Enneagram and Identity: What makes Enneagram Distinct from Myers-Briggs and All the Rest

I am not claiming to be an expert on the Enneagram or on Myers-Briggs (or the thousand other personality tests and inventories), but from my amateur study of the two, I have reached a couple of preliminary conclusions.  As I said in my previous post, I think Myers-Briggs is interested in providing a description of how cognitive processes work in human beings, but makes no claims about what human identity is or ought to be.  The Enneagram is different.  It has a "narrative" so to speak, about the origin of human personality and the neuroses thereof, and the story of redemption is about a return to the primeval harmony.  In most accounts, although some tend to Christianize the Enneagram, the story is what I would call secularized pantheism.  The problem is mostly one of being reconnected to the One, but the One is not necessarily Other, nor is the One a discreet Person, as far as I can tell.  (Actually, the way the folks on the Enneagram Institute's website tend to talk about the relation between the individual and the One reminds me more of Spinoza's Ethics than anything else, but that may be coincidence.  They point to medieval mystic traditions of all sorts, and back to Plato or Pythagoras, if I'm not mistaken.)
 
Though I am by no means a pantheistic and am not quite sure what I think about "secularized mysticism" of the kind proposed by the folks at the Enneagram Institute*, I do find the Enneagram's understanding of the connection between personality and identity to be one of the most helpful in contemporary psychology.  In this, the Enneagram seems to be in tune with what much of Christian mysticism (especially medieval mysticism) has said about personality, and I find this true, helpful, and mostly unsaid in modern settings.

   What the Enneagram writers and the Christian mystics (and possibly other mystics) agree on is this: personality--the sum of habit, inclination, predisposition, orientation, and desire in a human being is not necessarily helpful, and it is not necessarily essential to our identity.  In fact, personality (our inclinations, habits, predispositions, orientations, likes, dislikes, loves, hatreds) oftentimes gets in the way of true identity formation.  Personality is either unshaped or it is misshaped or it needs to be reshaped or finished--and some parts of personality have to be abolished altogether in order for the person to be made whole.  The Enneagram folks will say that every person is a sum of all the Enneagram points as represented by numbers 1-9, and the number you identify as is the way that your personality has become fixated on a certain thing.  In other words, personality--the fact that I am a "5"--is much more about how my soul has wrapped itself around my own brokenness than it is about anything else.  And what self-work in the Enneagram is is a way of getting "unfurled"--a way of relaxing into who you really are, a way of easing yourself out of being wrapped up in yourself out of some anxiety or knowledge of some deficiency in yourself or in the world.

If you're even a passing admirer of the work of Martin Luther, perhaps my description of the Enneagram makes it sound like Luther's description of original sin--that human beings are all incurvatus in se--all curved in on themselves.  Inflamed with the love of self and cold toward God and neighbor.  The way the Spanish mystics such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius of Loyola used to describe it, human beings are attached to the wrong things.  Part of our cure is being detached from wrong things (mostly creatures, created things) in wrong ways (i.e., idolatrous ways), re-attached to God in the proper way, so that we can also be present but non-attached to creatures.  John of the Cross' famous Dark Night of the Soul is all about this journey of proper attachment and non-attachment.  And for him there are two dark nights--the first is "sensible" (about stuff: feelings, experiences, etc) and the second is "intellectual" (about the work of reason, the intellect, knowing, the possession of the good).  But both nights are about deprivation--God deprives first the sensible part of human beings, and then the whole intellect of knowledge, sensation, use, in order to correct their disordered attachments to wrong things.  (This is why the theological virtues--faith, hope, and love must lead.  God must lead where we cannot even see, especially where we cannot we have gone wrong.)  In other words, this correction in the form of deprivation occurs in order to reform identities properly.  But what ends up happening is that the mature person, having died to self as one might also call it, has become less involved with their own inclinations.  Those inclinations are purified, reformed, remade, brought back into submission to reason and to faith and ultimately to God.  That is the work of the dark night and that is the work of sanctification.

The idea that we can love the wrong things in the wrong way is by no means unique to the medieval period.  It's essential to the whole scheme of virtue ethics and can be found in different forms in both Aristotle and Augustine.  For Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics of course moral virtue is about the proper response (the mean between extremes) to emotion or desire.  For Augustine, having the right loves is essential to living well, but we need the Spirit of God to give us love and to reshape our loves.  The Enneagram is helpful because it is friendly to the idea that we need to change and be reshaped, and that our identity does not .  depend on our behavior or even on what we see in ourselves at this very moment.  Myers-Briggs can sometimes be used superficially--"See, look, the MBTI says I'm like this, so don't ask me to change."  The Enneagram calls us to deeper observation and to the continual work of transformation.

I'm not knocking Myers-Briggs.  I think cognitive process theory is helpful, especially when what we struggle with is the fact that someone gets at the world differently than I do.  For that, it's a nice idea to do a nice jaunt through the pages of a good MB book or website.  It can be a great aide for self-knowledge or even for just helping one think more clearly about how to play well with others or with the world.  It can be helpful for self-acceptance or acceptance of fundamental non-moral ways in which human beings are different.   But I don't think it addresses the problem of transformation or discerning the difference between personality and identity.  For that, the Enneagram is an unexpected ally to the Christian agenda, even if the Christian response to questions about identity and transformation go deeper and are not, I hope, a sophisticated form of pantheistic monism!



*I am much too much a supernaturalist to be happy with any sort of system that doesn't take mysticism seriously.  Either someone is communing with God in a mystical experience, or being distracted by demons.  It is nothing to play with and vague notions about "the One" do leave me concerned about who exactly people are talking with.  The enemy does take every advantage, whether we want him to or not.)