The Sexual Instinct is not a “One-on-One”, “Intimacy”, “Eros”, or “Transmitting” Instinct.

The Sexual Instinct is not a “One-on-One”, “Intimacy”, “Eros”, or “Transmitting” instinct.

One of the most widespread and stubbornly resilient misconceptions within the body of Enneagram knowledge is attributing features of the Social Instinct with the Sexual Instinct while ignoring the influence of sexuality on human personality. The most popular understanding of the Sexual Instinct is that it is a drive for “intimacy” or “one on one connections”. This interpretation, however, effectively confuses the Sexual Instinct for the Social Instinct.

Another common characterization is describing the Sexual Drive as a generalized “passion”, “excitement”, or “eros” drive. This essay is an argument against these definitions and the common arguments in support of it. Not only are these views simply misinformed, they actually become obstacles for the kind of self-awareness that is the ultimate aim of the Enneagram.

If the central use and value of the Enneagram is to help us see through our identifications in order to liberate our consciousness from its enmeshment in limited identity structures, then having accurate definitions and descriptions is of central importance. Inner freedom is predicated on a diminishment of ego, i.e. a lessening of identification and a humiliation of the personality as a source of value and “self”. The Instinctual Drives constitute the foundations of the personality and represent some of our most vulnerable and unconscious needs and strategies, thus, they are the site of some of our strongest identifications.

It is not uncommon for people who identify with the Sexual Instinct on the basis of believing it is a “one on one”, “intimacy”, or “eros” instinct to outright make statements to the effect that it is because of their supposed typing that they are automatically more passionate or more interested in “real” connections than other people. This speaks to self-flattery, and genuine passion and authenticity simply cannot come from the personality because the personality is inherently preoccupied with itself. When definitions and descriptions are accurate, we see more clearly the patterned and automatic character of the personality and instincts, and thus, can hold them with greater impartiality and non-identification. In other words, we can see with greater clarity how these drives and patterns are not “I”. Regardless if one is “built up” from these definitions or not, it is accuracy that aids us in genuine self-observation and finding our way out of the psychological features that hook our consciousness. Seeing the automatic and “animal” character of the Instinctual Drives is one of the first steps toward not imbuing “I” into our personality structures.

Additionally, as I will describe further on, our Enneagram Type is composed of the “wrong work” of the Centers of Intelligence, the body (which includes the Instinctual Drives), the heart, and the mind, and make these patterns conscious requires accurate definitions which guide us to accurately self-observe. There is a “bottom up” dynamic with the Centers, wherein our mind is captured by the distorted mental patterns that within the Enneagram we call the Fixations. The fixations are mental outlooks that justify and maintain a worldview that in one way or another validates unmet emotional needs. We may need to feel important or a need to feel like a victim, and we will construct a worldview based on this. Our emotional needs are generated from the heart-rooted suffering that in the Enneagram are referred to as the Passions. The Passions are the suffering, both the feelings of deficiency and deprivation and narcissistic satisfaction and elation, that stem from identifying with the “instinctual self”, i.e. the personality. Our personality is nothing more than a psychological mechanisms for helping us meet our instinctual needs, and thus, our self-concepts and narcissism are rooted in how satisfied and effective we believe we are in being able to meet our instinctual needs. In other words, we become narcissistically elated when we believe we are doing well in all three instincts: when we are materially successful, safe, healthy, and vital, when we are attractive and connected with what “turns us on”, and when we feel we are valued, attuned to, connected, and esteemed by others. Identifying with the personality is identifying with the Instinctual Drives. This identification leads to the Instinctual Stacking in which one instinct becomes the dominant source of preoccupation and is prioritized above the other two, while one is neglected and seen as “draining” time and attention away from the Dominant Instinct. It is by integrating this neglected instinct that we are put in touch with our neurotic fears related to our Dominant Instinct. By working with those fears, we can learn to loosen our identification with the instincts and the personality overall. Dis-identifying with the instincts lessens the Passions and Fixations. What the Enneagram aims to help us develop is a presence that can stand outside this instinctually rooted sense of self. Therefore, we cannot genuinely confront these instinctual fears and neuroses if we are misled by inaccurate views and definitions.

In this article, I will cover what the Sexual Instinct is, how it is misunderstood throughout Enneagram discourse in the words of major Enneagram authorities, and to address some of the most common arguments used to support the wrong definitions. A lack of debate and discourse has severely hurt the credibility of the Enneagram and prevented ideas from evolving.

