The Enneagram is a Symbol... Of What?
Don't expect subtlety, nuance, or shades of grey from a stop sign.
I have gotten to the point in my study and writing about the Enneagram that I rarely look at the Enneagram symbol itself. I’m immersed in the material enough to have all the lines between the types and directions of integration and disintegration memorized. I can easily recall that 9 is at the top of the Enneagram and the numbers go clockwise from there. Would it still be worthwhile to spend further time with the symbol when all apparent information has already been gleaned from it?
Yes, I think so. I am actively trying to push against my impatience and hubris to spend more time actually looking at the Enneagram symbol itself. Seeing it visually helps me to consider its symbolic nature beyond its remarkable explanatory powers in the realm of human motivations and behaviors. Drawing from Carl Jung, analyst Daryl Sharp defines a symbol as “the best possible expression for something unknown.”1 There is much the Enneagram has helped me know (two weeks ago I wrote about something it helped me know about myself), and today I want to focus on the Enneagram as an expression of the unknown, and perhaps unknowable. To begin, I need to explore Jung’s understanding of symbols further, especially in contrast to signs.
Symbols: For When You Can’t “Just Come Out and Say It”
When I was taking my first few English courses in university, I had the misapprehension that the novels, short stories, and poems I was being assigned were all writing in a kind of secret code it was my job to crack. Why authors would do that and why trying to solve these riddles was a worthy academic pursuit, I didn’t know yet. The first chapter of my undergrad copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray has every flower and every colour underlined. I was naively looking for clues the way I thought a detective would. In hindsight, I was treating symbols as though they were cryptic signs.
Signs, as Jung understood the word, are much more straightforward and easier to describe than symbols. A sign is a shape, word, or combination of the two, used to represent something else. A good sign has one clear, unambiguous meaning. For example, it is imperative for order and safety that stop signs are clearly stop signs and that they only mean one thing: stop! As a society, we don’t publicly hang red octagons with any other words on them because we want to protect the clarity and signaling power of the stop sign. We need stop signs to mean just one thing. To expect “the rich odour of roses” that begins The Picture of Dorian Gray to have one unambiguous meaning in this way is to misunderstand symbols.
A symbol is our best attempt to convey something unknown or not reducible to a simple explanation. Most good authors and poets aren’t trying to be cryptic, mysterious, or to gatekeep their books for sophisticated crowds only when they work with symbols. Symbols, used well, are honest efforts to try and express something about a truth that would otherwise be unknown or near inexpressible. Having now read The Picture Of Dorian Gray a few times, the rich odour of roses that opens the book has a host of possible symbolic meanings that tie in to the themes and explorations of the novel. Roses can “evoke the evanescence of innocence and youth,”2 as well as a certain thorniness and danger that precludes closeness and intimacy. It’s a generally pleasant odour, and I wonder if it isn’t meant to mask something rotten, as powerful scents were sometimes used. This would mirror how Dorian’s physical, youthful beauty comes to mask his malignant selfishness.
The expressive use of symbols is not limited to acclaimed generational artists. We are engaging with the symbolic whether we intend to or not. All of us, in our dreams at night, experience the unconscious’ attempts to communicate deeper truths in the best, richest way it can: through the symbols that show up in our dreams. The monsters chasing us through our dreams and our teeth falling out during an exam we’ve forgotten all the answers to before we wake up in a cold sweat are the unconscious’ symbolic ways of drawing our attention to something urgent in our lives.
What Does the Enneagram Express?
It is important to understand that, for Jung, “the unconscious” and psyche as a whole, extend beyond any individual’s brain or mind. Psyche is in everything or everything is in psyche. It is possible that the symbols we collectively experience when we are awake are also products of the unconscious attempting to communicate deeper, unknown truths as best it can. I’m thinking of symbols like the Christian cross, a falling star, heart emojis, or really anything that can have a whole constellation of metaphorical meanings associated with it. A heart is understood to symbolize love, accord, and tenderness in most corners of the world now. This could be due to more than just coincidence and eventual consensus. It could be that the impulse to express the incredibly tangled network of feelings and affects we identify with love as a stylized human heart came from the unconscious, at least initially.
If we take this idea seriously, what are we to make of the emergence of the Enneagram symbol from humanity’s collective unconscious? What unknown deeper truth is the universe trying to express through the emergence and persistence of the Enneagram symbol? I explore some corners of the murky origins of the Enneagram symbol and system in this earlier post. For now, it is enough to say that the symbol seems to have emerged independently of the current use we often put it to helping us systematize character and personality.
My best guess is that the shape of the Enneagram captures something true and helpful about the way processes unfold and energy moves in a complex system. Something about the relationship between the points on the circle and the order in which they move mirrors how things develop, come to fruition, and where things are most likely to get stuck. This could explain why the Enneagram is so helpful in systematizing personalities and personality development: the Enneagram could reflect how libido moves in the complex system that is an individual and where its likely to get stuck. Our personalities are powerfully shaped by our mental and emotional fixations, after all.
This could go some ways towards explaining why this weird pentagram looking shape can help us to be remarkably accurate when it comes to the patterns of habits and motivations of different personalities. This is a very strange concept for me to sit with, that geometric shapes would have anything to say about patterns in the human psyche. To what extent is the psyche bound in two- or three-dimensional space the way a shape is? Can the mind be said to have a shape?
Probably not. I would imagine the psyche cannot be contained by any shape. However, following Jung’s approach, it is possible that shapes are sometimes symbols for some important truths about the psyche. A cross can be used to represent Jung’s four functions of consciousness, astrology also divides a circle to (among other things) identify distinct personality patterns. Perhaps the Enneagram is the shape that best symbolizes the understanding of personality that works best for me.
Ronnberg, Ami, and Kathleen Martin, eds. 2010. The Book of Symbols. Köln ; London: Taschen. Page 164