Learn · Chapter 13 of 15
Typologies
Type systems like the Enneagram and MBTI are everywhere, at work and in relationships. A few are well tested and most are not. Used well, a type points you to the fear a person is organised around, which is often the quickest route to what is going on.
Typologies, systems that sort people into types, are useful for generating hypotheses and poor as verdicts. The best ones name the core fear a character is organised around, and that is often faster to spot than a profile of traits. The weakest ones sort people into boxes the data doesn't support.
Which to trust for what
This table compares the best-known systems. Read each row for what the system is good for, then for how far to trust it. Strong means well supported by research. Clinical means drawn from clinicians' experience and little tested. Weak means little or no research support.
| System | What it's good for | Validity |
|---|---|---|
| Big Five / HEXACO (see Personality) | Predicting behaviour, comparing people, hiring | Strong; the scientific standard |
| Horney's three trends | Spotting someone's default move under threat: toward, against or away | Clinical; quick and robust in use |
| Riemann's four anxieties | Identifying how someone handles closeness and change | Clinical; underused, very practical |
| Shapiro's neurotic styles | Identifying character from how someone thinks and attends | Clinical; deep, for advanced identification |
| Enneagram | Naming a core fear and passion; rich descriptions for self-inquiry | Weak as a test; useful as hypotheses |
| MBTI | Shared language for preferences in teams | Weak; types are unstable on retest |
| DISC, four temperaments, love languages, Spiral Dynamics | Conversation starters | Weak |
How to use them well
- Identify the core fear, not the label. Ask what this person is most organised to avoid: being bad, being unloved, being worthless, being ordinary, being helpless, being unsafe, being trapped, being controlled, or conflict. Each of the nine Enneagram types (listed in the table below) is built around one of these. Connect the fear to the person's usual defence (how they protect themselves from painful feelings) and their schema (a core belief about themselves and others, formed early), and you have a fuller picture than the type alone.
- Riemann's two axes reduce to two questions. Fritz Riemann, a German psychoanalyst, sorted people by the anxiety they most avoid. His four styles use old clinical names (schizoid, depressive, obsessive, hysterical) for everyday styles, not disorders. Does this person fear closeness or distance? Do they fear change or permanence? Their answers predict who they clash with. A distance-seeker paired with a closeness-seeker, or a permanence-seeker with a change-seeker, is a common source of conflict in both marriages and partnerships.
- Watch for type used as a defence. "I'm an 8, I'm just direct" (Enneagram Type 8, the Challenger) can excuse aggression. "I'm an introvert" can cover avoidance. When a label ends a conversation instead of opening one, it is working as a rationalisation, a plausible reason that covers the real one.
The table below gives each system in brief, with the nine Enneagram types after the overview row. For each type, read the core fear first. 'Often confused with' lists look-alikes to rule out, and the last column rates the evidence as in the table above. 'Neurotic' in Horney's and Shapiro's names means an everyday rigid pattern, not a mental illness.