Defining the Sexual and Social Instincts

The Sexual Instinct is the motivational drive to put oneself ahead of sexual competition, to make oneself sexually attractive toward the aim of being sexually chosen by a desired sexual partner, as well as to discern one’s own sexual attractions and to pursue those attractions. This is a biological drive that is recognized throughout the animal kingdom, including human beings, by biologists and anthropologists. It is the force behind sexual selection, the evolutionary selection mechanism based on sexual attraction that runs complementary with natural selection.

Intimacy and relating, one-to-one or otherwise, belong to the Social Instinct. By identifying Sexual as “One-to-One”, the Social Instinct is shortchanged. Through these interpretations, the Sexual Instinct is granted both a kind of mystique of being more personally meaningful, authentic, and flattering while the Social instinct is left to be described as a vague, more impersonal “group instinct”, a need for belonging within a group and a need to track group dynamics.

The Social Drive is the drive to create and maintain relationships and connections of all kinds, from an individual to a group, from the highly personal to the abstract. It’s the instinct that allows us to be personal, to bring forward our own personhood and appreciate the personhood of another. It can be applied to one person or many. The Social Instinct is where our basic human need for connection, attunement, and care stem from. It’s the reason why we’re so interested in the perspectives, experiences, and qualities of other people. These are not the same thing as sexual interest.

The “One to One instinct” and the “Group instinct” effectively cuts the Social instinct into two artificial versions, one in which attention is on single individuals but attributed to the sexual instinct as “one on one/intimacy”, and one in which attention is on multiple individuals. The role of sexuality on personality is ignored by these definitions.

Nearly all Social Types identify with seeking and being passionate about intimacy, so they will identify as Sexual Types under the “One on one/intimacy” definition. The Social Instinct is the drive to connect, and from the point of view of evolution, it has its roots in parenting. When organisms reach a certain complexity, they require extra help to survive. Thus, an evolutionary leap occurred in some species wherein other animals' lives could matter beyond being prey or a mate. From there, bonding became central and an end in its own right. Intimacy, connection, attunement, and co-regulation are what this instinct is motivated to pursue, create, and maintain.

The central reason Social Types want to be involved with people, whether they’re extroverted social butterflies or introverts in deep, quiet conversation, is for the sake of reaching intimacy and emotional co-regulation. Certainly, some Social Types may get caught up in superficial connections or attending to the social fabric, and maybe there are attachment style issues that can be at play, but ultimately, every Social Type is seeking intimacy. People join groups or stay involved in a lot of different relationships in the hopes that the space opens for intimacy, whether or not an individual has the inner tools to drop in. Thus, the very idea of having a “group instinct” can be totally at odds with a Social Type’s drive and self-image.

These distinctions of “one on one” and “group” instincts crumble when you look past the surface of how both human social drives function and if you dare to acknowledge the enormous impact of sexuality on human personality. The instinctual capacities we have to evaluate information about “groups” are the very same that are required for “one-on-one” relating. They’re not separate instinctual systems, and why would they be? We apply the same capacities to read one person as we do with multiple people. “Group” awareness is simply a capacity of the mind considering relationships in abstraction.

A common argument for why Sexual is “one on one/intimacy” is that the instincts paired with the Enneagram aren’t actually instincts, they’re actually just subtypes of the core type, and therefore, despite their names, the instincts aren’t actually our biological drives. The Instinctual Drives, including the Sexual Drive can be understood independently from the Enneagram. If an instinct isn’t observable and understood outside of the Enneagram, it doesn’t exist. With the instinctual drives, we are dealing with the very foundations of personhood and the conditions of living in animal bodies and not some largely-inconsequential modifier (subtype) of the Enneagram type.

“Instinct” is a slippery term because it is normally applied to everything from reflexes to intuitions. In the context of the Enneagram, the instinctual drives are basic motivational drives to meet specific biological and emotional needs. The primary need for the Self-Preservation Drive is the need for physical well-being, for the Sexual Drive it’s the need both for sex as well as for the emotional need of being sexually chosen, and for the Social Drive it’s the need for connection and belonging. These are simplified for the sake of clarity and brevity. This need for regulation is what propels the personality structure because so long as we’re alive, our bodies need for regulation is ceaseless and ever-renewing.

Neuroscientist and author of Drive Donald Pfaff describes drives as having two main elements. First, a generalized arousal system in the brain that produces the energy and motivation to satisfy biological needs, and secondarily, a specific constellation of brain systems that produce the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors associated with each particular biological need. This is exactly what the instincts of the Enneagram are.

