“What Enneagram books have the best descriptions?”
This common question has more facets than you might think
Understandably, this question comes up a lot. Today, the market is flooded with Enneagram books. There are books for everything — from team building, marketing, personal development and regular personality typing to deeper inner growth. So which one should you pick? One with good descriptions, surely, as that would be the definition of a successfully written Enneagram book, right? After all, if no one relates so the type descriptions, what use is a typology model?
Now, counter-intuitive as it may seem, this is not the best starting point for this discussion. First, we need to position the question itself in relation to what the reader would hope to get out of reading the book.
Finding yourself vs grasping the idea
The vast majority of fresh or in-their-first-year-or-two Enneagram enthusiasts want to read a book that will tell them where on the model they fit in. Reading a book about different ways of being in the world, an obvious motivation is finding out where I fit in. What kind of person am I, what does that say about me, and — perhaps — how might I want to approach aspects of myself of my life differently? All reasonable questions, and, for sure, ones that we can have answered through our Enneagram studies.
However. (If you know me from before, you’ll recognize this word. It plays a key part in many of my writings.) The “however” this time requires a brief look back to the beginnings of the Enneagram model as we find it today.
The deeper roots of the Enneagram type model
The (extremely) abbreviated story is that a mystic called George Gurdjieff introduced working with the Enneagram symbol roughly a hundred years ago. He did not work with the types of personality or temperament that the model is connected to today (that connection was made by Oscar Ichazo, and later expanded hugely upon by Claudio Naranjo, who would be the “founding fathers” of the Enneagram type model that this article is about) — but he did teach extensively about the three centres of intelligence, on which the Enneagram type model rests heavily.
When the connection was made between the points of the Enneagram symbol and the different personality types, the archetypes mapped out on the circle originated from parallel lineages, deeply spiritual and psycho-spiritual in nature. (If you are interested in going deeper into the ancient teachings that flowed into Oscar Ichazo’s eventual creation, I can recommend Russ Hudson’s evergreen course The Ancient Spiritual Origins of the Enneagram as a Path for Self-Discovery and Wholeness on The Shift Network.) Originally, the model spread in the same types of circles from which the archetypes themselves were sourced: religious and otherwise spiritual contexts, where the purpose of identifying these inner workings was always to de-stabilise ego structures and help the individual achieve greater self-knowledge and inner freedom and, ultimately, get closer to God or Truth or whoever the current framework would phrase it. And — and here’s the important thing — this meant looking at the deep-seated, core, at best semi-concious habits and tendencies than, in effect, makes up our ego personality. And the goal of the ego personality is to spare us the deep suffering that is, in brief summary, the result of losing touch with our deeper, true identity.
This “fall”, case of mistaken identity, or whatever our personal tradition calls it, constitutes the basis for all spiritual quests. It’s the idea that we have lost touch with the essential truth of our being, and are now making do, as best we can, with the resources available to us from within our existence as humans on Earth (and, from the traditional spiritual perspective, failing quite miserably, which is what calls forth the need for guidance).
Now, fast-forwarding to present time and our confusion faced with the vast sea of Enneagram books to choose from, this might not be your focus at all. You might just want to learn more about yourself, get better at moderating conflicts at work, learn to “type” your friends for the fun of it, or all of the above (or something else entirely, of course). As the Enneagram has grown in popularity, its different uses have multiplied, too.
What do you hope to achieve?
So let’s go back to the question: which Enneagram books should you choose? Not the obvious “which”, as in “business or pleasure”, or “corporate or inner growth” — those will be quite obvious, I think. But understanding the background of the model, we might realise that it’s pretty deep stuff. The basis of type is not really traits and behaviours. If you’ve been around for a while, you probably heard more than once that no, rather, it’s about the motivations for those. But seen from our ancient origins point of view, even that is a bit on the shallow side. If my trait is “helpful” and my behaviour is compulsively (and often to my own detriment) doing stuff for others, than, of course, the motivation might be something like “wanting to be loved”. Sure, so far, so good. But why does this particular type (and most of you will have recognized it as the Two) think that the ticket to love is caring (or even “caring”, depending on the level of balance in the person) for others? Someone else, after all, might think that the way to being loved is acquiring cool stuff to show off, or achieving great things, or securing a tight-knit social circle who will have your back, or … well, there are many options.
The answer to this question will tell you more about the deeper structure of the type. In fact, everything that then springs from this deeper structure — i e, surface motivations, behaviours, and traits — are only examples of what the deeper structure might give rise to. Some of the “mights” are rather safe bets, sure, but depending on things like instinctual preferences and personal history, then again them might come out slightly different.
Descriptions and relatability
To most people, reading about traits and behaviours is fun, and the slightly (or grossly, depending on the book) stereotypical descriptions spawned from such qualities are likely to be quite relatable. As in you might quite quickly spot yourself, or family members and friends. If this happens, you are likely to deem the descriptions, and by extension the book, as “good”.
