Type 4 Initial Self-Belief: “I am lacking as I am.”

Type 4 Compensation: "I must find and cultivate what's authentic and uniquely special about myself to stand out from the ordinary."

Type 4 Core Focus: Significance comes from cultivating what is unique and emotionally authentic in myself. This requires that I discover and stay true to what has emotional meaning for me and find ways to express that through my own identity and in the world around me.

Personality characteristics that might arise from the type 4 core focus include:

• Cultivates and maintains moods they identify with
• Holds in disdain what's common in pursuit of what's special
• Stirs up or intensifies emotional states to feel more alive
• Feels more emotionally sensitive and deeper than others
• Takes things personally even when not intended that way
• Notices what's missing or lacking in self compared to others
• Creates idealized self from what they emotionally resonate with
• Looks for ways to express their inner emotional world
• Wants to deal with internal emotions before moving forward

The Individualist, The Sensitive, Withdrawn Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed, and Temperamental¹

Basic Fear: Of having no identity, no personal significance¹

Basic Desire: To find themselves and their significance, to create an identity out or their inner experience¹

How Fours Pay Attention: Fours rarely live in the present. Their focus of attention travels away: to the past, to the future, to the absent, to the hard-to-get.²

Basic Proposition: You will feel loved, whole and complete if you can find the ideal love or perfect circumstance.²

Strengths: Creative, empathetic, idealistic, capable of emotional depth, compassion²

Challenges: Moody, withdrawn, self-absorbed, over-sensitive, demanding, unsatisfied with what is²

Energy goes into: A range of intense feelings associated with what seems to be missing or lacking in my life. Finding love, meaning, and fulfillment through self-expression and deep connection. Endeavoring to be a unique individual.³

The Romantic: Creative, sensitive and moody, they are motivated by a need to be understood, experience their oversized feelings and avoid being ordinary.⁴

Romantics have sensitive feelings and are warm and perceptive.⁵

Focus of Attention: Fours focus attention on their own feelings, the feelings of others, and interpersonal connection and disconnection. They feel a sense of deficiency about their own worth, so they seek idealized experiences of qualities they perceive as outside themselves.⁶

¹Book: The Wisdom of the Enneagram; Website: The Enneagram Institute

²Book: The Enneagram; Website: The Narrative Enneagram

³Book: The Essential Enneagram; Website: Dr. David Daniels

⁴Book: The Road Back to You

⁵Book: The Enneagram Made Easy

⁶Book: The Complete Enneagram; Website: Chestnut Paes Enneagram Academy

Type 4 Fixation and Trap

Fixation: Melancholy comes from a dissatisfaction with what is and a longing for what once was or could've been.

Trap: Authenticity comes from finding a sense of self and significance that expresses your unique gifts and individuality.

The fixation of melancholy points to the mental preoccupation of the type 4 ego. The trap of authenticity keeps an individual stuck in the fixation.

Type 4 Holy Idea

Holy Idea: Holy Originality involves accepting the common and ordinary in life instead of disdaining it in favor of the unique and special.

The fixation of melancholy and trap of authenticity keep an individual stuck in the type 4 fixation. The way out of that fixation is through holy originality.

Type 4 Passion

Passion: Envy is a one-sided comparison between the positives of others and the negatives of oneself. "What's lacking in me that I don't have what they have?"

The passion of envy is the emotional energy that serves the fixation of melancholy and trap of authenticity.

Type 4 Virtue

Virtue: Equanimity appears when you also see the positives you have to offer instead of just the negatives when comparing yourself to others.

The virtue of equanimity is what appears when the passion of envy subsides.

• Envy
• Poor Self-Image
• Focus on Suffering
• "Moving Toward"
• Nurturance
• Emotionality
• Competitive Arrogance
• Refinement
• Artistic Interests
• Strong Superego

One method used to bring the types to life when teaching the Enneagram types involves interviewing people of a given type about how that type plays out in their life. This may be done through panels and one-on-one interviews.

Self-revelatory videos can also be useful where a person simply describes their type to a camera without the prompting of an interviewer.

Note that sometimes a person in a video may have been mistyped and may not offer an accurate representation of type when that happens.

Once their Enneagram type is known, celebrities or famous people can also offer interesting examples of and insights into Enneagram type as revealed through interviews, lectures, writings, and the person's work.

However, it's not like the Enneagram panels, interviews, and self-revelations where people are specifically describing how they experience Enneagram type in their lives. It's more a matter of looking for glimpses into how Enneagram type is operating in the person.

It can be difficult to type someone at a distance. Look for a consensus of opinion on a person's type from multiple sources and hold it loosely. Celebrities and famous people are often typed differently by different Enneagram authors, teachers, and enthusiasts.

It needs to be made clear that fictional characters are not real people, even when they are based on real people. There can be a temptation to assign Enneagram type to every character in a story, but many characters don't have that kind of consistency or depth.

Not only might there be a number of different people, usually of different types, influencing the creation or portrayal of a character but often the character is nothing more than a vehicle for telling the story and moving it along.

While once in a while a character appears that you can attribute an Enneagram type to, generally it's more accurate to look at specific scenes as examples of a type rather than the character as a whole.

Tom Condon wrote a book called The Enneagram Movie & Video Guide that you may find useful for seeing type in fictional characters.

Although they do exist, there are few song lyrics that can be attributed to one particular Enneagram type. Most songs have both lyrical and musical elements that can be attributed to a number of different Enneagram types.

Songs are extremely subjective. There are many songs that listeners, and even performers, interpret in a very different way than the song writer intended. A number of songs also emphasize the sounds of words rather than their meaning.

As such, different people hearing the same song often will experience it as representing different Enneagram types.

Enneagram type 4 wings (4w3 and 4w5)

Enneagram type 4 subtypes (sp 4, sx 4, so 4)

Enneagram type 4 tri-center (gut, heart, head)

• 4 vs 1
• 4 vs 2
• 4 vs 3
• 4 vs 5
• 4 vs 6
• 4 vs 7
• 4 vs 8
• 4 vs 9

Enneagram Type Preference Test
This test produces a scored list of all nine types.
Questions are forced-choice, similar to the method used by the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indictor (RHETI).
Use to determine type, wings, gut/heart/head types, and tri-center.

Enneagram Type Comparison Test
This test compares any two types. The preferred type will have the higher score.
Use when you've narrowed your type down to two or three possibilities you'd like to compare.