“Drive” may be a more appropriate characterization for the instincts, but “instinct” is both the term in most widespread use and it does capture their automatic, “animal”, compulsive, and basic quality. It’s important to make note of what a drive actually is because this specificity not only means a great deal in terms of how we work with them but also in clarifying their nature.

“Survival Strategies”

The “one-to-one/intimacy” argument typically rests on the assumption that the instincts being addressed by the Enneagram are “survival strategies”. Satisfying an instinctual need provides our bodies with regulation. Our immediate needs for regulation sometimes goes against our survival needs, which is an enormous factor in the struggle of being human.

Pursuing a sexual connection can put our social standing or our lifestyle at risk, as when people have affairs or they move across the country to be with a new love interest, giving up jobs and home. Animals put their personal well-being at risk when they care for their offspring (social) or when they compete to mate (sexual). Therefore, to think of them as strategies is not really accurate or useful.

Sex regulates us, as does even feeling another’s attraction. Interpersonal connection regulates us, as does feeling a sense of belonging among a group. Thus, the instincts aren’t “survival strategies”. They are motivations that organically arise from the body’s need for basic regulation. They are far more basic than a survival strategy.

Additionally, the survival strategy interpretation assumes that “pair bonding” or monogamy is both the natural, default state of human mating and that it’s a strategy to improve survival, neither of which are held to be an accurate view of human evolution or pre-agrarian human social organization. It appears to a large proportion of modern anthropologists that our prehistoric ancestors had multiple ongoing sexual relationships, much like the bonobo, and aspects of our psychology as well as our physiology suggest as much.

Charles Darwin was literally making himself nauseous trying to understand why animals waste enormous amounts of energy and put themselves at risk for “biologically costly”, “frivolous”, and ostentatious dances, calls, feathers, horns, and more that seemed to go against the basic, conservative principles of natural selection. That’s when he recognized there was another force that drove evolution forward - sexual selection.

Sexual selection describes how evolution advances based on animals' mate choice, i.e. their sexual attraction. The more attractive an animal, the more likely it was successful in passing on its genes, producing an evolution not on strict survival fitness but on how attractive they were. The attractive features that put the animal above the competition would then be passed on to its offspring, and gradually that popular feature would spread throughout the population at a rate far quicker than natural selection.

Darwin came to recognize that “sexual ornaments” were actually detrimental to the animal’s survival needs, and, in fact, the more energetically wasteful and impractical, the more attractive to mates these features were likely to be. Such features demonstrate that the animal was so full of vitality, it could invest excess energy into displays that often put the animal at survival risk- loud songs give their locations away to predators, bright, cumbersome tail feathers could prevent an animal from escaping predators, and some animals even fight, to the death, for mates. All of these go against the survival interests of the organism.

Humans are not the exception to the animal kingdom that we often imagine. Much of human personality is itself a sexual ornament. Our most sensitive organ is our brains, and therefore, it is like a human corollary of a peacock’s tail. If we are healthy and are able to invest our energy into non-practical things like creativity, virtuosity, talents, and other flourishes of personality, which bolster how interesting and attractive we might be. Most of the brain structures that have led to what we think of as human culture, and what many suppose puts us “above” other animals, - art, humor, creativity, etc - very likely stems from the human version of sexual ornamentation. We sexually display by being interested and talented.

Most animals have a distinct mating season, but human beings are one of the most sexual animals on the planet. Our mating season is 24/7. Sex and sexuality have far more utility than procreation, and thus, aren't the compartmentalized forces that our modern world would have us imagine. Therefore, to mislabel the sexual instinct as “one-to-one/intimacy” is to ignore the powerful and all encompassing impact of sexuality on human personality.

In my book, The Instinctual Drives and the Enneagram, I present a great deal of research supported by credible sources for this interpretation. I recommend checking it out if you are interested in arguments that support it.

Instinct’s Role in the Personality

The reason the instinctual drives are paired with the Enneagram at all is because we become psychologically identified with them. When this happens, one of them becomes the dominant force in our personality: we can be a Self-Preservation Type, a Sexual Type, or a Social Type. They capture our conscious and unconscious attention in a specific way that profoundly influences our sense of identity. When we identify with the instincts, their fears and neuroses become infused with content from the other Centers of Intelligence: emotional baggage, our object relations, and our sense of self. We feel like we are “being ourselves” when we are pursuing our instinctual priorities.

A Self-Preservation Dominant becomes especially identified with how they evaluate their well-being and the means by which they shape and sustain their lifestyle.

