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The link you clicked on said “Enneagram 2.0.” That was the name of my former website, as well as the title of the series of articles that were published in EM last year.

Now, I’ve changed the name to more accurately reflect the character of my model. It is a Structural Enneagram in that it uncovers a set of factors that support personality.

This site is still being developed, but I hope you enjoy what’s here so far. Please come back and follow the progress. I think you’ll find that Structural Enneagram is a great new tool for self discovery.

• Mitt Romney, Eight-wing-Nine
• Rick Perry, Eight-wing-Nine
• Michele Bachmann, Eight-wing-Seven
• Sarah Palin, Seven-wing-Eight
• Ron Paul, Six-wing-Five

Romney and Perry seem to have the typical “leader” profile, much like George W. Bush. Bachmann likes power, but her fanciful treatment of facts doesn’t argue for her being another Eight-wing-Nine.

These days, Palin is more about publicity than exercising power, but it is only today that I moved her (in my mind) from Eight-wing-Seven to Seven-wing-Eight. I can’t see her as Three-wing-Two because she doesn’t seem to prepare for her appearances, by studying, for example.

Ron Paul doesn’t seem so much to want to exercise power as to promote a system of thought. Yet, in spite of his principled libertarianism, he is the “guardian” of embryos and fetuses. In other words, he’s anti-libertarian on the issue of abortion. So, for now, I’m calling him Six-wing-Five.

The conventional Enneagram gives no explanation for why its nine types can be presented on the enneagram shape.

The Structural Enneagram explains that mystery and others. It offers:

• Detailed specification of the underlying  structures of personality.
• More-accurate, two-number structures as opposed to the old single-number types.

The basic Structural Enneagram still looks like the illustration above, although its parts have different meanings. For example, in the conventional Enneagram, the lines
connecting numbers map a “direction of integration”, while in Structural Enneagram some of the lines are repurposed to map a developmental path, an order in which perceptual and cognitive abilities arise in childhood.

For those wishing to break out of personality traps, the conventional Enneagram’s vague recommendations to behave more like the type in one’s “direction of integration” are replaced by specific behavioral and conceptual patterns that may be either directly emulated or used to devise a plan of therapy.

Even at the level of delineation and description of types, the Structural Enneagram’s innovations are quite extensive. The conventional Enneagram describes nine personality
types, with the option of assigning a “wing”—the type on either side of the dominant type. The Structural Enneagram proposes instead:

•  6 “perspectives” that form the building blocks  of personality
• 9 personality structures corresponding to the  numbered points around the circle
• 18 type-plus-wing personalities
• A model of personality dynamics

In short, the Structural Enneagram understands the Enneagram to be not only an organized collection of personality types but also a dynamic model of the underlying structure of personality.

That is one of the impressions I took away from Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry (Riverhead-Penguin 2011). Ronson, a journalist, is also the author of Them and The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Ronson’s book is a good, fast read and a worthwhile exploration into both the “criminal mind” and society’s stake in understanding it. Can we begin to protect ourselves from psychopaths by diagnosing them scientifically? If so, would we find that some corporate and political leaders are psychopaths and that we are all their victims? Or do we ourselves become power-mad when we slap such labels on people and ignore the degrees of difference among them?

The book offers an abundance of evidence by which psychopaths can be correlated to the Seven-Eight structure. Here are just three of the many examples provided by the men and women Ronson profiles:

• They have perspective Eight’s other-orientation and requirement for recognition. They want to be liked and, if not liked, at least respected. Being “dissed” can send them into a rage.
• They also have Eight’s need to control. If they are ingratiating, it is only to turn manipulative.
• They have the perspective-Seven ability to mirror the other. They are skillful imitators.

What psychopaths do not have are interiority and a conscience, and Structural Enneagram can explain that, too.

According to Structural Enneagram, Seven-Eights have some sort of negative relationship with perspective Two, which is the ability to empathize. Ordinary Seven-Eights are rebels whose need to achieve autonomy leads them to do the opposite of what the other wants. Psychopaths flat out can’t empathize.

Ordinary Seven-Eights aspire to Four’s perspective of self-awareness and autonomy. They become rebels in an effort to release their psyches from the other and achieve autonomy. Psychopaths can’t occupy either perspective Two or Four, so they simply have no interiority; they are empty shells.

If Ronson has the full story, true psychopaths may be the way they are because their amygdalas don’t work properly. But if Seven-Eights fall on a spectrum between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Idi Amin, then perhaps at least those in the middle could be helped to add more flexibility to their perspectives through the use of Structural Enneagram principles.

Betty’s dominant Enneagram perspective is Two, a helper. She’s the kind of mother whose children followed her into the bathroom. But now they’re getting older, and she thinks they should be less dependent.

Betty is overwhelmed and unhappy. She wishes her husband would show more appreciation for all she does. He actually wishes she would do a little less for him (get off his back, in other words).

Her therapist tells Betty she needs to stop thinking about herself so much. “Go work at a soup kitchen,” he says. “Go help others.”

So the answer to too much helping is to go help some more people?

Betty has a better idea. Her boss has told her that she could do her job better and get a promotion if she would take some accounting courses. So she signs up at the local college. This choice will help her exercise her independence and yet avoid going against the grain of her native Two-ness.

Hers is a growth solution, while her therapist’s was unwittingly designed to keep her stuck in old patterns.

