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From Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery , by Don Richard Riso
Type Five: The Thinker
The Five in Profile
Healthy: Becomes a visionary, profoundly comprehending the world, discovering something new; possibly genius. Observes everything with extraordinary perceptiveness and insight. Able to concentrate and get mentally involved: becomes knowledgable, an expert. Innovative, produces extremely valuable, original ideas.
Average: The intellectual, becomes analytic, specialized, making a science of things: into research and scholarship. Detached, enjoys speculating about abstract ideas and spinning out complicated interpretations of reality. Begins to interpret everything according to a pet theory, becoming reductionistic, farfetched, eccentric, imposing ideas on the facts. Iconoclastic, extremist, radical interpretations.
Unhealthy: Can get very reclusive and isolated from reality. Cynical and antagonistic, repulsing attachments with others. Obsessed by strange, threatening ideas, becoming paranoid and prey to gross distortions and phobias. Insanity with schizophrenic tendencies common.
Key Motivations: Wants to understand the environment, to gain more knowledge, to interpret everything as a way of defending the self from threats from the environment.
Examples: Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jocob Bronowski, James Joyce, Charles Ives, Bobby Fischer, and Erza Pound [and the Buddha].
An Overview of the Five
The connection between genius and madness has long been debated. These two states are really poles apart, the opposite ends of the personality spectrum. The genius is someone who fuses knowledge with insight into thenature of the world, someone who has the ability to see things with utter clarity and awe-inspiring comprehension. What separates the genius from the madman is that the genius, in addition to extraordinary insights, has the ability to see them correctly, within their context. The genius percieves patterns which are actually present--whereas the madman imposes patterns, projecting an erroneous idea onto every circumstance. The genius may sometimes seem to beout of touch with reality, but only because he or she operates at a more profound level. The madman, however, is truly outof touch with reality, having nothing but delusions to substitute it.
The Five is the personality type which most exemplifies these extremes. In the Five we see the genius and the madman, the intellectual and the scholar, the mildly eccentric crackpot and the deeply disturbed delusional paranoid. To understand how these widely diverse states are part of the same personality type is to unserstand the Five.
IN THE DOING TRIAD
Fives are members of the Doing Triad. Their potential problem with doing results from the fact that they emphasize thinking over doing, becoming intensely involved with their thoughts. Fives think so much that their mental world becomes all engrossing, virtually to he exclusion of evrything else. This is not to say that Fives do nothing at all, but that they are more at home in their minds, abstractly analyzing their environment, than they are in the world of action.
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PROBLEMS WITH SECURITY AND ANXIETY
Like the other two members of the Doing Triad, average Fives tend to have problems with security because they fear that the environmentis unpredictable and potentially threatening. Fives protect themselves by being extraordinarily observant so that they can anticipate problems in the environment, particularily problems with other people. Their curiosity, their insight, their need to make sense of their perceptions--and eventually, their pranoid tendencies--are all attempts to defend themselves from real or imagined dangers.
When Fives are healthy, they observe reality as it is and are able to comprehend complex phenomena at a glance. In their search for security, however, the perceptions of even average Fives tend to become skewed. They come to premature conclusions about the environment by protecting their faulty interpretations on it. They begin to reduce the complexity of reality to a single, all-embracing idea so that they can defend themselves by having everything figured out. And if they become unhealthy, Fives re the type of persons who take their eccentric ideas to such absurd extremes that they become obsessed with completely distorted notions about reality. Ultimately, unhealthy Fives become paranoid, utterly terrified by the threatening visions which they have created in their minds.
Their problem with anxiety, one of the issues common to the personality types of the Doing Triad, is related to their difficulty with percieving reality objectively. They are afraid of allowing anyone or anything to influence them or their thoughts. They fear being controlled or possessed by someone else. Ironically, however, even average Fives are not unwilling to be to be possessed by an idea, as long as the idea has originated with them. Nothing must be allowed to influence their thinking lest their sense of self be diminished, although by relying solely on their own ideas, without testing them in the real world, Fives eventually become out of touch with reality.
The upshot of this is that average to unhealthy Fives are uncertain whether or not their perceptions of the environment are valid. They do not know what is real and what is a product of their minds. They project their anxiety-ridden thoughts and their aggressive impulses into the environment, becoming fearful of the antagonistic forces which seem to be arrayed against them. They gradually become convinced that their peculiar, and increasingly paranoid, interpretation of reality is the way things really are. In the end, they become so terrorized that they cannot act even though they are consumed by anxiety.