A Sexual Dominant becomes especially identified with their “courtship display,” the means by which they foster attraction and elicit intense engagement and chemistry.

A Social Dominant becomes especially identified with the means by which they are able to engage with or stay in relation to others.

The Instinctual Drives carry with them compelling, primitive survival fears - fears of scarcity and harm, fears of being undesirable and sexually overlooked, and fears of being ostracized and abandoned. The personality is a psychological structure that helps us meet our instinctual needs and, consequently, to hedge against these instinctual fears. Their enmeshment with personality isn’t arbitrary. The Instincts are intrinsic to personality. They are the foundation of personality. These basic instinctual fears (and traumas) are the root of what our Enneagram Type is responding to.

Identification with the instinctual drives is the very thing that alienates us from essence leading to the core suffering of the Enneagram Types: the passion. The Passion is the core suffering of the types that stems from their alienation from essence due to identifications with the instinctual drives and, as a consequence, the personality structure.

Thus, to put it succinctly: the instinctual drives are the core of our Enneagram type. Our relationship to the Instinctual Drives are the source of all of our type’s patterns, reactions, and degree of psychological fixation. If we were to be free of our identification with them, we would find our type’s Essence Quality within ourselves, and thus, our sense of identity, presence, and connection to ourselves would not involve “falling asleep” under the spell of personality. So long as we have a body, we have instinctual drives to regulate that body, but our sense of self would not be confused for how we achieve self-regulation.

The ego comes to believe that in order to “get back to” essence (and therefore one’s authentic identity), it has to “do” something to make essence happen, and it suffers from this perpetual alienation (because essence is Being and not a by-product of “doing”). The “doing” the ego believes it must perform is an idealized achievement of instinctual goals: to be healthy, competent, powerful, safe, wealthy, vital, to be attractive, desired, sexually chosen, fertile, to be beloved, cared for, popular, important, a good person, acknowledged, influential. We project our essential quality into our instinctual resources, through the lens of our Enneagram Type. Identification with the instincts constitutes the core of the ego, and therefore, the instinctual drives occupy a pivotal role in the Enneagram. They aren’t just ‘subtypes’ or clarifying modifiers to the Enneagram type.

Depending on our type, when we are afraid of the loss of an instinctual resource or ability to access it, we unconsciously are fearing we are losing our path to essence. This is even higher stakes than “survival” because it represents a threat to one’s purpose for being alive. If we are a Social Type, any detriment to our sense of being lovable, worthy of connection, esteem, and social value can be interpreted as a threat to our connection to essence, and thus, through the style of our Enneagram type, must be constantly reinforced. If we’re a Sexual Type, any detriment to our attractiveness is reacted to in the style of our Enneagram Type as a threat to one’s connection to essence.

Identification also causes the instinctual drives to be stacked in an order of priority, where some needs are unconsciously viewed as more important to our sense of identity than others. Instinctual Stacking plays an enormous role in the overall personality, and therefore, understanding what the instincts are and how they actually operate is not merely important, it is a key aspect of the kind of inner transformation the Enneagram makes possible. The instinct we habitually neglect, the “blindspot”, is the lynchpin of the ego because attending to our blindspot forces us to confront the powerful core fears of our dominant instinct.

There is an anxiety that if one engages with their Blindspot Instinct, it may lead to the realization of the Dominant Instinct’s fears. A formula useful for understanding this is: “If I (give attention to and express) my Blindspot Instinct, it will cause (the fear of my Dominant Instinct).” In identifying the stackings below, each instinct is abbreviated and the blindspot is dropped off to imply it’s “blindness”:

SP/SX: If I express Social (by being too available and dispersed), it will create scarcity and harm by undermining my resources and foundations.

SP/SO: If I express Sexual (by being too provocative and unstable), it will create scarcity and harm by undermining my resources and foundations.

SX/SP: If I express Social (by being too available and dispersed), I won’t be attractive and will be sexually overlooked.

SX/SO: If I express Self-Preservation (by being too stable and self-sufficient), I won’t be attractive and will be sexually overlooked.

SO/SX: If I express Self-Preservation (by being too stable and self-sufficient), I will alienate others and be ostracized and abandoned.

SO/SP: If I express Sexual (by being too provocative and unstable), I will alienate others and be ostracized and abandoned.

Thus, if the purpose of the Enneagram is to see what we’re identified with, then understanding the instinctual drives with clarity and accuracy is the heart of this endeavor. To confront this identification is to confront the intense instinctual fears and our emotional and mental distortions around our instinctually-based sense of self, i.e. the personality, and how investing in that sense of self is the way we turn our back on our inner life. This is exactly as countless spiritual traditions have attested to in cautioning against the passions or the drives of the body. All this is to underscore why it's so important to be clear and accurate.

