Doubts About the Enneagram

(To make much sense of the following you need to have come from the Awareness of the Soul's Shape page.)

Though Riso's theories are appealing, and in general make sense, I have some hesitations about them, and the Enneagram in general.

For example, I have a friend who to me very clearly fits Riso's description of the Type 3 (the Status Seeker). Riso claims that Type 3 people have had positive relationships with their mothers, and this is exactly the opposite of the case with my friend, who despises his mother and always has.

According to the tests I took online (links on main page), I am a Type 5 (the Thinker), and the extended description certainly seems to fit me well enough. My introspective assessment from Riso's book is that I am a Five with a "Four-wing" (that is, with some qualities of the adjacent  Type 4, the Artist), rather than a "Six-wing" (the Loyalist, Type 6). Not that I am completely without Type 6 qualities - in fact, loyalty is a high value for me - but I have (I think) more qualities of Type 4.

My Direction of Integration is (according to Riso) towards Type 8, the Leader: I need to develop courage. This makes intuitive sense to me, as this is certainly a lack in my life (both moral and physical courage). Continuing integration from that point would take in first Type 2, the Helper; then Type 4, the Artist; Type 1, the Reformer; Type 7, the Generalist (my Direction of Disintegration, which by Riso's theory I should only approach from this direction); and so back to Type 5.

However, the test results and my own introspection show rather a different pattern - in fact, three different patterns, as per this table. The two tests gave results in two different formats, which I have converted (in brackets) to a ranking from 1-9, to help in direct comparison to my introspective ratings of how much I identify with each type. To confuse things as little as possible, I have made these percentages.

The rating of each type is independent of the other ratings (that is, the total of all the ratings is not significant).

From this, it's clear that I am a Thinker. However, Reformer was second or first equal in all the evaluations, whereas in Riso's theory it should be the fourth step in my journey towards integration, after 8 (which in two evaluations was almost the lowest score, though in one test it was third), 2 (rated very low in all three), and 4 (third, fourth or seventh, depending on the evaluation).

Riso's theory can potentially account for the high One score by taking it as the direction of integration of my Four-wing. However, both the tests are a lot more ambiguous than my introspection about saying that I have a Four-wing rather than a Six-wing, and all the evaluations rank my Four score lower than my One (the second test very much lower).

Conclusions

I am inclined to distrust the second test in detail, because it differs both from the first test and from my introspective evaluation. (I am also annoyed with it because, unlike the first test which allows you to skip questions which genuinely don't apply to your life, it requires you to answer all the questions - and three of them assume that I have a partner, which, like a large percentage of the population, I didn't at the time I took the test.)

I am also inclined to distrust Riso's theory in detail, though I very much like his overall idea - that one can integrate one's personality both within itself by overcoming the inherent dangers and weaknesses of it, and also by coming closer to other personality types. His presentation of the most desirable qualities of the other types is also motivational and interesting.

A craftsman can detect, though, when another craftsman is "forcing" his materials, and speaking as a crafter of theories, I think Riso is forcing some of his conclusions to fit the Enneagram diagram. I agree with him that both human personalities and his personality theory are subtle and complex. However, I think that their subtleties and complexities, looked at closely, don't always match as well as he would like to think. Personally, I feel that rather than proceeding in an orderly fashion around the diagram in my "direction of integration", I have incorporated a number of qualities, which Riso assigns to various types, to different degrees which have little to do with his schema.

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This material is copyright 1998 to Mike McMillan. Use for profit is reserved to the author unless otherwise arranged.