Stages of Psychological Health Within Enneatypes
Traditional analytical psychology typically identifies a basic psychological type (narcissistic, masochistic, bipolar, borderline, depressive) and then delineates classifications occurring within each individual personality (its id, ego, and superego) as well as the behaviors that are indicative of the person's current level of functioning. Most Enneagram theorists use terms like “healthy,” “average,” and “unhealthy” to delineate various stages of psychological health. However, as mentioned previously, this book prefers to label three major behavioral classifications using Jung's terminology: self-actualized, ego-driven, and pathological.
The essential theory is that self-actualizing, highly functioning personalities function very well and employ balanced, consistent, reliable, and admirable behaviors. Pathological personalities become intractable to the point of obsessive-compulsive behaviors, eventually lapsing into neurosis or psychosis. And ego-driven personalities fall somewhere in the middle.
No one leaps from pathological to self-actualized; you move in the direction of extremely healthy self-actualization or extremely unhealthy pathology in stages. In other words, you don't leap from being healthy to being psychotic, or vice versa. Achieving these behavioral states results from either a progressive movement toward health or a steady, regressive deterioration.
While it's true that part of your type is genetically predetermined, without question your early childhood experiences vastly affect your development. The quality and style of parenting, in conjunction with environmental givens — health, income, education, location, and wealth or dearth of physical, emotional, or spiritual resources — have everything to do with your ability to function at the higher, the middle, or the lower spectrum of your enneatype. You began life whole, but whatever happened in your early life led to the development of a set of adaptive behaviors that suppressed your essence and created a self driven by its own self-constructed ego. An additional drop into pathology brings a set of maladaptive behaviors that really throw you off track.
These traits are sustained by habit and the failure to examine your beliefs. If your childhood was particularly dysfunctional, your coping mechanisms will likely be more rigid and more neurotic than those people who had “normal” or idyllic upbringings. Fear grows in proportion to the dysfunction — the greater your early childhood family's dysfunction the greater your underlying fear, anger, or need for relationship.
Some traditions cultivate and engage negative emotions in an effort to breach the point in your psyche where emotions become uncontrollable. Their theory is that fully experiencing your primary, negative compulsions will help you release them. Gurdjieff, for example, believed in pushing people to their breaking point by deliberately placing them in situations that created maximum stress or went against their adaptive persona. This offered them the chance to consciously live through, and then detach from, their negative compulsions.
To increase your understanding of yourself — and others — it's important to determine where you are and the direction in which you are progressing or regressing. This will help you understand why you swing from one behavior to another and what behaviors serve as warning signs. Understanding the various fluctuations within each of your personality components — your enneatype, wing, security point, and stress point — affords you a truer picture of the full spectrum of traits that define what is really happening within the parameters of your personality and those around you.