The basis of their orientation to the world is thinking; personality type Five corresponds to JungÕs introverted thinking type.
Introverted thinking is primarily oriented by the subjective factor. . . . It does not lead from concrete experience back again to the object, but always to the subjective content. External facts are not the aim and origin of this thinking, though the introvert would often like to make his thinking appear so. It begins with the subject and leads back to the subject, far though it may range into the realm of actual reality. . . . Facts are collected as evidence for a theory, never for their own sake. (C.G. Jung, Psychological Types, 380.)
Although they correspond to JungÕs introverted thinking type, Fives are perhaps more precisely characterized as a subjective thinking type because the aim of their thought is not introverted (that is, directed toward themselves); rather, it is directed outward toward the environment, which Fives want to understand for defensive purposes. The impetus for their thinking comes, as Jung says, from Òthe subjective factor,Õ from their need to know about what lies outside themselves, as well as their anxiety when hey do not understand the environment. This is why thinking is themethod Fives use both to fit into the world and, paradoxically, to defend themselves against it.
One of the results of the way Fives think is that even healthy Fives are not very deeply rooted in experience. They are the type of people who get a great deal of intellectual mileage out of very little experience because they always find something of significance where others see little or nothing. This may lead to great discoveries. However, when they stop observing the world and focus their attention on their interpretations of it, Fives begin to lose touch with reality. Instead of keeping an open mind while they observe the world they become too involved with their own thoughts. Whatever does not agree with their ideas is simply not percieved or is rejected, with serious consequences for themselves.
CHILDHOOD ORIGINS
As a result of their childhood experiences, these children became ambivalent to both parents. Their parents may have nurtured them erratically, or they may have been emotionally disturbed or alchoholic or caught in a loveless marriage, and therefore not dependable sources of love and reassurance. The result is that these children become ambivalent not only toward both parents, but ambivalent toward the world.
As a result of their ambivalence, Fives learn to live in a state of constant alertness about their environment. Because they fear being controlled by others, they train themselves to observe their parents and the environment in general so they can foresee events and take protective steps accordingly.
However, the evr present conflict which Fives unwittingly create is that they need to understand the environment and at the same time defend themselves against it. Just as they both love and hate their parents, they love and hate the environment, feeling pulled between their desire to identify with it and be detached from it. Fives attempt to resolve their ambivalence by not identifying with anything other than their thoughts about the world outside themselves. They feel that their thoughts are ÒgoodÓ (that is, correct, and can be safely identified with), while outside reality is ÒbadÓ (and must therefore be vigilantly watched), so tht it can be repulsed at a momentÕs notice.
Although they continue to find their parents, the world, and other people fascinating and necessary, Fives also feel thatthey must keep everything and everyone at a distance lest they be in danger of being possessed by some outside force. Thus, from the very way they think--their cognitive style--Fives set up a strict dualism between themselves and the world: they see everything as essentially split into two fundamental areas--the inner and the outer world, subjects and objects, the known and the unknown, the dangerous and the safe, and so forth. This sharp split between themselves as subjects and the rest of the world as objects has tremendous ramifications throughout their lives.
PROBLEMS WITH DETACHMENT AND PARANOIA
When they are healthy, Fives do not have to detach themselves from the environment because they feel secure enough to observe reality as it is. But as they deteriorate down the Continuum toward unhealth, their perceptions become more intensely focused on what seems to be threatening and dangerous in the environment. As a result of their hyperalertness to threats, their mental world becomes filled with anxiety. Ironically, however, Fives must have ÒdangerÓ on their minds to feel safe: the more paranoid they become, the more completely defended they try to be.
In the end, since they invariably focus on what is threatening, Fives turn their terrifying projections into their only reality, and in doing so, turn their minds against themselves--literally scaring themselves Òout of their minds.Ó They become completely defenseless against the environment, which they find supremely dangerous because their minds have made it so. They become so paranoid that it is extraordinary difficult for them to turn to anyone for help. Yet, unless paranoid Fives can reach out to someone, they have few ways of getting back in touch with reality.
If they live like this for long, their thought processes become so delusional and terrifying that they must separate themselves not just from the world but even from their own thoughts. Neurotic Fives become schizoid, unconsciously splitting themselves off from their teeming minds so that they can continue to live. Recoiling in horror, they retreat into emptiness--and yet more horror.
