Enneagram Types
The Individualist
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Origin 1916 to 1949
Type Four, the Individualist (also called the Romantic), is one of the nine Enneagram personality types. The Four is sensitive, expressive, introspective, and drawn to depth, beauty, and authenticity, seeking a unique identity and meaning of its own. Its basic fear is of having no identity or personal significance, and its basic desire is to find itself and its distinctive meaning. Its characteristic vice or passion is envy (a longing for what others seem to have and it feels is missing), and its balancing virtue is equanimity. The Four belongs to the Heart or Feeling triad, whose central issue is identity and image, and it sits between the Three and Five wings. Under growth (integration) the Four moves toward the principled, disciplined action of the healthy One; under stress (disintegration) it takes on the clingy over-involvement of the unhealthy Two.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1916 to 1949 2Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff) Origin Period1971 to 1975 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Origin PeriodHe taught the scheme in Chile through the later 1960s and formally from his Arica Institute from 1970, mapping nine ego-fixations onto Gurdjieff's figure 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Origin PeriodThe nine types are Oscar Ichazo's 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Origin PeriodThis is the moment the personality system comes into existence and there is no earlier one 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Place of OriginArica in northern Chile, and then Berkeley, California 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Place of OriginMoscow and Saint Petersburg, where Gurdjieff was teaching in 1916, and then Constantinople and Fontainebleau, where the work continued after the revolution. 2Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff) Place of OriginThe system is South American and North American in equal measure and belongs to the countercultural psychology of the years around 1970 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Creator / OriginatorOscar Ichazo, who made the nine-type scheme and attached it to Gurdjieff's figure, and Claudio Naranjo, whose psychological elaboration is the version the later literature descends from. Both are named, both are recent, and neither claim is disputed by anyone who has looked at the record. 2 Origin of the Name"Enneagram" is Greek: ennea, nine, and gramma, a figure or a thing drawn. The word names the DIAGRAM and nothing else. Its transfer to a nine-type personality theory happened in the twentieth century and is the source of most of the confusion about the system's age, a reader told that the enneagram is old is being told something true about a shape and something false about a typology. 2Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff) Attributions
Wing TypesSourced to the subject's own accountType Four's two possible wings are Three (the Achiever, giving 4w3) and Five (the Investigator, giving 4w5). 1 Debunked
Attributed Author / CompilerPopular writing traces the system to a Sarmoung Brotherhood in central Asia, to Sufi masters, to the desert fathers, to Pythagoras. No independent evidence for the Sarmoung Brotherhood exists; Gurdjieff's account of visiting it is read even by sympathetic scholars as teaching narrative, not reportage; no Sufi order used the figure this way; and the figure is not attested before Gurdjieff. 2Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff) Carole M. Cusack's article "The Enneagram: G. I. Gurdjieff's Esoteric Symbol" (Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, vol. 20, no. 1, Brill, 2020, pp. 31-54) traces the nine-pointed figure to George Gurdjieff's own early twentieth-century teaching and examines the lineage claims later attached to it, that it descends from a Sarmoung Brotherhood, from Sufi masters, from the Christian desert fathers, or from Pythagoras. Checking each claim against the documentary record, Cusack finds no independent evidence a Sarmoung Brotherhood existed, no Sufi order that used the figure this way, and no attestation of the symbol earlier than Gurdjieff's own circle. The personality-typing use of the enneagram, distinct from Gurdjieff's own geometric teaching, was added later still, by Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo in the 1960s and 1970s. On that documentary record the ancient-lineage claim is not historical. Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceIn Gurdjieff's own teaching the figure is a diagram of how any process unfolds: a circle divided by nine points, carrying the law of three and the law of seven, with the inner lines showing where a process must be fed from outside if it is not to run down. It describes events, not people. Nothing in it identifies a type, and no published student of Gurdjieff attaches one. 2Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff) Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe classical treatment is of a movement of the soul to be resisted 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe modern treatment is of a stable disposition that identifies who a person is 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe passion Ichazo gives type Four is ENVY, invidia, one of the classical seven 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe word survives the transfer and the doctrine does not 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryUsed, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 3 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseVery widely used and very thinly evidenced, and both halves are true. A systematic review of 104 samples found the subscales relate to established measures as the theory predicts, but that factor analyses typically recover FEWER THAN NINE factors and that no study derives the nine types by clustering. It is not a validated instrument and must not be used for hiring or clinical decisions. 3 Learn More
Type Four in the System
Type Four, the Individualist or Romantic, is placed in the heart triad with Two and Three, and is the type the system regards as most in contact with shame and most inclined to make an identity of it. Its basic desire is to find itself and its significance, its basic fear is of having no identity or personal significance. Its passion is envy, in the specific sense of a persistent sense that something essential is missing which others possess, and its virtue is equanimity. Its wings are Three and Five. Under stress the system places Four at Two, becoming clinging and over-involved with others; in growth it moves to One, becoming principled, disciplined and able to act on what it feels rather than only to feel it.
In the Hornevian groups, Riso and Hudson's second classification drawn from Karen Horney's three neurotic trends and set out in The Wisdom of the Enneagram (1999), Four falls among the withdrawn types that move away from others, alongside Five and Nine, since its search for identity is read as an inward turn rather than an assertive or compliant strategy. A later addition again, Katherine Chernick Fauvre's tritype theory, developed in 1994 and 1995 from scattered remarks by Ichazo and Naranjo, holds that a person carries one dominant type from each of the three triads, body, heart and head, so a Four's fuller tritype combines it with one number from each of the other two; like the rest of the system's internal machinery, it has a named modern author and no older source.
What the Evidence Says
The Enneagram is very widely used and very thinly evidenced, and both halves of that sentence are true. Reviews of the empirical literature have generally found that Enneagram inventories show some internal reliability and some correlation with established personality measures such as the five-factor model, but that the central structural claims of the system, that there are exactly nine types, that people belong to one of them, that the stress and growth arrows describe real movement, and that the wings function as described, are not supported by the available evidence and in several studies are contradicted by it.
Factor analyses of Enneagram instruments have not reliably recovered nine factors. This is not a fringe objection; it is the state of the published research. The system may still be found useful as a framework for reflection, and many people do, but it is not a validated psychometric instrument and should not be used as one in hiring or clinical decisions.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
Disintegrates Toward
Riso-Hudson stress/disintegration direction: Type Four moves toward the unhealthy qualities of Type Two.
Disintegration Point For
Riso-Hudson stress/disintegration direction: under stress, Type One moves toward the unhealthy qualities of Type Four.
Integrates Toward
Riso-Hudson growth/integration direction: Type Four moves toward the healthy qualities of Type One.
Integration Point For
Riso-Hudson growth/integration direction: Type Two moves toward the healthy qualities of Type Four.
Sources
1. Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987Type Four, the Individualist
1. Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987Disintegration Point For: The Reformer
1. Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987Integration Point For: The Helper
1. Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987Integrates Toward: The Reformer
1. Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987Disintegrates Toward: The Helper
2. The Enneagram: G. I. Gurdjieff's Esoteric Symbol
Carole M. Cusack, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 20, no. 1 (Brill), pp. 31-54, 2020on Arica and on the Berkeley groupsView the Source 3. The Enneagram: A systematic review of the literature and directions for future research
Joshua N. Hook, Todd W. Hall, Don E. Davis, Daryl R. Van Tongeren and Mackenzie Conner, Journal of Clinical Psychology, volume 77 number 4, 2021the review's conclusions and its cautions on applied useView the Source Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View
Claudio Naranjo, Gateways/IDHHB, 1994the claims of the system and their basis
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