Enneagram Type 5

5
THE INVESTIGATOR
Enneagram Type Five

Enneagram Type Five

The Intense, Cerebral Type:
Perceptive, Innovative, Secretive, and Isolated

  • Basic Fear: Being useless, helpless, or incapable
  • Basic Desire: To be capable and competent
  • Enneagram Five with a Four-Wing: "The Iconoclast"
  • Enneagram Five with a Six-Wing: "The Problem Solver"

For more about the meaning of the arrows, see below.

Type Five in Brief

Fives are alert, insightful, and curious. They are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills. Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. They become detached, yet high-strung and intense. They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation. At their Best: visionary pioneers, often ahead of their time, and able to see the world in an entirely new way.

Key Motivations: Want to possess knowledge, to understand the environment, to have everything figured out as a way of defending the self from threats from the environment.

The Meaning of the Arrows (in brief)

When moving in their Direction of Disintegration (stress), detached Fives suddenly become hyperactive and scattered at Seven. However, when moving in their Direction of Integration (growth), avaricious, detached Fives become more self-confident and decisive, like healthy Eights. For more information, click here.

Examples: Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Georgia O'Keefe, Stanley Kubrick, John Lennon, Lily Tomlin, Gary Larson, Laurie Anderson, Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, James Joyce, Björk, Susan Sontag, Emily Dickenson, Agatha Christie, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jane Goodall, Glenn Gould, John Cage, Bobby Fischer, Tim Burton, David Lynch, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Trent Reznor, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, Jodie Foster, and "Fox Mulder" (X Files).

Excerpt from Type Five ITAR (5:06 minutes)  Audio Stream

Buy the Individual Type Audio Recording of Type Five—Click Here

Type Five—More Depth by Level

Healthy Levels

Level 1(At Their Best): Become visionaries, broadly comprehending the world while penetrating it profoundly. Open-minded, take things in whole, in their true context. Make pioneering discoveries and find entirely new ways of doing and perceiving things.

Level 2: Observe everything with extraordinary perceptiveness and insight. Most mentally alert, curious, searching intelligence: nothing escapes their notice. Foresight and prediction. Able to concentrate: become engrossed in what has caught their attention.

Level 3: Attain skillful mastery of whatever interests them. Excited by knowledge: often become expert in some field. Innovative and inventive, producing extremely valuable, original works. Highly independent, idiosyncratic, and whimsical.

Average Levels

Level 4: Begin conceptualizing and fine-tuning everything before acting—working things out in their minds: model building, preparing, practicing, and gathering more resources. Studious, acquiring technique. Become specialized, and often "intellectual," often challenging accepted ways of doing things.

Level 5: Increasingly detached as they become involved with complicated ideas or imaginary worlds. Become preoccupied with their visions and interpretations rather than reality. Are fascinated by off-beat, esoteric subjects, even those involving dark and disturbing elements. Detached from the practical world, a "disembodied mind," although high-strung and intense.

Level 6: Begin to take an antagonistic stance toward anything which would interfere with their inner world and personal vision. Become provocative and abrasive, with intentionally extreme and radical views. Cynical and argumentative.

Unhealthy Levels

Level 7: Become reclusive and isolated from reality, eccentric and nihilistic. Highly unstable and fearful of aggressions: they reject and repulse others and all social attachments.

Level 8: Get obsessed yet frightened by their threatening ideas, becoming horrified, delirious, and prey to gross distortions and phobias.

Level 9: Seeking oblivion, they may commit suicide or have a psychotic break with reality. Deranged, explosively self-destructive, with schizophrenic overtones. Generally corresponds to the Schizoid Avoidant and Schizotypal personality disorders.

Learn More

More about Type Fives and

Tell Others You Are an Enneagram Type Five

If you have a homepage or a weblog where you would like to show others that you are an Enneagram Type Five, you can place one of these images on your site:

Type5 Type5

To do this, use the following code.

Lefthand (male):
<a href="http://enneagraminstitute.com"><img src="http://enneagraminstitute.com/icons/type5M.gif" alt="Enneagram"></a>free enneagram test

Righthand (female):
<a href="http://enneagraminstitute.com"><img src="http://enneagraminstitute.com/icons/type5F.gif" alt="Enneagram"></a>free enneagram test

When one of these images is installed on your site it will link back to the Enneagram Institute to let your visitors learn more about the Enneagram and your personality type.

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