| Term | What it is | Often confused with | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) | Sorts people into 16 types from four forced choices: extraversion or introversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. Treats each preference as either-or, though scores pile up in the middle like most traits. | Big Five; Jungian cognitive functions | Weak |
| Jungian cognitive functions | Jung's four functions: two for taking in information (sensation, intuition), two for judging it (thinking, feeling), each turned outward or inward. Typology communities claim a fixed order, with the 'inferior' function erupting under stress. | MBTI; Shadow | Weak |
| Introversion and extraversion (Jung's original sense) | The extravert orients to the object: outer facts and people set the terms. The introvert orients to the subject: the inner response to the object is what counts. | Extraversion; Schizoid personality | Clinical |
| Enneagram (overview) | Nine character types, each organised around a core fear, a compensating desire and a passion, meaning a habitual emotional driver (anger, pride, deceit or vanity, envy, avarice, fear, gluttony, lust, sloth). Lines claim each type moves toward another's worse traits under stress and another's better traits in growth. | MBTI; Big Five | Weak |
| Type 1: Reformer | Fear: being bad or corrupt. Desire: to be good and right. Passion: anger, held down and leaking as resentment and criticism. | Type 6; Type 3; OCPD | Weak |
| Type 2: Helper | Fear: being unwanted or unworthy of love. Desire: to be loved, secured by being needed. Passion: pride, the hidden belief that they need nothing and everyone needs them. | Type 9; People-pleasing; Communal narcissism | Weak |
| Type 3: Achiever | Fear: being worthless apart from achievement. Desire: to be valuable and admired. Passion: deceit or vanity, self-deception about who one is beneath the image. | Type 8; Type 7; Grandiose narcissism | Weak |
| Type 4: Individualist | Fear: having no identity or significance; being fundamentally flawed. Desire: to find themselves. Passion: envy, the sense that others have something essential one lacks. | Type 5; Vulnerable narcissism; Depressive character | Weak |
| Type 5: Investigator | Fear: being useless, helpless or overwhelmed by others' demands. Desire: to be capable. Passion: avarice, hoarding time, energy, knowledge and privacy. | Type 9; Type 4; Schizoid personality | Weak |
| Type 6: Loyalist | Fear: being without support or security. Desire: to be safe. Passion: fear, shown as compliance with authority (phobic) or defiance and testing of it (counterphobic). | Type 8; Type 1; Paranoid personality | Weak |
| Type 7: Enthusiast | Fear: being deprived, trapped or stuck in pain. Desire: to be satisfied and free. Passion: gluttony, an appetite for more experience and options. | Type 3; Hypomanic character; ADHD in adults | Weak |
| Type 8: Challenger | Fear: being harmed or controlled. Desire: to protect themselves and set their own course. Passion: lust, meaning excess and intensity in everything. | Type 6; Type 3; Antisocial personality | Weak |
| Type 9: Peacemaker | Fear: loss of connection, conflict. Desire: inner peace. Passion: sloth, meaning inattention to oneself, one's priorities and one's anger. | Type 5; Type 2; Passive aggression | Weak |
| Enneagram instinctual variants | Three areas where attention and anxiety concentrate: self-preservation (security, health, comfort), social (standing, belonging), sexual or one-to-one (intensity, the charged bond). | Maslow's hierarchy; Enneagram | Weak |
| Riemann's four basic forms of anxiety | Four styles defined by the anxiety each avoids, on two axes (closeness against distance, permanence against change). Schizoid fears closeness and seeks distance; depressive fears separation and seeks closeness; obsessive fears change and seeks permanence; hysterical fears permanence and seeks change. | Attachment theory; Horney's trends; Schizoid personality | Clinical |
| Horney's three neurotic trends (toward, against, away) | Three strategies for basic anxiety, a child's sense of being helpless in a hostile world: moving toward people (compliance, love), against (aggression, mastery), away (detachment, self-sufficiency). Trouble starts when one becomes compulsive and the others are repressed. | Conflict modes; Fight, flight, freeze; Riemann's anxieties | Clinical |
| Neurotic styles (Shapiro) | Four ways of thinking and attending: obsessive-compulsive (sharp, rigid, driven by 'should'), paranoid (searching, suspicious, finds hidden meaning), hysterical (global, impressionistic, led by feeling), impulsive (captured by the immediate, no felt sense of deciding). | Cognitive distortions; OCPD; Histrionic personality | Clinical |
| DISC | A workplace profile: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness, from two axes (outgoing against reserved, task against people). | Big Five; Four temperaments | Weak |
| Four temperaments | Sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic. In modern terms, the four corners of extraversion crossed with emotional stability. | Temperament; Big Five | Weak |
| Love languages | The claim that people give and receive love through one of five channels: words, time, gifts, acts of service, touch. The matching claim isn't supported. | Bids for connection; Attunement | Weak |
| Spiral Dynamics | A colour-coded stage model of values from survival through tribal, power, order, achievement, egalitarian, to systemic and holistic. Popular in integral and coaching circles; little research support. | Ego development; Subject-object shift; Moral foundations | Weak |