Analyzing the Healthy Five
THE PIONEERING VISIONARY
At their healthiest, Fives have the paradoxical ability to penetrate reality profoundly while comprehending it broadly. They are able to take things in whole, percieving patterns where others see nothing but confusion. They are able to synthesize existing knowledge, making connections between phenomena which no one previously knew were related, such as time and space, the structures of the DNA molecule, or the relationship between brain chemestry and behavior.
The healthiest Fives do not cling to their own ideas about how the world works. Instead, they encompass reality so profoundly that they are able to discover unanticipated truths they could not have arrived at by mere theorizing. They make discoveries precisely because they are willing not to know the answers for a while, keeping an open mind while they observe reality.
Because they do not impose their thoughts on reality, healthy Fives are able to discover the internal logic, the structure, and interrelated patterns of whatever they observe. As a result, they have clear thoughts into obscure matters, and are able to predict events, often far in advance of the ability of others to verify them. Fives operating at the peak of their gifts may seem to be prophets and visionaries, although the explanation is simpler. They possess foresight because they see the world with extraordinary clarity, like a weaver who knows the pattern of a tapestry before it is completed.
The result is that they transcend rational thought to reveal objective reality, and in doing so they move toward the ineffable, to a level of comprehension where words, theories and symbols are left behind. They perceive the world in all its complexity and simplicity with a vision that seems to come from beyond themselves. They are closer to contemplatives than thinkers.
Very healthy, gifted Fives so perfectly describe reality that their discoveries seem simple, even obvious, as if anyone could have thought of them. But the geniusÕs insights are obvious only in hindsight. To have made the leap from the known to the unknown, and to describe the unkown so clearly and accurately that the discovery accords perfectly with what is already known, is a great achievement.
Thus, very healthy Fives are intellectual pioneers who open up new domains of knowledge. An individual Five, if sufficiently gifted (@ ), may well be a genuis of historical dimensions, able to make staggering intellectual breakthroughs for mankind. A genius of the highest caliber may understand the way the world works for the first time in history. Less gifted individuals may have a sense of the geniusÕs excitement when they first understand calculus or how to use a computer. Their understanding is new to them and can be thrilling. Others can only imagine how exciting it must be for someone to discover something totally new--when the discovery is new not only to that individual, but to everyone.
THE PERCEPTIVE OBSERVER
Even though Fives are not always this healthy, they are still extraordinarily conscious of the world around them, its glories and horrors, incongruities and inexhaustable complexities. They are the most mentally alert of the personality types, curious about everything. Healthy Fives enjoy thinking for its own sake; possessing knowledge--knowng that they know something, and being able to turn it around in their minds--is extremely pleasurable for them. Knowledge and understanding are exhilerating.
Given sufficient intelligence, healthy Fives penetrate the superficial, getting to profound levels very quickly. Their insights can be brilliant because they have the uncanny ability to see into the heart of things, noticing the anomaly, the curious but heretofore unobserved fact or hidden element which provides a key for understanding the whole. Because they see the world with unfailing insight, they always have something interesting and worthwhile to say. The act of seeing is virtually a symbol of their entire psychological orientation. If something can be seem, that is, apprehended either by the senses or the mind, Fives feel that it can be understood. Once something is understood, it can be mastered. Then Fives can act with the certitude they desire.
Nothing escapes healthy Fives unnoticed because they do not merely observe the world passively, they concentrate on it, noting how things go together to form patterns and bear meaning. People and objects are perceived in detail, as if Fives were training a magnifying glass on the environment. Since their minds are so active and they find everything around them so interesting, Fives are never bored. They like learning what they do not know and understanding what is not obvious. No matter how much they know, they always want to learn more, and since the world is, for all intents and purposes, infinite in its complexity, there is always more to know.
Healthy Fives are also able to perceive far more than others because they have the ability to sustain concentration; they are not easily distracted. They quickly become deeply involved in the object of their scrutiny so that they can understand how it works--why something is as it is. Their intellectual curiosity leads them to expend considerable effort to to find out more about those things which have caught their attention. They are increadibly hard workers who will attack a problem for years until they solve it, or until it becomes clear that the prblem is insoluble. They are also very good conceptualizers, asking the right fundemental questions and defining the proper intellectual boundaries for the problems with which they are involved. They do not attempt to do the impossible, only to understand what they have understood before.