Maybe the truth is that her male therapist was pigeonholing Betty: as a typical whiney woman. Better to be typed than stereotyped.

In 2009, on my now-defunct website, enneagram2.com, I argued that he is a Nine-wing-One. I opted for a light-hearted proof: he doesn’t dress well enough to be a Three. Here’s some of what I wrote then.

… sorry guys, Obama is nowhere near type Three. Just recall the incident of the shapeless Levi’s at the ballgame. Following are Obama’s responses to the criticism of his lack of sartorial sense.
> “I’m a little frumpy.”
> “I hate to shop.”
> “Those jeans are comfortable.”
> “Here’s my attitude: Michelle, she looks fabulous. … For people who want a president to look great in his tight jeans, I’m sorry, I’m not the guy.”
This is not the image of a Three.

In a more serious vein, Beatrice Chestnut wrote a well-argued essay, “Barack Obama is a Nine, Not a Three,” in the February 2010 issue of Enneagram Monthly. She further specifies that he is a Nine-wing-One. Her two affirmative points:
1. He avoids conflict like a Nine.
2. He has issues around belonging, like a Nine.
She also makes a case against his being typed as a Three.

Traditional Enneagram descriptions emphasize the “deadly sin” of sloth for Nines of either wing. At various times, you may experience Nine-wing-Ones as anything from accommodating to stubborn, industrious to indolent, judgmental to accepting. It all depends on the match between their external and internal realities, and you, of course, cannot know how those match up unless they tell you, and they may well not tell you.

When I give my own sorting test to Nine-wing-Ones, they resonate with six to eight of the conventional, single-number Enneagram types—but never with type Eight. Thus you may know them by their apparent contradictions. Whether you see it in them or not, they sense within themselves many of the characteristics of the majority of Enneagram points. Others explain this fact away by saying that Nine-wing-Ones are out of touch with themselves, but it seems to me that they are simply well-integrated.

For example, although Nine-wing-Ones generally use detached perspective Five and may seem to be “out of body”, they do get good rapport and typically make others feel comfortable. This leads me to conclude that most of them must not be shut out of perspective Seven since Seven’s ability to enter the other’s mental or energetic space is necessary for rapport.

Visual tip-offs to the Nine-wing-One: They often use slow hand gestures. They may nod their heads a lot. They are not necessarily agreeing with you; they are encouraging you to continue and saying, “I hear you.” They sometimes have a slouchy posture and lean against the back of the chair or, if standing, against a wall. They will also match others’ posture and gestures when they are in rapport, which is often.

Probable examples of personality type Nine-wing-One are Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Walt Disney, Queen Elizabeth II, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Garrison Keillor, Princess Grace of Monaco, Rose Kennedy, George Lucas, and the Dalai Lama.

Being less influenced than most by perspective Eight’s need for interpersonal validation, Nine-wing-Ones generally don’t take things personally. This, along with their reliance on perspective Five, allows them to see all sides of an issue. Having perspective Four in their makeup, they feel separate from others. Having a perspective-One component, they feel a strong sense of purpose, even if they can’t quite articulate it.

Finally, Nine-wing-Ones’ concerns and aspirations will be found at the intersection of reality and their ideals. If there is a good enough match, they will be content and relatively inactive. If there is not a match, then their choice of goals is apparent: they must either withdraw from that particular environment or change it. If Nine-wing-Ones have adopted a view of themselves as intellectuals, then they will set out to educate an uninformed world. If they view themselves as spiritual, then they will model holiness for a materialistic society. If they have had instilled in them a sense of their obligation to lead, then they will study, plan, and act toward that end. They unpretentiously allow themselves to be used and used up on behalf of their goals.

In this book, Grinder essentially mirrors my view of personality as a rhetorical construct, although he would call it a linguistic construct.

The book emphasizes the importance of exploring other perceptual positions when in difficult situations. If you are stuck in, say, self position, you won’t get the benefit of seeing things as others see them or as a disinterested observer would. Not surprisingly, since I have been trained in NLP, the Structural Enneagram includes perceptual positions as the key elements of what I call perspectives.

Perspectives are the building blocks of personality in the Structural Enneagram. Over-reliance on one or two perspectives causes people to be stuck in inflexible and often maladaptive personality patterns.

Other writers say the following are examples of personality type One-wing-Nine: Plato, Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau, Colin Powell, Michael Dukakis, William F. Buckley, Jr., Al Gore, George F. Will, George Harrison, and C. S. Lewis. I do have some doubts about Thoreau belonging in this group.

In my observation, One-wing-Nines, more than any other type, have a tendency to occupy the place of an impersonal ideal—to represent an ideal and act on its behalf without consideration of what other people think. This perspective-One ability to think from the place of an idea was illustrated by a former teacher of mine, who would muse during a
seminar, “I wonder what wants to be said on this topic.” Would another type even consider that an idea might “want” something?

One-wing-Nines are reformers, moralists, and philosophers. They can be somewhat ascetic, suppressing impulses that do not accord with their principles. And they can be intolerant of the weaknesses and hypocrisies of others. You may typically find them earnestly engaged in convincing others to live up to their own professed ideals.

Along these lines, my One-wing-Nine friend loves the poem “Let America Be America Again” by the African-American poet Langston Hughes, which you can read here.