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Helen Palmer,  The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life,
Harper & Row, 1988

Point One: The Perfectionist

The preoccupations of Point One include:

• Internal standards of correctness that can become puritanically demanding. Stream of self-criticizing thoughts.
• A compulsive need to act on what seems to be correct.
• Doing the right thing.
• A belief in their own ethical and moral superiority. The better people. The top 10 percent, who do things right.
• Difficulty in recognizing real needs that do not conform to standards of correctness.
• Mentally comparing oneself to others, "Am I better or worse than they are?" Concern about criticism from others, "Are they judging me?"
• Procrastination in decision making, stemming from the fear of making a mistake.
• Do-gooder. Displacement of the anger generated by unmet needs toward what appear to be legitimate outside targets.
• The emergence of two selves: the worried self, who lives at home, and the playful self, who comes out away from home.
• A way of paying attention that is based on correcting error, which can lead to
• Superb powers of criticism, and
• A background awareness of the potential for perfection in any given situation, against which, by comparison, error stands out as the foreground perception. "Think how perfect it could be."

Point Two: The Giver

The preoccupations of Point Two include:

• Gaining approval and avoiding rejection.
• Pride in the importance of oneself in relationships. "They'd never make it without me."
• Pride in meeting the needs of others. "I don't need anyone, but they all need me."
• Confusion between the many selves that develop in order to meet the needs of others. "Each of my friends brings out a different part of me." "Which me is my authentic self?"
• Confusion in identifying personal needs. "I can become what you want, but what do I really feel for you?"
• Sexual attention as a guarantee of approval. "I don't want to sleep with you, but I want to know you'd like to."
• Romantic attachment to "the great man," "the inspired woman."
• Fighting for personal freedom. Feeling controlled by other people's needs.
• Hysteria and anger when emerging real needs collide with the many selves that have developed in order to please others.
• An attentional style of altering oneself to meet the needs of others, which can lead to
• Empathic connection with other people's feelings, or
• A manipulative adaptation to the wishes of others as a way of assuring love.

Point Three: The Performer

The preoccupations of Point Three include:

• Identification with achievement and performance.
• Efficiency.
• Competition and the avoidance of failure.
• The belief that love comes from what you produce, rather than for who you are.
• Selective attention to whatever is positive. Tuning out of negatives.
• Poor access to personal feelings. Emotions are suspended while the job gets done.
• Presentation of an image that is adjusted to gain approval. A high-profile public persona.
• Confusion between one's real self and the characteristics that are appropriate to one's role or job.
• A way of paying attention that is called convergent thinking, in which a multitrack mind is focused upon a single goal.
• Intuitive adjustment of self-presentation, often to the point of believing that the image is one's true self.

Point Four: The Tragic Romantic

The preoccupations of Point Four include:

• The sense of something missing from life. Others have what I am missing.
• An attraction to the distant and the unavailable. Idealization of the absent lover.
• Mood, manners, luxury, and good taste as external supports to bolster self-esteem.
• An attachment to the mood of melancholy. Depth of feeling as a goal rather than mere happiness.
• Impatience with the "flatness of ordinary feelings." Needing to reintensify one's feelings through loss, heightened imagination, and dramatic acts.
• The search for authenticity. The feeling that the present is not real, that the real self will emerge in the future, through an experience of being deeply loved.
• An affinity with what is real and intense in life. Birth, sex, abandonment, death, and cataclysmic happenings.
• A push-pull habit of attention. Focus alternates between the negative features of what one has and the positive features of what is distant and hard to get. This attention style reinforces
• Feelings of abandonment and loss, but also lends itself to
• A sensitivity to other people's emotionality and pain. An ability to support others in crisis.

Point Five: The Observer

The preoccupations of Point Five include:

• Privacy.
• Maintaining noninvolvement; withdraw and tighten the belt as a first line of defense.
• Fear point. Afraid to feel.
• Overvaluing of self-control. Detaching attention from feelings. "Drama is for lesser beings."
• Delayed emotions. Feelings withheld while others are present. Emotion comes later, when safely alone.
• Compartmentalizing. Commitments in life are kept separate from one another. One box per commitment. Time Limit for each box.
• Wanting predictability. Wanting to know what will happen ahead of time.
• An interest in special knowledge and analytic systems that can explain the way that people work. Want a map to explain emotions. Psychoanalysis. The Enneagram.
• A confusion between spiritual nonattachment and a premature emotional shutdown to keep out pain. The unenlightened Buddha.
• An attentional style of focusing on life and oneself from the point of view of an outside observer, which can lead to
• Isolation from the feelings and events of one's own life.
• The ability to maintain a point of view that is detached from emotional bias.

Point Six: The Devil's Advocate

The preoccupations of Point Six include:

• Procrastination of action. Thinking replaces doing.
• Issues with work and incompletion.
• Amnesia with respect to success and pleasure.
• Authority problems: either submitting to, or rebelling against, authority.
• Suspiciousness of the motives of others, especially authorities.
• Identification with underdog causes.
• Loyalty and duty to the cause, to the underdog, and to the strong leader.
• Fear of direct anger. Attribution of own anger to others.
• Skepticism and doubt.
• Paying attention by scanning the environment to look for clues that might explain the inner sense of threat.
• An intuitive style that depends upon a powerful imagination and single-pointed attention, both of which are natural to the fearful mind.

Point Seven: The Epicure

The preoccupations of Point Seven include:

• The need to maintain high levels of excitement. Many activities, many interesting things to do. Wanting to stay emotionally high.
• Maintenance of multiple options as a way to buffer commitment to a single course of action.
• Replacement of deep contact with pleasant mental alternatives. Talking, planning, and intellectualizing.
• Charm as a first line of defense. Fear types who move toward people. Avoid direct conflict by going through the cracks. Talk your way out of trouble.
• An attentional style of interrelating and systematizing information, such that commitments necessarily include loopholes and other backup options. This style of attention can lead to
• Rationalized escapism from difficult or limiting tasks.
• The ability to synthesize unusual connections and parallels between what appear to be antagonistic or unrelated points of view.

Point Eight: The Boss

The preoccupations of Point Eight include:

• Control of personal possessions and space and control of people who are likely to influence the Eight's life.
• Aggression and the open expression of anger.
• Concern with justice and the protection of others.
• Fighting and sex as a way of making contact. Trusting people who can hold their own in a fight.
• Excess as an antidote to boredom. Late hours, heavy entertainment, bingeing. Too much, too loud, too many.
• Difficulty in recognizing the dependent aspects of the self. When affected by others, can deny real feelings by withdrawal, by claiming boredom, or by internally blaming the self for past misdeeds.
• An all-or-nothing style of attention, which tends to see things in extremes. Other people appear to be either strong or weak, either fair or unfair, with no middle ground. This style of attention can lead to
• Not recognizing one's own weakness and the automatic denial of other points of view in favor of the single "legitimate" opinion that is going to make the Eight feel secure, or
• The exercise of appropriate force in the service of others.

Point Nine: The Mediator

The preoccupations of Point Nine include:

• Replacement of essential needs with inessential substitutes. The most important things are left to the end of the day.
• Trouble with decisions. "Do I agree or disagree?" "Do I want to be here or don't I?"
• Acting through habit and by repeating familiar solutions. Ritualism.
• Difficulty in saying "No."
• Containment of physical energy and anger.
• Control through stubbornness and passive aggression.
• A way of paying attention that reflects other people's positions, which can lead to
• Difficulty in maintaining a personal position, but also the development of a marked ability to sense others' inner experience. Similar to point Two, the Giver.

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