How Your Personality Functions
Various energies within your psyche, such as libido, progression and regression, and individuation, allow you to function. Jung theorized that your libido is the psychic energy that frequently flows between opposite forces within your ego and determines whether you are balanced or out of balance.
Your personality also has a progression or regression that determines how you cope with, or adapt to, security and stress. Individuation is the process of separating your ego from your parents'. One must individuate to achieve self-actualization or the unveiling of your true self or essence.
Libido, or Balancing of the Opposites
Contrary to what most people think, and contrary to Freud, who linked people's most basic drives to sex, Jung did not equate the libido strictly to the sex drive. Jung defined the libido as the motivating psychic energy that reflects a natural instinct for preservation of the species and self-preservation. Unlike Freud, Jung suggested that libido encompasses different expressions of your basic drives.
Jung believed the flow of libido, or psychic energy, flows between two opposite impulses within your psyche — the greater the tension, the stronger the libido. When your psyche is out of balance, the flow of the libido serves as a sort of pressure valve. Jung believed that a failure to achieve balance between opposite drives sends your libido flowing into the unconscious where it will eventually demand expression through neurotic (ego-driven) or psychotic behaviors (deeply pathological behaviors) within your enneatype.
Progression and Regression
Jung's theories on progression (movement within the psyche toward adaptation to the environment) and regression (movement backward) are similar to the Enneagram concepts of integration and disintegration. Within the Enneagram, the flow of your libidinous energy plays a central role in the loosening or tightening of your particular Enneagram style.
When things in your life are going well, you are ripe for expansion and may integrate or progress toward individuation and self-actualization by adopting behaviors that support forward movement. Conversely, when you feel insecure or are under severe stress, you may disintegrate or regress away from individuation and self-actualization by lapsing into pathology.
If you are not progressing or regressing, you are relying on ego-driven behaviors that allow you to cope but that do not help you progress toward the ultimate goal of self-actualization — becoming authentic, flexible, fully present, and able to access your current adult resources
Fixed, or childish, stages of consciousness result from a failure of the child to progress beyond the patterns she learned in order to deal with her early childhood experiences. For example, for survival, very young children are naturally enmeshed with their parents and siblings, but at some point a healthy child individuates, or separates. Some people never individuate, resulting in a fixed or immature personality.
Per Enneagram theory, each enneatype has a complementary security point and stress point, indicated by placement on the Enneagram circle. In times of stress you are more likely to adopt characteristics of the pathological side of your stress point, but you might also respond to the challenge and boldly experiment with its more desirable characteristics.
In times of relaxation, when you are most receptive to expansion, you are more likely to nourish the desirable or more self-actualized characteristics of your security point, but you may also indulge in some of its less desirable characteristics.
These points may cause some confusion in that Enneagram theorists originally believed that a person under stress (consciously or unconsciously) adopted negative behaviors from their stress point, and that a person who felt secure (consciously or unconsciously) adopted positive behaviors from their security point. Under this theory, when a Seven felt secure, for example, she would have integrated or progressed toward the positive energies of Five; and, when a Seven felt stressed, she would have disintegrated, or regressed by assimilating some of the negative energies of One.
Today, however, most theorists believe that people adopt positive and negative behaviors from both their stress point and their security point. Thus, using the same example, when a Seven feels secure, she integrates, or progresses toward individuation, by adopting positive behaviors from both her security and her stress points — positive behaviors from both Five and One; and when a Seven feels stressed, she disintegrates, or regresses away from individuation, by adopting negative behaviors from One and Five. However, when stressed, you may also choose positive behaviors from your stress point that facilitate growth.
All theorists agree that our stress and security points are where our energies of growth and change frequently reside. In succeeding chapters when individual enneatypes are discussed, you'll see the Jungian terms of progression and regression used to identify each enneatype's movement between its connecting points as they relate to the process of individuation or self-actualization.
Individuation
Jung defined individuation as the process of forming an integrated personality, which allows you to self-actualize — become what or who you were born to be, what you were before you formed an ego based on what happened in your childhood. This individuation or self-actualization process is a lifelong, ongoing process or quest.
Through therapy or active self-development using introspection and conscious choice, you can work toward unveiling your negative and positive shadow, unraveling your personality restrictions, broadening your ego, and integrating or self-actualizing your psyche. Your goal is to finally become your true self, or essence. Jung offered the analogy that most people have a self that is equivalent to a large, multistoried apartment building, but they consciously or unconsciously confine their personality to the first few floors.
