Mistyping Part 2: The Difference Between Type Five and Type Nine
Types Five and Nine are confused by Enneagram enthusiasts and Enneagram teachers alike, almost as much as Four is with Nine. Nines are often mistaken for Fives, and many Nines initially believe they are Fives. It’s rare, however, for a Five to mistake themselves for a Nine. This article will explore why that is, because, while harmless, mistyping is a huge problem within the Enneagram. When mistyping is rampant, it leads to conceptual drift.
Conceptual Drift is a process where definitions and descriptions gradually change, such that they no longer actually match the thing they purport to describe. Thus, you’ll have Type Five Enneagram panels full of Types Nines sharing their perspective on what it’s being a Five is like. Those observing will then start to see and describe Five in a gradually more and more Nineish way. “Real Fiveness” gets lost.
From one point of view, no big deal. From another, this kind of thing really blurs the Enneagram and obscures it from being as potent, penetrating, and insightful as it could be. It cheapens the Enneagram, leading to a lot of “hobbyists”, who believe they are seeing deeply into their own personality structure, only to be actually obscuring the very thing they believe they are deepening awareness of.
This leads to a greater issue wherein the Enneagram, a system meant to help deepen our awareness, becomes its own opposite as a tool that prevents awareness. It becomes appropriated by the ego to hide from itself.
Nines and Fives
Nines are a fairly common type and extremely diverse in how they express themselves. Some Nines are very athletic and seem assertive, others are artistic and creative, others are withdrawn and intellectual, others take a “simple life” orientation, some are helpers and people pleasers, and others are outgoing, fun, novelty-seekers. And, some Nines, contrary to the lazy stereotypes, are not conflict avoidant (if and when their attachments are threatened). With such a wide range of expression, it can be difficult to see how all these flavors can come from one type. Additionally, Nines, like Threes and Sixes, are especially influenced by their Tri-fix.
In addition, the rarity of Types Five and Four mean there are few examples or representatives of those types and their energies within the culture to draw from. Therefore, it’s extremely common for Nines to mistype. This mistake is compounded by the lack of a clear, distinct archetype or energy one can “point to” and easily grasp what Five and Four are all about.
Object Relations: Underlying Psychological Dynamics
The Enneagram Types are made up of the intersection of the centers of intelligence: the body, the heart, and the mind, in combination with three Object Relation Affects: attachment, rejection, and frustration. Object Relations is a diverse range of models that describe the relational foundations of the personality. The affects were articulated by A.H. Almaas and later applied to the Enneagram by Riso and Hudson. Within the three body types, there is one attachment type, one frustration type, and one rejection type, and so it goes with the heart types and the mental types.
The object relational affects represent underlying emotional convictions that flavor everything about our personality. Taken together, the relationship between the centers and object relations make up the personality dynamics of the Enneagram. Nine is an Attachment Type and a Body Type. Five is a Rejection Type and a Mental Type.
Attachment refers to an emotional conviction that one must connect with and adapt to external conditions. Rejection, on the other hand, is a rejection of external influences. When interacting with others, Attachment types, Nine, Three, and Six, seek connection and reciprocity with others, whereas types defined by Frustration and Rejection are focused on their individual agendas first. Frustration Types will look for others who share in their critique and vision, and Rejection types will connect with those who are receptive to their offering: their insight, their care, or their forcefulness.
The Body Center is preoccupied with their relationship to their “holding environment”, the sum total of the sensory field. To be attached to the sensory field means that Nines are unconsciously taking in and absorbing sensory information from their environment, resulting in a difficulty with keeping consistent boundaries. To deal with this, Nines often escape into their emotions and thoughts. They dissociate from their bodies, which often means that their mind or heart “picks up the slack” for the sensitivity of their bodies. This means that some Nines can be very emotional, and therefore are commonly mistaken for Four, and other Nines lean toward intellect. These are often mistaken for Fives.
Mental Types Five, Six, and Seven are preoccupied with orientation and their relationship to mental representations. They seek a reliable and realistic internal map for engaging with reality. As rejection types, however, Fives will reject any source of knowing, orientation, insight, or understanding that comes from outside themselves by default, unless it accords with their very specific internal vision of relevance and accuracy.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Fives, not being grounded in the body, often don’t give priority to whether something is “true” or not. Instead, they prioritize their inquisitiveness and where an idea, concept, or perspective can push their thinking into new, uncharted directions. The ego interprets this “originality of thought” as evidence of not being under any exogenous influences.
Unlike Nine, Fives are “not open” at all, much to their detriment. And, unlike the common stereotype, Fives aren’t vaguely interested in learning or understanding everything - they are fashioning their own conceptual framework, which is exhausting and slow. Thus, Fives experience a great limitation in their capacity to immerse themselves in life and experience.
Attachment Types - Nine, Three, and Six, are expressions of “universality”, and there are many more Attachment Types than Frustration and Rejection within the population. Therefore, most attempts by teachers and Enneagram enthusiasts to clarify and caricaturizes the qualities of Four and Five often come from an attachment type bias or lens. Thus, maybe our first impression of Five is actually closer to Nine with a Five Fix or a Type Six.
