Type 5 Initial Self-Belief: “I am uninformed as I am.”

Type 5 Compensation: "I must objectively observe the world as it is in order to clearly make sense of and navigate it."

Type 5 Core Focus: Comprehension comes from objectively observing the world and logically distilling the facts. This often requires that I detach from experiences as they happen in order to see things clearly and not feel overwhelmed. I need time and space to later process those facts and experiences.

Personality characteristics that might arise from the type 5 core focus include:

• Narrows area of interest to specialized niche
• Minimizes needs to avoid dependency on others
• Guards against intrusions upon privacy
• Lives life from the sidelines instead of fully participating
• Withdraws when feeling overwhelmed by people
• Postpones action in favor of more research and analysis
• Detaches from emotions by going into the head
• Delays experiencing life in the moment, rehashing it when alone
• Requires time to think and reflect before responding

The Investigator, The Intense, Cerebral Type: Perceptive, Innovative, Secretive, and Isolated¹

Basic Fear: Of being helpless, useless, incapable (overwhelmed)¹

Basic Desire: To be capable and competent¹

How Fives Pay Attention: A Five’s isolation does not depend solely on withdrawal into privacy, or even on putting up emotional walls. The psychic isolation of the type can be seen as the habit of disengaging from feelings in order to observe.²

Basic Proposition: You can assure survival and gain protection from intrusion and insufficient resources through privacy, self-sufficiency, limiting desires and acquiring knowledge.²

Strengths: Scholarly, perceptive, thoughtful, self-reliant, dependable, respectful, calm in crisis²

Challenges: Detached, isolated, overly intellectual, withholding, hoarding²

Energy goes into: Retracting in order to observe. Learning all there is to know about a subject. Thinking and analyzing in advance. Dampening and reducing feelings. Remaining self-contained to conserve energy. Maintaining sufficient privacy, boundaries, and limits.³

The Investigator: Analytical, detached and private, they are motivated by a need to gain knowledge, conserve energy and avoid relying on others.⁴

Observers have a need for knowledge and are introverted, curious, analytical, and insightful.⁵

Focus of Attention: Fives believe knowledge is power, so they like to observe what’s going on around them without getting too involved, especially emotionally. They focus on accumulating information about subjects that interest them and managing their time and energy, which they perceive as scarce, by avoiding entanglements with others.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 5 Fixation and Trap

Fixation: Stinginess comes from holding on to resources in a world that seems to take more than it gives back.

Trap: An observer stands back from the world in order to better understand it before participating in it.

The fixation of stinginess points to the mental preoccupation of the type 5 ego. The trap of observer keeps an individual stuck in the fixation.

Type 5 Holy Idea

Holy Idea: Holy omniscience requires participating in life to gain a more complete understanding than can be had by simply observing it.

The fixation of stinginess and trap of observer keep an individual stuck in the type 5 fixation. The way out of that fixation is through holy omniscience.

Type 5 Passion

Passion: Avarice is a hoarding of resources and minimizing of needs in order to avoid intrusions. "I can avoid entanglements by managing my resources."

The passion of avarice is the emotional energy that serves the fixation of stinginess and trap of observer.

Type 5 Virtue

Virtue: Detachment (Non-Attachment) appears when you allow yourself to more freely participate in the world instead of observing it from the sidelines.

The virtue of detachment (non-attachment) is what appears when the passion of avarice subsides.

• Retentiveness
• Not Giving
• Pathological Detachment
• Fear of Engulfment
• Autonomy
• Feelinglessness
• Postponement of Action
• Cognitive Orientation
• Sense of Emptiness
• Guilt
• High Superego
• Negativism
• Hypersensitivity

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 5 wings (5w4 and 5w6)

Enneagram type 5 subtypes (sp 5, sx 5, so 5)

Enneagram type 5 tri-center (gut, heart, head)

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