I am a latecomer to this thread, I found it while doing a web search and signed up so I could participate in it. Because I think it's important to understand that a diagnosis is not the same thing as a personality type.
I am autistic. I am also as four as four can be. I have been everything from the unhealthiest four to the healthiest four and everything in between. It fits me like a glove. And for a long time, I didn't want to believe it. I wanted to believe that I was a 5w4. I wanted to be that stereotype, the autism stereotype of the dispassionate scientific person, but I never was that person. I just didn't want to be who I was, which I thought was profoundly defective, which I now know is classic unhealthy four thinking. I have come to embrace who I am, including as a four, and one of my strengths as a four is understanding who I am, and trying to help other people understand who they are.
To look for famous autistic Fours you don't have to go further than Donna Williams. She is in many ways more Four than Four. And she is absolutely autistic.
People when they think of autistic people who are likely to be on these forums, think of a stereotype they call aspie. The aspie stereottype is being less emotional, more scientific, more aloof, afraid of emotion, certainly not immersed in their emotions. But not even everyone with Asperger's meets that stereotype. And not all people with autism have Asperger's, for that matter, even if all aspies were that stereotype.
Autism is a place of big opposites. For every type of autistic person, for every autistic trait they have, you will find another autistic person who has the exact opposite trait. What identifies us is not just the traits themselves taken singly. It's how they fit together. And it's the extremeness. We can have extremely hypersensitive senses, or we can have senses that are so shut off that it takes a blaring siren to make an impact. We can be awash in our own emotions, or we can be so cut off from our own emotions that we barely notice they exist. To make matters more confusing, we can switch back and forth between these different modes of existence depending on the situation.
I would say that the classic aspie on the Enneagram would come out most often as a 5, a 6, or a 1. But that's just the classic stereotypical aspie. Not all autistic people are the classic stereotypical aspie. Not all autistic people are aspies at all. There's also autism and PDDNOS and CDD and Rett's, and that was before they combined it all into one big spectrum diagnosis in the DSM-V to avoid a lot of this confusion.
I've known an aspie who was a classic nine, a peacemaker, he wanted everything to be harmonious all the time and he did his best to make it that way. He and I did the Enneagram together for the first time and that's when I found out I was a 4. Which I immediately recognized as the truth, but over the years went back and forth rejecting, because I was very unhealthy at the time and hated reading about what a screwup I was. :tongue:
Anyway, there is nothing about being a Four that clashes with my autistic traits. In fact, it meshes with my variant of autism very well. The best way to describe my variant of autism is to take the classic aspie stereotype and invert it completely. Rather than logical and cerebral, I am sensory and intuitive. Rather than underemotional, I am overly emotional and too wrapped up in my own emotions, sometimes it used to feel as if I was drowning in them. Rather than lacking in empathy, I am overly empathetic and get overwhelmed by the emotions of others, feeling them as if they are my own, which then can cause a shutdown and an appearance as if I am not processing the information, because there is simply too much of it. Rather than living in my head, I live in the world around me. Rather than understanding things intellectually, I understand them through my senses. Rather than having one rigid, stable set of abilities, I have a constantly shifting set of abilities. I never know from one day to the next what I will be capable of.
Being autistic added to my Four's sense that I was alienated from the entire human race, that I was not even a real person. I used to dream of when my people would come and find me, although I had only the vaguest notions of what 'my people' would be. I took it to an extreme, I tried to live in a fantasy world. This didn't work out for me very well and I eventually abandoned it, but I was stubborn enough to stick it out for years, thinking maybe if I believed hard enough, it would all come true. I eventually had to concede that it never would come true, that I was a human being like everyone else, just a human being with a different brain wiring. I talk to autistic people every day who went on this same journey though. Autistic alienation, adolescent alienation, and Four alienation are a potent and dangerous combination.
I've spent a lot of time learning about myself, and a lot of time learning about autism. Being diagnosed wasn't enough, I had to learn about it for myself before I could believe it, because 'autism' was just a word, and I've never understood the world through words. So I learned the stories of dozens, even hundreds, of autistic people, and I learned that I did in fact have a place within this spectrum. I am not the most common variant of autistic person but I am far from the rarest either. And a lot of autistic people make very good Fours, or very bad Fours as the case may be. (I've done both. I prefer making a good Four.)
While a diagnosis can sometimes push a person's personality in a certain direction, it isn't everything. Certain kinds of autistic people are going to be more likely to be 5, 6, or 1, I think those may be the most common in some ways. But my kind of autistic person is very commonly a 4 or sometimes a 2 or a 9. And there are autistic people who are 3, 7, or 8 as well. Not everyone is the stereotype.
I'm a very very strong 4, with a 5 wing, and pretty much no 3 to me at all. And I'm definitely autistic. And I can see plenty of clear connections between my form of autism and the fact that I'm a Four. In fact it seems so obvious to me, that it's hard to understand why anyone would be surprised by it. Maybe because there is that aspie stereotype out there, and people think that's all there is. But there's a lot more variation within the spectrum than most people are aware of. In order to really see the variation in the spectrum, you can't just be on the web forums. You have to know people in real life. You have to go to meetups, you have to meet people's children who aren't going to be typing things online yet (and some may never), you have to meet a really wide variety of autistic people before you can start making generalizations about our autistic traits or our personality types. And by a wide variety, I would say dozens, or hundreds. There are over 200 books by autistic people, there are even more writings online, and there are lot of groups where autistic people meet each other, or where parents of autistic children bring their children, and in all of those places you can find autistic people. And when you've read things by, or interacted with, or observed in any way, that many, then you can see our true variety as a spectrum, which is enormous.