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lilsuccubus 's review for:
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.