It’s essential to identify and work past what our first impressions are of the Enneagram because they’re almost certainly incorrect. This “attachment bias” permeates ways most people try to understand and articulate psychological categories. It’s the water our culture swims in. Because Five and Four are not attachment types, it can be very difficult, from an Attachment perspective, to imagine an alternative to feeling compelled to connect with and adapt to external influences.
The Passions
The Passions are traditionally ways of describing the core emotionally suffering at the heart of each of the types. The ego mistakenly seeks out our type’s Essential Quality through the instinctual drives, creating a profound confusion of identity and immense suffering. The Passions share the names of the Catholic Seven Deadly Sins because they have roots in the same tradition going back to Evagrius’s writings on the teachings of the desert fathers. The Passions are a way to describe the subjective experience of the object relational affect as it is expressed through a type’s dominant center.
The Passion for Type Nine is Sloth, which isn’t defined in the typical sense of laziness. While some manifestations can certainly look like laziness, Sloth is more like a neglect of self. It’s an emotional conviction that one’s presence and authentic self don’t truly matter. There’s a give-up on the self, which leads to Nines being willing to adapt themselves in order to preserve connection. Sloth leads to a heavy sense of melancholy, loneliness, and sadness that makes Nines feel like something about them isn’t good enough or special. It feels like a vague, semi-conscious backdrop of incompleteness that leads them to adapt themselves to others by ignoring their own needs, sense of violation, and anger. Sloth presents the ego with a kind of false trade-off: connect with loved ones or connect to self, but you can’t do both.
The Passion for Type Five is called Avarice, which doesn’t mean material greed. It refers to a sense that the personality is not substantial or robust enough to fully exist in the world, so contact must be withheld. It represents a kind of retraction of self into one’s mind, specifically to keep external influences out. While Nines fear separation from loved ones, Type Fives have a fear of connection and contact, sensing that it will contaminate them, “wash them out”, and threaten their capacity for concentration. Fives sacrifice relationships and entanglements to stay in their retracted mental focus. Because of this, Fives have an intense sense of alienation, like they “can’t be human”, and retract from things that would contaminate them.
Both of these types are withdrawn, with some Nines who live very isolated lives and some Fives have vibrant social lives. For Nine and Five, it’s like starting at polar opposite starting points but ending up expressing some superficially similar traits. So with these very different Passions at the core of these types, we can touch on how they can seem similar and be confused for each other before contrasting them.
Similar Traits
Both Fives and Nines are withdrawn and known for their intelligence. Both types can have a bookish, introspective quality, and Nine wing One, in particular, tends to be very philosophical, high-minded, imaginative, analytical, and interested in learning. They are natural synthesizers, bringing together different intellectual models and perspectives, with an emphasis on broad theories of everything. On our podcast, Big Hormone Enneagram, we jokingly refer to some 9s as “philosophers of the universe” because their thought tends toward open-ended philosophical speculations that take on a holistic veneer about the nature of “life itself”, nature, or the universe.
Fives, by contrast, aren’t actually “philosophical”. Their thinking style is granular and penetrative, honing in on a very particular few subjects to understand deeply. They rarely leave their thoughts open-ended. One of the principal aims of their understanding is to grasp a subject so deeply that they can know what is not yet known about it - in other words, their energy and attention is seeing ‘beyond’ something, toward finding original insights.
Both 5 and 9 can be very “in their heads” and out of touch with their bodies, but how this actually shows up energetically is quite different. Fives are high strung and tightly wound, whereas Nines that are very dissociated from the body can have either a very heavy cloudy quality or a ghosty, barely-there, aura.
However, that’s kind of where the similarities end. A lot of our popular culture’s view of a “smart person” or a philosopher is rooted in a Nine wing One archetype, but when people read about Type Five, the image of a “smart person” comes to mind. This association is so immediate and strong that, for a person identifying with their mind, it can be difficult to see the archetype of the intelligent person or philosopher in any other type but Five. As mentioned before, Type Five is pretty rare, and there are few cultural icons who represent Five energy such that they seem like kooky outliers rather than their own type, distinct from the “philosophical Nine”.
Different Qualities
It’s difficult to convey in text, but Nines and Fives have radically different quality or “tone”.
As highly absorbent Body Types, Nines put a lot of their attention on calming their powerful and tumultuous inner life. Despite the stereotypes, Nines have a lot going on inside, but they typically don’t reveal the extent of it unless they’re either really pushed or their attachments are threatened. Nines often worry that if they reveal their inner world, their connections will be rejected - they fear they’ll overwhelm others or come across as too strange or off-putting. Therefore, Nines give off an energy of being steady, soothing, and “bodily”, punctuated with leaks of high anxiety, sadness, or rage.
Fives are mental types. Their energy is often frenetic and despite how introverted and withdrawn they can be, they often overwhelm people with their relentless mental energy. All three Rejection Types are known for their intense energy, but for each type, it is channeled through their dominant center of body, heart, or mind. Fives are rarely calming to others.
Fives have an unconscious conviction that they must build their own cognitive orientation from the “ground up”. This means that Fives are typically very limited in their interests and their self-expression. As high strung as they are, there’s also a quality of being a kind of spider backed up into their own mental hole.
