Pain and suffering must now must be avoided for me to be okay.
Drive/Obsession: Freedom
Path to Growth: Embrace stillness and boredom, fully feel all emotions (including sadness), commit deeply, finish what’s started.
Transformed Self: A joyful sage who embraces the full range of life, including its sorrows.
Type 8 – The Challenger
Core Wound: "If I am soft I will be hurt. I must be strong to avoid betrayal or vulnerability."
False Belief: I can’t let my guard down.
Drive/Obsession: Power
Path to Growth: Allow vulnerability, trust others with your heart, surrender control, lead with compassion not force.
Transformed Self: A fierce but tender protector of truth and justice who leads with their heart.
Type 9 – The Peacemaker
Core Wound: “I feel unwanted/ignored.”
False Belief: I need to make myself small and be passive to maintain harmony.
Drive/Obsession: Harmony
Path to Growth: Assert opinions, tolerate conflict, stay awake to desires, act decisively and purposefully.
Transformed Self: A “harmonizer,” someone who brings people together.
Hopefully some of those resonate with you. And hopefully I don’t need to say that the thinking that we “are” any of these categorizations, even subcategorizations like “4 wing 3” is delusional and largely unhelpful unless reframed in the way I’ve laid out in this article. We all experience a variety of wounding as children that serve as the inspiration for us to develop into the multifaceted beings we are meant to be. I mentioned earlier that I tested as 4-dominant. But now that I’ve written it out, I also resonate heavily with numbers 1,3, 5, 7 and 9. This is a rough map I made, gridding the 9 types onto the four-quadrant chart I discussed earlier along with the four trauma responses of the psychotherapeutic model.
It must be restated now that pain is truly a guide to who we are meant to be. In the context of my “4” wound: My father took out his emotions on me as a child in the form of arbitrary punishments and ridicule. The most intense meltdowns created a “freeze” response in my nervous system, as I was unable to escape, fight, or placate this drunken adult towering over me. Because I had done nothing wrong I began to believe that there must be something “inherently wrong with me” (because why else would he do that?). The feeling was one of frantic searching, rifling through my memory for something terrible I’d done but must be forgetting, a search which never landed on anything – creating the feeling that there was something missing inside of me. I felt like my punishment and suffering must be penance for lacking that something and eventually it would fill the void and make me into a real or worthy person.
I only felt comfortable identifying as unique and individual, separate from the herd, as it gave me more of a sense of uniqueness which placated the gnawing feeling of emptiness. Simultaneously, I spent much of my time in fantasy, detached from my day to day life, imagining the grand person I would be when I was older. In these fantasies I was always famous for not only being the absolute best at something, but for being a Very Interesting and Deep Person.
When I was older, I was drawn towards creative pursuits as an outlet for my deep need for authentic self expression. I never felt anything I did was good enough though because I’d placed extremely high standards on myself. I was stuck oscillating back and forth between an overwhelming push to express myself as a unique individual and a terrified pull back from the feeling that my authentic self wasn’t good enough or didn’t even exist. I was only able to create anything through a combination of extreme effort, support from those around me, and strategic use of emotionally-numbing substances.
Once I identified this pain point and started processing it, I began emotionally reconnecting with myself and the world and was able to create more freely. I stopped excessively scrutinizing my work and learned to trust my taste and emotions. Instead of trying to prove something about myself I began to create works that I would enjoy consuming and write about topics that I found meaningful.
The question then is: would I have ever developed my creativity and desire to self express without this burning need placed in me as a child? Would I have begun this process of self inquiry and transformation without that nagging feeling that I was flawed or empty? Would my current work and abilities even feel remotely as meaningful if I had not gone through such trials to win them? Was the “trauma” I endured also the necessary fertilizer for a seed which is now sprouting and bearing fruit?
During my meditations, I would routinely have feelings come up that had existed in the back of my head as long as I could remember. As they dissolved, I recognized them as driving forces for so much of my past behavior - often they were actions I was proud of despite the fact they sprung from an animal response to psychological pain. The image came to my mind of a booster rocket falling off once a space shuttle breaks through the atmosphere.
Hopefully you are able to find your specific narrative around your specific wounds. The enneagram is a very useful model for doing so.
The pop psychotherapeutic model (which is part of the “reality tunnel” imprinted on us as westerners) does not really consider the transmutation of these wounds as a realistic possibility for most. Instead they are seen as as pathological developments needing amelioration or the foundation of someone’s immutable personality. Any positive gifts associated with the wounds are written off as coping mechanisms, psychological silver linings. I suspect that the enneagram as it is presented today straddles the line between the mystical and pop-psych models.
To be fair to the pop psych model, most humans are just looking to minimize their suffering. Hidden, but crucial, within all of these “paths to growth” in that chart is the willingness to experience the pain and discomfort you have engineered an entire personality to avoid. The day to day suffering most of us are looking to alleviate or escape from is a result of the limitations of the psychological imprints, much like playing a video game with a controller whose joystick drifts to one side, but to break free from these limitations and reprogram the controller requires voluntarily undergoing the more acute discomfort of transformation. It gets worse before it gets better.
But I also believe that more people would take the leap if they weren’t programmed to believe such a path is impossible. Or, better said, it’s not offered as a possibility within their reality tunnel - a smooth wall where there should be a door. These doors are all hidden well off the beaten path, buried deep within our cultural mythos. Yet, in my experience, all it takes is some internal decision or act of prayer, one moment where you truly decide you want more out of life, for these doors to begin materializing as if by magic, inviting you to fulfill your destiny.
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Ichazo
Ibid.
this is brilliant.