Healthy Fives want to possess knowledge of the objective world, and yet, the very act of inquiring into things immediately adds a subjective element to the process. (Physics has taught a psychological truth--that the presence of the observer changes what is being observed.) Furthermore, even though the need to understand the environment is healthy, the desire to possess as much knowledge as possible reflects a disposition to fear the unknown. Even at this stage, healthy Fives are subject to a certain amount of anxiety about the environment if they do not understand it. (And, of course, because they cannot understand it until they deal with it, they are caught in a conundrum.) Therefore the habit of observation reflects not simply a dispassionate curiosity but a deeply personal need.
THE KNOWLEDGEABLE EXPERT
By observing the world and having insight into it, healthy Fivesaccumulate knowledge. Now they want to apply their ideas in the environment. More than any other personality type, healthy Fives enjoy using their knowledge to see how it corresponds with reality and how it can affect reality.
People of this personality type possess expert knowledge in various intellectual disciplines, whether in the arts (for example, French opera of the seventeenth century or Egyptian hieroglyphics), or in the sciences (how to build a computer or put a satellite into space). Healthy Fives are usually polymaths, possessors of knowledge in a wide range of intellectual disciplines, and expert in them all. Healthy Fives know what they are talking about and share their knowledge with others, enriching the whole of society with their learning. It is precisely because their insights are so on target that both healthy Fives and their ideas are especially valuable to the rest of society. Where would we be without the computers and antibiotics, the sophisticated communications media and the technological innovations of all sorts which make up the modern world?
Sometimes the results of their expertise are ingenius inventions and technological marvels which yield highly practical results. At other times, few things may result from their original ideas, although in time those ideas, too, may have practical applications. What is impractical in one era often becomes the underpinnings of an entirely new branch of knowledge or technology in another, such as the physics which made television and radar possible.
Because Fives understand things so perceptively, their profound knowledge enables them to get to the heart of difficulties so that they can explain problems, and possible solutions, clearly to others. Healthy Fives like sharing their knowledge because they often learn more when they discuss their ideas with someone else. This is why healthy Fives make exciting teachers, colleagues, and friends. Their enthusiasm for ideas is infectuous, and they enjoy fertilizing their ow areas of expertise with those of other intellectuals and thinkers, or really, with anyone who is as interesting, curious, and intelligent as they are.
As much as they like being among those who can understand and appreciate their insights, healthy Fives are nevertheless extremely independent. For the most part, learning and thinking are solitery adventures best embarked on alone. Because they never know where their discoveries will lead, Fives value their independence very highly; they are willing to be unorthadox as their inquiries require, pursuing their interests and discoveries regardless of the sanctions of others or society. They are not afraid to challenge existing dogmas, if need be.
Their innovations can be revolutionary, overturning previous ways of thinking. Owing to the nature of their interests and the scope of their intellects, healthy Fives give us powerful ideas which can literally change the course of history.
Analyzing the Average Five
THE ANALYTIC SPECIALIST
The essential difference between average Fives and healthy Fives is that average Fives begin to fear that they do not know enough to act or to make their ideas or discoveries public. They feel that they have to study more, to do more research and experimentation, to involve themselves even more deeply with their subject. (ÒThe more you know, the more you know you donÕt know.Ó) They therefore become highly analytic and specialized, dissecting reality into ever simpler parts so that it can be studied more in depth. In a word, healthy Fives possess knowledge, whereas average Fives are in pursuit of it.
Average Fives analyze everything in great detail, taking things apart, literally or intellectually, to find out how things work. They take an empirical approach, quantifying things, attempting to be objective so they can arrive at certain knowledge. But in so doing, they unwittingly begin to take things out of context, no longer looking at the whole.
By quantifying and analyzing everything, average Fives tend to make a science of whatever they are interested in, whether history, linguistics, stereo equipment, jogging shoes, or sociology of ape families. It is here that we see the beginning of their tendency to abstract from reality, concerning themselves with only those aspects of reality which capture their attention. They are by no means out of touch with reality in any unhealthy sense yet. They are, however, narrowing the focus of their perceptions so they can pursue their intellectual interests in more depth.
Of course, many things in the ohysicl world can be measured precisely: the distance to the moon, the velocity of a bulet, the varying depths of the ocean. The problem with the empiricl appraoch, however, is that it eleiminates anything which the tools of a particular analysis cannot measure. What cannot be measured objectively is not verifiable, and therefore not scientific, and therefore not certain. (However, many of the most valuable things in life cannot be measured empirically. Love, for example, cannot be calibrated or weighed on a scale. Instead, if average Fives study love scientifically, they measure things like eye contact, pulse rate, and brain chesistry, which may be quantified.)
