The Enneagram: All Nine Types Animated

The Enneagram is a system for naming and exploring nine personality types.

It gathered its meaning through the many lives of an ancient symbol, but it really emerged as the psychological tool we know today through the work of Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo from the 1950s to the 1970s.

You can think of the enneagram as a system for locating the primary fears or orientations with which we enter the world. The central concern can be seen as a magnet that gathers the metal shaving of personality around it; personality is made of a system of defenses and motivations that hold this central fear or concern at heart.

A Type 3, for instance, fears losing esteem in the public sphere; the 2 orients herself toward helping others; the 9 orients herself toward keeping her environment peaceful. When the orientation has too strong a hold, too unrecognized a role, then it can end up running us. We compulsively orient toward the fear. Part of the work of the enneagram is recognizing what your primary motivation or orientation is, and then not letting it drive you as hard as it might if it had stayed unconscious.

In "Faces of the Enneagram," the series I’ll be posting for a few weeks, I interviewed one person for each type, or one person who loved someone of a type, and then animating their story to exemplify the type. In the interviews, we played with Play-Doh to see what might come up in the unattended action of our hands. This series is a homage to the ways we all show up in the world.

Today, the video of 7, the Enthusiast. For this interview, I spoke to Anna. She is a 7 through and through; she orients toward play, fun, optimism, social life, and grand future plans. Her enthusiasm is the major way she knows herself. The enthusiasm is also a way to avoid the stiller, more painful aspects of life. The 7 is often the center of the party, bringing sunshine to the room. But she can have a harder time in follow through. Anna is a very aware 7 and walks us through the character type in the video above.

One nice way to grapple with the enneagram type is to think of the growth arrow. We all have some aspects of all nine types in us, but some parts of self grow dominant, and some fade away from being under-practiced. The growth arrow for the 7 points toward the 5. While the 7 engages with the world through her extroversion, her gluttony of experience, the 5 is the type most likely to preserve her energies, to turn inside, and consider social life a drain. We all grow by taking lessons from each other. The growth arrow would remind the 7 that on the other side of the party lies the silence, which Anna says beautifully in the video above.