The enneagram is a diagram which embodies a personality theory. The diagram is a 9-pointed figure, and the origins are wrapped in vague and mysterious beginnings - discussion of Eastern European mystics, the Sufis, number theories, etc., is common.
The basic idea is that there are 9 types of people, who are related to each other by the position on the diagram. The two types beside your type, your "wings", are similar and you can tend towards one of them. There are also two other types which you relate to when under stress, or in security, which are across the figure from you. In other words, your main type + the two wings + plus the two "stress/security" points describe you - or 5/9th of the diagram potentially describes you, and the types that "describe you" cover all aspects of the personality space. As you can see the enneagram is not a sharp tool.
The 9 types can be chunked into 3 groups of three - and your wings and stress/security points ensure that your personality spans then entire space of personality as you are related to each of these groups, e.g. the enneagram does not actually seem to discriminate you into a type that is distinct and informative. These three goups describe how information/emotions are processed by your type - head/fear, heart/grief, body/anger. A generous reading is that the enneagram captures your stance towards objective, social, and objective reality - but reading books/webpages about the enneagram does not have this insight leaping out. In terms of labeling and understanding people, the enneagram seems too complex for what it does - 9 types? But you can be close to the wing? Or under stress and thus across the diagram, or perhaps you are secure and thus across in a different direction? Oh yeah - in some of the literature they point out that stress doesn't mean what we normally mean by stress, so maybe you are at your stress point when you are not stressed. Huh? Where are the clear and sharp distinctions that one would look for in order to justify the number of labels?
At best it seems that the 3 groups of three - head/fear, heart/grief, body/anger - offers some insight, and a reduced version of the enneagram (e.g. 3 main types of personality) could be useful. But at this point why even attempt to salvage the enneagram? The big 5 is an emprical description of personality that is on solid, if limited, footing. Why not simply find your big 5 properties, and then think about subjective, social, and objective reality as the environment that you are embedded in and which you must learn to live in in order to thrive? For that matter, if the 9 types actually were clear distinct types they should correspond to clusters of big 5 properties - if we looked at the 5-d space with points for each person who took the test we should see clusters of the points: to be precise, we should see 9 distinct clusters, one for each type. To my knowlege this has not been observed, pretty strong evidence that the "enneagram theory" is false.
You can take an enneagram test for fun - after first hearing of this theory I googled and took 3 different ones, from 3 different web pages which sold enneagram related products, and had three different results - not surprising since the theory does not seem to make sharply distinct categories. Even worse, some of the test show the "points" you have on each personality type and my score was fairly evenly spread over a huge subset (~3/4) of the personally types. Basically I could pick any personality type that sounded nice to me and claim it as "capturing me". To me it seems clear: the enneagram is pseudo-science that offers no insight or constructive means to understand yourself and others. Disturbing, as apparently this model is used by some counsellors and therapists, as a google and amazon search reveals, and since it appears to have no sharp and incisive properties that would justify such use it would be better to say the model is misused by some counsellors and therapists.
Pseudo-science is not inert, and can cause a lot of pain and damage. Any placebo value of the enneagram should exist with any other treatment plan, so I cannot see any value brought to the table. Folk psychology and traditions have the potential have capture interesting truths, but as far as I can tell the enneagram contains no such interesting aspects. In fact, it does not even seem to be a legitamate folk theory - with the "mysterious roots", with vague references to Sufis or other groups, likely being made up in order to give the false sense that the method is an ancient tradition (no evidence is given, and inconsistent stories exist, both of which suggest the "ancient system" claim is false). The story seems to be thus: the enneagram theory was made up in the 20th century, with false historical pedigree, and its claims to sort people into meaningful categories which help you understand yourself and others and grow falls apart under even the weakest examination.
Lowdown
- The enneagram lives up to its name (pronounced "any-a-gram": yes, you too can pick any of the grams/personality types you want to pick to describe yourself), but does not appear to live up to any of its claims.
