![]() I remembered thinking, “that’s not me…I’m not childlike.” So, my defenses went up when I read that they thought I was a Self-Preservation Two. ![]() I remembered that the day before, Claudio had described the Self-Preservation Two as being childlike. When they asked us to break into groups by subtype, I saw that they had written on my piece of paper, “Self-Preservation.” They thought I was a Self-Preservation Two. Apparently, on the afternoon and evening of the first night, Claudio and his team read all of these papers, looked at some video they had taken of many of us, and re-classified us into the types and subtypes they thought we were. And I was pretty dysfunctional when it came to one-to-one relationships. I had said I was a Two and that I wasn’t sure what subtype I was, but that I thought I was a Sexual Two because my impression was that your main instinct reflected the area of life where you were the most neurotic. The day before they had asked us to write down on a piece of paper what type and subtype we thought we were and why. The next day, Claudio and his associates divided the whole conference group (about 350 to 400 of us) into nine groups according to type-and then divided each of the nine type groups into three groups according to subtype. His descriptions of the 27 personalities that emerged from the mixture of a specific dominant instinct and the passion and patterns of the type were greatly expanded and much more interesting than any I had heard before. I was immediately struck by how much new information he was including in his descriptions that I had never heard before. The first morning Claudio described all 27 characters. And I didn’t see a path to learning more about what the subtypes were all about.Īll that changed for me in 2004 when Claudio Naranjo and his 17 collaborators came to the International Enneagram Association in Washington DC to do a 3-morning training on the subtypes. I didn’t understand very much about any of the subtypes-or, most importantly, how the subtype aspect of the Enneagram enhanced inner work. Throughout the 90s, when I was doing my early Enneagram training, I couldn’t figure out which “subtype” of Type Two I was. What I am calling “subtypes” sometimes gets referred to as “instincts” when the term “instincts” is used as a shorthand for “instinctual variants.” It’s good to know about this use of “instinct” as a synonym for “subtype” because if you don’t know this, it can make the language mourned this topic confusing. Note: “subtypes” have also been called “instinctual variants” by some authors, leading to some confusion. The work of Claudio Naranjo in discerning and articulating these very accurate and revealing subtype descriptions, in my view, cannot be overstated. Rather than being just “added” together - as in Type X + Instinct A = Type X who does Instinct A behaviors, the mixture of the main Type passion and patterns with a specific dominant instinct (and even mores an “instinct sequence” - which is first, second, and repressed - is more alchemical. The subtypes are the 27 personalities –more specific, more nuanced versions of the main type, with distinct traits and patterns–that you get when you multiply 3 x 9. There are 3 main instincts, 9 types, and 27 subtypes, which result when you mix the dominant instinct with the passion and patterns of each of the 9 types. ![]() The three “instincts” refer to our biological survival drives-those of 1.) Self-Preservation, 2.) Relating to others generally and in Social groups, and 3.) Sexual relationships, or One-to-One bonding, and other types of fusion experiences. I spent a bit of time in academia, and in the language of an academic, “the literature” on subtypes was not very developed.” There was very little written about the subtypes in books, and what was written and talked about wasn’t as clear or as unified a teaching across different books and by different authors.įirst, I think it’s helpful to get clear at the outset on some definitions: While there was a lot of attention paid to describing the 3 instincts and the behaviors that flowed from their influence, there wasn’t much clarity about the subtypes. ![]() The Enneagram System's 27 Personality Subtypes ![]() But in my opinion, the subtype information was not very substantive. I think Enneagram teachers were doing the best they could with the small amount of information that had been conveyed about the subtypes early on, but the subtype descriptions seemed more abbreviated than the much fuller picture of the 9 types that had been beautifully articulated by early (modern) Enneagram authors and teachers. In the early years of my Enneagram training, I never saw the subtypes-the 27 instinct-based “sub-personalities”-as very helpful to my personal growth. Looking more closely at the Enneagram’s 27 subtypes ![]()
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