The Enneagram - We Are Not Our Type

[Speed Gavroche]

... Mostly because anything about "you" not being the "real" you tends to strike me as pretentious. I am who I am, and it's that simple.

+1

 

[brainheart]

My immediate response is to think that it's total mumbo-jumbo, and to want to go off and fulfill my type stereotype by quitting typology altogether and playing some football!! :workout:

... Mostly because anything about "you" not being the "real" you tends to strike me as pretentious. I am who I am, and it's that simple.

Comments like this are what make fours hate themselves. If only it were that simple! You in the gut triad know who you are, lucky you. We image triad types are a bit more puzzled by this question. I can't speak for the twos and threes, but as a four, I've been ruminating over who I am my whole life. So people call us self absorbed and pretentious and narcissistic and lecture us for not snapping out of it and doing something real. But let me tell you- art would truly suck, possibly not exist, if people didn't ponder this very question.

 

[brainheart]

+1

So then why are you interested in the enneagram, if you don't mind me asking? You, too, ejcc?

 

[redacted]

That's the debate -- are we discovered, or constructed, or some combination of both? And to what degree? And how would we figure this out?

Yeah.

My take is that we are the current intersection between our nurture and nature. Since nurture continues to change, we continue to change. Both enneagram and MBTI try to describe the amalgamation of it all -- but I think it's kinda pointless to speak of this stuff like you can somehow isolate the nature variable.

These systems are all about dimensionality reduction (aka approximation). They aren't basic rules of human psychology.

 

[highlander]

I tend to think of MBTI type as variable and Enneatype as invariable. We can change our MBTI type but not our Enneatype, basically.

We don't change our MBTI type. That much I know.