The Peacemaker

Type Nine, the Peacemaker or Mediator, stands at the top of the figure and at the centre of the body triad, and the system regards it as the type most out of contact with its own anger, which it suppresses in favour of keeping the peace. Its basic desire is for inner and outer peace and for wholeness, its basic fear is of loss, separation and fragmentation. Its passion is sloth, meant in the sense of the classical acedia, an inertia about one's own priorities rather than physical laziness, and its virtue is action. Its wings are Eight and One. Under stress the system places Nine at Six, becoming anxious and doubting; in growth it moves to Three, becoming engaged and self-developing.

In the Hornevian groups, Riso and Hudson's second classification drawn from Karen Horney's three neurotic trends, Nine falls among the withdrawn types that move away from others, alongside Four and Five, its peacemaking having as much to do with disengaging from conflict as with actively resolving it. Naranjo's instinctual subtypes cross each type with one of three biological drives, self-preservation, social and one-to-one (sexual). For Nine these give the self-preservation Collector, whose peace is sought through appetite and comfort; the social Community Benefactor, who merges with a group's participation; and the one-to-one Seeker, whose peace is pursued through union with another person.

Most responsible Enneagram teaching states two things about its use, and both are worth passing on. The first is that a type is intended to describe a habitual strategy rather than a fixed identity, and the system's own literature warns against using it to explain people away, to excuse behaviour or to type others without their participation; the whole point of the passion and virtue pairing is that the type is what one is meant to work with, not what one is. The second is that self-typing by questionnaire is unreliable, that people commonly mistype themselves, and that the schools recommend reading the full descriptions and reflecting over time instead. To those two should be added a third, from outside the system: because the nine-type structure is not empirically established, the Enneagram should not be used for hiring, selection, or any decision affecting another person's life.

The instrument most often used for self-typing is the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (RHETI), which first appeared in Riso and Hudson's 1995 book Discovering Your Personality Type and was revised into the widely used version 2.5 in 1999. It is the questionnaire the contested-use research on the system has most often examined, and the same research that finds the type descriptions relate to established personality measures as predicted also finds that factor analysis of the RHETI's items does not cleanly recover nine separate factors, one more reason the schools themselves recommend reading the full type descriptions rather than relying on a test score alone.

Sources The Enneagram: G. I. Gurdjieff's Esoteric SymbolCarole M. Cusack with The Enneagram: A systematic review of the literature and directions for future researchJoshua N. Hook, Todd W. Hall, Don E. Davis, Daryl R. Van Tongeren and Mackenzie Conner