But looking back to what really constitutes type, we just saw that such descriptions might not be true for all individuals of that type. What would be true for all of them is the set of deeper structures, wounds, and leanings. But the problem is that those are what the whole ego personality spectacle is designed to spare us from bothering with — so most people, unless they have done some hardcore, true inner work on themselves, won’t recognise themselves at all well if we were to just stay with describing the deeper core fixtures of our psycho-spiritual inner structure.
See the dilemma? If you want easily relatable, you will inevitably end up over-simplifying and offering stereotypical pictures of what each type might look like. And if you want to only include the deeper aspects that constitute type and therefore, in theory, will make airtight descriptions to help people find themselves, your descriptions will only be useful to the handful of readers who did a substantial amount on inner growth work already (and so, if they find the Enneagram, will likely have figured out their type already).
The purpose of reading an Enneagram book isn’t necessarily primarily to identify yourself on the map
So there is no one stack to put these writings in, and no one way to rate them “objectively”. Nor would I advice freshly hatched Enneagram enthusiasts to aim for typing themselves as quickly as possible. If you don’t know enough about the model as a whole, its types, or your own inner workings to see which one is “you”, I suggest you just keep reading. Keep exploring — the types, but also, more importantly, the Enneagram model and yourself. Even if you do identify your type quite easily (a conclusion which might be a correct or incorrect one, obviously, but let’s say for the sake of argument that you found the right one right off the bat), keep learning about the model, about the other types, and about yourself (regardless of any typology). That is the way to get good, meaningful use out of the Enneagram model.
So if you are looking for a book that will help people locate themselves with as little work as possible, then obviously detailed subtype descriptions from the get-go is an appealing option. But on the other hand, even if you do then identify yourself correctly, what good is the info unless you understand what it means? If you don’t have a good understanding of what exactly the model is even describing, and/or if your self-knowledge is rather superficial — what good, then, will it do you to know you are a Six with a Five-wing, leading with the self-preservation instinct, with a social adaptation blind spot, currently generally operating out of level 4 of balance? It’d just be a bunch of labels.
The boring job: masking tape and pre-washing
So rather than scanning through descriptions for “me”, get curious about the model as a whole, and about the types and their many different triads of characteristic. Read about it not primarily to quickly recognize yourself, but so that you get what it is they will be recognizing. This switch is likely to change the way we read and take in the information — and the thing is, if I read this way, rather than to find “me”, I’ll find me soon enough as a side-effect of that. But if instead I read primarily to find “me”, that won’t necessarily give me an understanding of the whole — or even of my type at the level that would be needed anyway to get anything out of it all.
I’m currently doing some indoor painting, so the simile of masking tape and boring preparations — all the time-consuming, tedious puttering you need to engage in before you even crack open the can of paint — came easily. But it’s a quite good one, actually. We want to sink our teeth into the types, into the bits that define us and our friends (and, possibly, enemies). This equals dipping the brush into the paint and actually making a visible difference. But to ensure the end result still looks good, we’re wise to engage in the boring bits first. OK, comprehensive Enneagram theory is much more fun than masking and pre-washing, but from the ego’s point of view, maybe not so much. The good thing, though, is that contrary to paint jobs, we can learn about the system and the types sort of in parallel. Only, once we get our sights on personality descriptions, it’s easy to forget that perhaps we don’t yet have what we need to read them correctly.
So, no book recommendations?
So what’s a good Enneagram book? It depends on what you know already — about the model, about the types, and about yourself. But unless you are looking for parlour-game level typing or aim to use the Enneagram for team building, it makes good sense to pick a book that spends at least a chapter or two on the background of the system and of the model as a whole (e g, explaining its basis in the centres of intelligence and the level of psychological dynamics you will be addressing), not just one that goes through the types. Don’t be hoodwinked by descriptions brimming with relatable everyday details, focusing mostly on behaviour or surface motivations, or claiming all type Xs have this or that childhood experience. It’s not that simple. There is really no trick to typing yourself; no short cut — especially not if you want to be able to do growth work from its perspective.
In fact, I’d say a mark of a good book is one that makes clear upfront that it will contain two level of descriptors: ones that constitute the deep-seated, core structures of type, and ones that illustrate what this might often look like (but won’t always). Even better, a book that then clarifies which aspects of its descriptions go in which of these two categories. To be honest, though, I don’t actually know about any such books. This is why any time put towards understanding what it is that “type” is even describing, and what level dynamics we are talking about, is usually very well spent. Then you will be fit (or at least, more fit) to make the missing distinctions yourself.)
And, finishing off with a tip: If you are missing a comprehensive run-through of the centres of intelligence and/or the instinctual drives and their respective scopes, you might want to complement any type descriptions you read with my book Aspects of you — An exploration of the centres of intelligence and our instinctual drives. This book focuses on the centres and drives as such, type-independently, and covers knowledge that is paramount to understanding the Enneagram (and helps hugely in understanding ourselves, too, regardless of any typologies). It’s got lots of exercises for practical application, too. And if you’ve been into the Enneagram for a long time and know quite a lot of theory, but aren’t sure how to use this knowledge in the way of inner growth work, you might be interested in The Enneagram Way — Experiential Exploration; Practical Psycho-Spirituality. This book is practical application. Welcome to the experiential realm❤️