In their pursuit of knowledge, average Fivestend to become specialists in some field, delving into a body of technical knowledge not understood by most. (As specialists, they take pride and pleasure in their ability to say, in effect, ÒI know something that you donÕt know.Ó) Some Fives may become specialists within an accademic discipline, analyzing genetic structures or the mathematics of snowflake formation or the migrartion patterns of birds in the Amazon Delta. Others may specialize in less academic areas, becoming specialists in antiques, stamp collecting, or jazz. In any event, their approach is the same: collecting and analyzing data to aquire more knowledge.
Average Fives are typically bookish. They haunt bookstores, libraries, and coffeehouses catering to intellectuals who discuss politics, films, andliterature far into the night. They love scholarship and are fascinated with the technical appurtenances by which they acquire knowledge. And while they will spend money to obtain whatever toolsthey need to pursue their intellectual interests, be they medieval manuscripts or computer equipment, average Fives are usually loath to spend money on themselves or their own comfort because they identify with their minds, not with their bodies.
Even those Fives who are not scientists usually like to think of their appraoch to reality as scientific, or at least rigorously intellectual. Every personality type deals with its strongest suit, and the intellect is what Fives are gifted with and what they favor in their development. As a group, Fives are the most inteligent of the personality types, filling the rosters of Mensa, engineering schools, and Nobel Prize laureates. Since being a Five is a psychological orientation ti life and not only a matter of possessing intellectual prowess, there are Fives who are not unusually intelligent. Nevertheless, usuing the mind is how Fives find their place in the world and thereby obtain security and self-esteem. (Intellectual pursuits may also have been fostered by an Òugly ducklingÓ child to compensate for physical and social handicaps.) In any case, average Fives consider themselves thinkers and intellectuals because they live in their minds more than in the world of action and practicality.
THE INTENSELY INVOLVED THEORIST
If their scientific and analytic methods fail or do not yield answers quickly enough to satisfy their emotional needs, average Fives become uncertain of what their ideas mean even as their need for certainty increases. New questions arise, the answers to which Fives do not know. As a result, they resort to speculation and interpretation rather than observation and investigation, becoming more intensely involved with their ideas and less with reality.
This is a turning point in their development. Rather than investigate the objective world, average Fives at this stage begin to become preoccupied with their own interpreations of it, mentally detaching themselves from the environment by becoming more intensely involved with one small aspect of it.
More than anyother persoanlity type, average Fives personify DescartesÕs famous dictum, ÒI think, therefore I am.Ó They can be characterized in a nutshell as deiembodied minds because, as far as they are concerned, the body is merely the vehicle for the mind. At this level, they do not pay much attention to their physical conditions except when they get in the way of their thinking. They become so deeply involved in projects that they forget to eat or sleep or change their clothes. They frequently look like the proverbial absent-minded professor, or the disheveled German metaphysician. No matter. To them the life of the mind, the excitement of pursuing and possessing knowledge, is what counts.
They plunge into comlex intellectual puzzles and labyrithine systems--eleaborate, impenetrable mazes by which they can insulate themselves from the world while dealing with it intellectually. They get involved in highly detailed, comlicated systems of thought, immersing themselves in obscure theories, whether these have to do with the abstruse regions of such traditional academic studies as astronomy, mathematics, or philosophy, or with esoteric topics such as the Cabala, astrology, and the occult. They are endlessly fascinated with intellectual games (such as chess or Dungeons and Dragons) making areas os study into a kind of game and games into an area of study.
The problem is that as Fives speculate and theorize, turning their ideas around in theirminds, examining them from every angle, endlessly producing new interpretations, they lose the forest for the trees. With every new conjecture, they have no sense of certitude that their speculations are final: everything remains hanging in the air, in a cloud of possibilities. For example, the more they write, the more complex the exposition becomes until it is virtually incomprehensible. As brilliant as they may be, average Fives do not easily publish their ideas because they cannot bring them to a conclusion.
Furthermore, all ideas seem equally plausible to Fives, since they can make a convincing case for almost anything they can think of. Anything thinkable seems possible. Anything thinkable seems real. They are intellectually and emotionally capable of entertining any new thought, even horrifying or outlandish ones, since speculating on new possibilities is virtually all they do. Their ideas, however, begin to have no direct connection with the outside world. (The problems of epistemology not only fascinate them; average Fives unwittingly live them out.) But establishing a relationship between their ideas and reality is no longer a primary function of the thinking of average Fives. Instead, speculation maintains the sense of self by keeping the mind active.
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