The succeeding chapters will employ these Jungian concepts to more fully explain and clarify the dynamics of the Enneagram — how each personality type develops, functions, progresses, regresses, and either achieves self-actualization or sinks into pathology.

To review, you are born with a true self that encompasses everything you possessed before your early childhood environment influenced your development. This true self is also known as your essence. When you are born, you are greatly influenced by whomever is there to nourish and support you. How these people treat you and how you react to their behavior, in concert with your physical, intellectual, instinctual, or emotional characteristics, determines what becomes your modus operandi, or way of being in the world. This equates to your enneatype style, ego state, or personality. Your parents, parental figures, and your siblings have a major effect on how you formulate a personality and your primary way of perceiving, interacting with, and responding to other people and to your environment, including your geographical region, country, and culture or religion.

Every ego state, personality, or enneatype style develops and harbors shadows, and most also contain complexes or fixations. It comes down to this: You began life affected in some way by who or what you experienced, and you, consciously or unconsciously, covered over or clouded your true self. You might not have been properly mirrored or validated, you might have been punished for being a certain way, you might have received mixed messages, your parents might have suffered a crisis that separated them from you, you might have responded to excessive restrictions, or you might have had parents that had vastly different sensibilities than you. Even with the most healthy, supportive parents on the planet, you still veiled parts of your essence, and it becomes your lifelong task, or quest, to unveil your true self and become whom you were meant to be.

Further, your libido is the psychic energy that flows between your opposing drives, and how you accelerate or depress your libido determines your progression toward or regression from individuation and self-actualization. Self-actualization means bringing all the parts of yourself into one whole, integrated self — your true self.

The Enneagram delineates nine enneatypes or core personalities. Within each enneatype, an individual is either functioning at maximum capacity (self-actualized), functioning fairly well but according to his or her ego needs (ego-driven), or not functioning well (pathological). You can be in between or at either ends of the spectrum (whole or crazy).