This retracted quality might give one the impression that Fives are soft and withdrawn. They could appear so at first impression, due to their lack of embodiment, but when a Five is expounded on topics that fall into their areas of interest, Fives can become quite dominant and pushy in their views. As rejection types, they are forcefully offering their mental orientation and rejecting all external sources of orienting and knowing.
Other people and their moods impact Nines a great deal, and much of their need to be alone is a way of unwinding and releasing all that they’ve absorbed. When Nines are overwhelmed, they can have a great deal of difficulty finding their own grounding and solidity. They can easily lose sight of their own point of view or their “voice” under pressure. Because of this, Type Nines also need a lot of “off” time. Their interests are often means of relaxing, but they can veer into zoning out.
Despite their solitary and introverted nature, Fives, by contrast, don’t relax much. They always need an object of intense focus, which gives off a mental relentlessness. Whereas a Nine might relax by getting lost in a show, book, or some other interest, the Five version of relaxing is some kind of “burrowing” that can look like total focus or, via their line to Seven, scattered voracious information consumption.
Unlike a Nine, not much sticks to or makes an impression on Five, which contributes to their aliened energy. Under stress, Fives, likewise, don’t give up their mental or emotional location like a Nine might. If they can’t simply leave a situation, they may become arrogant, intellectually biting, and give of a frenetic-but-compressed quality.
Nines are typically very aware of their impact on others, because Nines themselves are so easily impacted by others. This means that if they have a specialized interest, they may be extremely aware of when they ramble on about whatever’s lit them up. A Five, by contrast, can easily blast information at other people with little to no awareness of how it impacts the other person or if the other person is interested or not. This can sometimes lead to Nines being very conscious of when they “info dump” and Fives very unaware of when the do it and how much. Therefore, Nines can greatly over-estimate the ways they overwhelm or otherwise subject others to their own perspectives or thoughts and Fives can be extremely unaware of it, even if they do it far more extensively.
Lastly, in terms of external presentation, Fives come across as very solitary and alienated, even if they can be friendly. Fives struggle with making and keeping up with human relationships. They typically stay away from big families and extensive involvement in other people’s lives. Type Fives often sense that there’s a conflict between staying focused on their interests and being involved with others. Fives will almost always choose a life that is arranged around focus on their interests over a great deal of relationships. Nines may have passionate interests, but they’ll usually be balanced with or integrated within personal relationships.
A big indicator between a Type Five and a Type Nine is their degree of involvement in interpersonal relationships. Despite being withdrawn types, Nines are attachment types, seeking connection, and Fives are withdrawn and Rejection Types, leading to a profound solitary quality that Fives simply take as a “given”. When Fives do seek connection, they will connect primarily through their intellectual offering, quickly losing social stamina if the focus veers from their specific interest. Further, when they’re communicating about their interest, they tend to actually be quite dominant and forceful. It’s Rejection Type energy filtered through the mental center. Avarice, the passion of Five, represents this rigid, limited pathways through which Fives can communicate and connect with others, in contrast to Nine’s generally more adaptable way of relating to others.
Nines may feel very lonely and isolated, but they make efforts to find connection. In so doing, Nines will often give up much of their own location or needs to adapt, to meet someone else “halfway”. Fives feel unable to adapt, to relax whatever positions or idiosyncrasies that may be holding them back from others. Their energy proactively moves toward intellectual and conceptual interests, but it is very difficult for a Five to find the motivation to pursue relationships in a direct way.
So while Fives will not adapt themselves (and not even recognize the need or feel they have the capacity to adapt) and thus either total retract or dominant the interaction with their interest, Type Nines typically defer to the will of those they are engaged with as a way to ensure a comfortable social holding. As intelligent and intellectual as Nines can be, they are ultimately Attachment Types and Body Types, seeking a comfortable holding environment through connection and relationship to something outside themselves.
Attachment Bias
Attachment Bias is a major obstacle that impacts how the Enneagram is explored, understood, and applied that prevents awareness in the guise of deepening it. The short of it is that it’s an assumption that all people are seeking out common ground (or rudely against common ground), adapting, and multi-faceted. To really understand this bias, refer to the article linked here. In short, it is a widespread cognitive bias within Enneagram studies that add challenges to our efforts to understand the Enneagram, including the differences between Five and Nine.
Conclusion
As stated above, a lack of accuracy with the Enneagram leads to conceptual drift. The issue is not merely “getting things right” for the sake of being correct. It’s that, without this precision and accuracy, we can’t effectively see ourselves, which means we can’t really use the Enneagram for its central purpose: to bring greater awareness, to make conscious what is unconscious. Taking this further, the lack of striving to see more deeply and penetrate further or to be really clear and accurate with how we apply the Enneagram twists the Enneagram from a tool to help us become more conscious into an instrument that actually blocks greater consciousness under the guise of making us feel we are being conscious. The ego seeks to appropriate everything it can into a means of reinforcing itself, including the very tools that hold the promise of helping us find inner freedom, like the Enneagram.
thanks to Alexandra Arroyo-Acevedo and Lee Rowen for feedback on this article.