[EmotionallyTonedGeometry]

During an interesting conversation with Promethea, the following point came up. What is the relationship between the unconscious and one’s tritype and wings?

We talked about it, and I agree that my tritype is 6w5 4w3 9w8. In my head, I am very conscious of my 6 and 5 tendencies and am becoming more aware of my ability to play the 7 if I have a sufficient reason. But when I get to my heart, things get weird. Consciously, I am aware of my 2 and 3 tendencies, but the 4 seems to be an unconscious motivation that I don’t readily acknowledge. It just seems to creep in as almost a neurotic tendency. The same is true of my gut type. Consciously, I look for balance (9) and self-cultivation (1), but unconsciously, I love to get my own way.

What are your thoughts on the nature of the unconscious in the context of the Enneagram? Do you notice your tritype is shaped by unconscious impulses? Could I just say that my personality is shaped in such a way as to either avoid or indulge neuroses?

[Dichotomy]

Well the unconscious/conscious divide is I think relevant because this could be the cause of many enneagram misunderstandings. In short, behaviours and thoughts cannot be assumed to be the ones you would expect of a particular primary type. To give some background to my opinion however, I have included a brief round-up of my enneagram history.

Within a short time of discovering the enneagram I decided I was a 4, because it sounded more like me than any of the other descriptions and something definitely resonated. Every now and then though I'd wonder about 6, for various reasons, but then dismiss it because the type 6 descriptions were only patchily like me, and those for the instinctual variants didn't ring true very much at all. So I thought perhaps I merely have 6 in the tritype plus a strong self-preservation instinct (and to be fair, the two sp descriptions for 4s I'd read appeared to back this up).

But because of some self-doubts about me being a 4 (I'll not bore anyone with the details here), this was discussed at length in a thread with ScreamofConsciousness, and she was pretty convinced I was 6(w5). Again, the details are not sufficiently relevant to this thread, and I'm still undecided myself, but either way the 6 fixation appears to operate within myself on a largely unconscious level, with the odd revealing clue, while the 4 fixation is pretty 'obvious' in terms of self-observable manifestations, though these may not be as 4-led as previously thought.

So in summation, I consider unconscious versus conscious impulses to be a VERY relevant issue and perhaps the main source of enneagram mistyping. This is especially an issue for type 6, because sixes are seemingly far too diverse in manifestation to realistically expect to create a decent description of 'typical' 6 thoughts and behaviours, because there is really no such thing as 'typical' where six manifestations are concerned. I don't know about you (as a self-typed six) but whenever I've read a general description of sixes, I've always thought they were written with (Jungian) SJ types in mind (and certainly for the J contingent), but seriously even for 'ultra' SJs I would take the descriptions with a pinch of salt.

I don't know if this is the sort of thing you were getting at, but there are endless angles here and this is just one of many possibles.