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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
Kind of depressing and really hard to get into. I plodded through it anyway but wish I hadn’t.
informative
slow-paced
Difficult to get through. The beginning sections were terribly written--a lot of metaphysical, faux-spiritual psychobabble that made me think this was written by a Naropa student in the 60s. The author claims that there's special sacred math explaining the layout of the ennegram diagram, which was all baloney. There was a lot of very dated phrasing that I found quite confusing. Basically, I agree with the premise that we each have biases that cloud our perceptions and cause us to act in certain ways. But I don't know that I agree that there are 9 types; my own types (1 and 2) seemed true and tightly written. They also seemed to match the DSM diagnoses quite well, although I would argue that type 1 is OCPD, not OCD at all. Type 2 is definitely dependent. I also felt that type 7 was quite accurate and seemed like my abuser; I agree that it matches up with narcissism, although I think there were aspects that are more borderline personality disorder. Because this was written in the 80s, I'm not too surprised that the author didn't know about it. The other types seemed muddled and not internally consistent. The author describes type 8 as sociopathic, but then the whole chapter described nothing similar to someone with that personality disorder. Overall, I think it would be far more helpful to read a book specifically about the personality disorder(s) that best fits you, even if you don't qualify as having the disorder. I wouldn't recommend this book and won't read the others by the same author on the enneagram.
Like many of my contemporaries, I try to fit people into whichever boxes I can as a temporary means to an end. The 'end' here is consciousness; being aware of myself, my motivations, bringing the unconscious forward, such that I no longer rely on personality types, star signs, and even benign symbolic boxes of my own that will never be studied or written on because they're even more ridiculous than something like this, the enneagram. This 'end' towards which I am hopelessly, endlessly striving is so far away that a book like this, 'The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life' actually feels quite helpful. I would go as far as to call this book illuminating in understanding, as the title suggests, Myself and the Others in My Life. That being said, I am the type of person who gets tremendous satisfaction when I believe I have placed someone in the 'right box'. One day, I hope to see these boxes as arbitrary. I got this book for my roommate for Christmas after forcing them to take an online enneagram test and then took this book from their room the following week and read only the sections that applied to me and the negative sections that applied to my enemies. I do not recommend this book for everyone. I do not recommend this book for most people. Most of all, I do not recommend the people who love this book.
I think this is the best information about the Enneagram I've come across so far - I am still unsure which number I am but I hear that's a common problem.
Skimmed through this one evening at a vacation rental and found it much more useful than most personality sorters, both for looking at my own life and other people. I always think every book of this type just happens to work for certain people at certain times, and this one happened to make sense to me that night.