A colourful analogy
Convention dictates that there are seven main colours in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Each colour spans a certain range of the colour wheel (Figure 1). For example, most people would agree that the bottom left quadrant of the wheel is blue. Notice how the colour "blue" spans a wide range of individual hues (navy blue, royal blue, cyan, sky blue, turqoise, etc).
In addition, it is hard to see where one colour ends and the other begins. Notice how each colour blends into the next. One cannot really say where the colour Red ends and the colour Orange begins.
Although we say there are seven colours in the rainbow for convenience, each of these colours spans a wide range of individual hues to produce an infinite number of unique colours.
The Enneagram's concept of personality
type is analogous to the colour wheel. Like the seven discrete colours of
the rainbow, the Enneagram describes nine distinct personality types. Like
each of the seven colours, each personality represents a wide range of behaviours
and traits, allowing for individual "shades of personality."
The colour green has some yellow in it, some blue in it, and something that is neither yellow nor green. Likewise, each personality type is a mixture of the types around it, plus its own unique characteristics. For example, the personality type Three has some characteristics of type Two and the type Four (the types on either side of it). This concept is illustrated with the colour wheel in Figure 2.
In practice, people do not fall perfectly
into any one of the personality types. For the most part, however, we adopt one of these types as our primary
way of interacting and coping with the world. We call this type our main type.
Of the other personality types, certain
ones influence us much more than others. The enneagram symbol shows us which
types affect us strongly.
The two types next to our main type
are called the wings. For example, type One can have a Nine wing or a Two
wing (and sometimes both). One of these types is usually much stronger than
the others. Just like each colour is a mixture of its neighbouring
colours, each personality type tends to have traits of its neighbouring types.
The wings play an important "second side"
of our personalities. Sometimes the traits of our wing reinforce the traits
of our main type; sometimes the traits of our wing conflicts with our main
type.
The Enneagram goes further than simply describing different personality types; it explains the
entire range of psychological health: from high functioning states to neurosis.
If the personality type is analogous to colour, then the psychological
health is analogous to its brightness. Again, there are infinite levels
of brightness for each colour. At the healthy extreme, the colour melts away
into pure white; at the unhealthy extreme, the colour dissolves into blackness.
To summarize, the Enneagram does not describe static categories of people. Instead, it takes into account the unique mixture of traits that make up our individual personality.
