Separating Scholar from Scholarship in the Enneagram Community

In every academic community, it is commonly accepted and expected that scholars debate and challenge each other’s work. It is considered good scholarship to make an argument against someone’s ideas using evidence of your own—not to challenge them as human beings, but to refine ideas. It is never acceptable however to challenge the scholar themselves, to attack them as a person. The problem with the enneagram community is that the scholar and the idea are linked in many cases.

In my years studying the enneagram, I have noticed that there is extreme resistance to questioning the ideas of other teachers. It’s somehow considered blasphemous to say, “I don’t think that idea written in Wisdom of the Enneagram is fully correct,” for example. Even when offering an alternative with evidence, people hold certain authors/teachers as scripture. Any time I offer information that is different from some of the books, someone dives in with a quotation from the Enneagram Institute website or some false information about “countertypes” for example. For the record, I don’t think these resources are “bad” or useless, but there are things I would change or refine.

There are a couple of reasons why people are resistant. Firstly, since there are many types such as 6 that might have difficulty accepting the usefulness of a system like the enneagram without some semblance of scientific proof or an origin story, people tend to take the older sources as being the most pure and the most accurate. This is a fallacy in any level of scholarship. A primary source is the most direct, but there is no primary source to be close to the enneagram because the enneagram is not a thing one can be close to or far away from. It is something that is experiential that can be learned in any time and place. There are older sources that speak to the origins of the enneagram as an idea/system, but that really has no bearing on whether the source is the most accurate in real-life application. It is something that is growing and evolving. For example, there are many aspects of Claudio Naranjo’s writing that I find to be inaccurate including the way he linked mental illnesses with enneagram types. However his The Enneagram of Society book is one of my favourites.

The other reason is because many of the mistakes in enneagram writing are caused by people’s own blind spots. We can only see as far as we can see. The enneagram describes unconscious/hidden processes within us and others, and it’s extremely difficult for someone to have in-depth insight into energies they’re not familiar with.

This is where it’s difficult to separate the scholar from the scholarship. There are many teachers that I believe to have mistyped themselves. In other academic communities, this particular detail of someone’s personal life would be completely irrelevant (and inappropriate to discuss), however these mistypings cause the teacher themselves to fill their resources with misinformation that conforms to their own mistyping. One large example of this is the idea that “4’s are the most empathetic type.” The entire structure of 4 is designed around being too self-absorbed. The very large amount of 9’s mistyping at 4 have caused the essence of type 4 literature to incorporate elements of 9ness, namely “empathy” in this case. Any human being can show empathy, but most 4’s would never describe themselves as highly empathetic, good listeners, or anything of that sort.

So how can we as enneagram teachers/learners continue to preserve the integrity of the system itself if we are not allowed to challenge the material? It’s difficult to separate the scholar from their work when the two have a direct link, and that includes me. The enneagrammer team gets a lot of flack for challenging people’s mistypings and “daring” to state the unthinkable when it comes to other teachers who might have mistyped. We are thought of as arrogant, or even “toxic” just for daring to say that perhaps this information needs to be refined or understood better. However our point is not to be contrarian, but rather to bring light to some of the systemic misinformation that has spread throughout the enneagram community. At the end of the day, we are all limited and it’s often others who see us in the ways we can’t see ourselves. Before reacting to new information as dangerous, perhaps consider if it has any value.

-Joseph Simone