Popular Definitions

Let’s look at how a few of the popular Enneagram schools of thought define the Sexual Instinct on their websites.

The Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition website defines it as a “survival strategy” for “One-to-one – primary relationships or coupling; also known as the Sexual subtype” without further elaboration.

We’ve established that the instinctual drives are not strategies, and the function of coupling is not survival but social and sexual regulation. A large portion of anthropologists reject the view that our ancestors were monogamous for more than a short term or that pair bonding evolved for survival’s sake. Additionally, we all know from our direct experience that relationships or the desire for coupling is not necessary for sexual attraction. People desire, lust after, have affairs with, fantasize about, and have sex with people they feel no social connection or safety with or even outright don’t respect. The flipside is also true, coupling doesn’t always require sexual attraction, or, at least, people typically don’t choose to couple with the person they feel the most attraction for. Sexual interest in a partner often wanes or dies after the “honeymoon phase” precisely because the instinct to bond and the instinct of attraction are not the same.

A vibrant romantic coupling involves both the Sexual and the Social Drives, a need for relatedness and connection with a sexual interest. It’s what makes the difference between someone being a romantic partner versus a friend or relative. When the sexual attraction fades in a relationship, people say they feel like their partner is now their “roommate”, indicating that Sexual and Social instincts are both vitally important and have to both be present in a romantic coupling for it to be romantic.

On the Chestnut-Paes Enneagram Academy website, it says, “The Sexual instinct focuses attention on and shapes behavior around issues related to the quality and status of relationships with specific individuals. Sometimes referred to as the “One-to-One” instinct, it generally directs energy toward the achievement and maintenance of sexual connections, interpersonal attraction, and bonding. 9is [sic] instinct seeks a sense of well-being through one-to-one connections with people in terms of whatever that means for a person of a specific type.”

There are a few confusing points here. It would seem that this is an instinct about sexual relationships, but are the one-to-one connections in the last sentence sexual connections? By retaining the term sexual but re-defining the instinct as one to one relating, are they suggesting all forms of one on one relating are somehow rooted in sexuality?

The idea that a word used in reference to the Enneagram needs to be re-defined contextually is more than fair albeit accompanied by clarification. The Passions, for example, all require being understood in the context of a type and not as the usual definitions of the terms. However, Chestnut’s book, The Complete Enneagram, offers very little to clarify. On page 26 she describes “instinctual goals” of the Social Instinct and Sexual Instinct as “Social Interaction” and “Sexual Bonding”, respectively, but retains the same definitions as the website without further elaboration.

The description of the Social instinct goes, “The Social instinct focuses attention on and shapes behavior around issues related to belonging, recognition, and relationships in social groups. It drives us to “get along with the herd”—our family, the community, and the groups we belong to. This instinct also relates to how much power or standing one has relative to the other members of “the group” in terms of whatever that might mean for a person of a specific type.” This only reinforces the questions posed above. Where does non-sexual one-on-one relating go?

Awareness to Action has different terms for the instincts, but they nonetheless are describing the same basic concepts. They call the sexual instinct the “Transmitting Instinctual Bias”, and instead of describing the bias itself, the website characterizes those for whom the Transmitting bias is dominant as “...focused on “attracting and bonding” and on passing genes, beliefs, values, interests, and worldview to others in order to make them carriers of that information.” This definition seems to be putting the transmission of genetic information through the sexual act in the same category as commonly-recognized social features such as values, beliefs, interest, and worldview.

These concepts are social because they are concerned with both the subjective world of other people and with how one person holds another in mind. Intimacy and attunement require an awareness of personhood, which the Sexual Instinct alone does not provide, and therefore, worldview, values, beliefs, and shared interests are related to intersubjective exchange, not arousal, attraction, or desire. If values and beliefs do add to attraction, it is only because humans are such social animals that social qualities can influence our sense of valuing, respecting, and enjoying another person. In actuality, the Sexual Drive can be somewhat impersonal, focused far more on the energy of attraction than on the inner life of the person who carries that energy.

Between “getting along with the herd” versus “one on one connections”, nearly every social type will relate to preferring one on one relationships, bonds, and connections. Very few people have a social preference for groups relating. While a sense of belonging or getting along with people in general is important, the quality of nervous system regulation is far more powerful and potent in intimate bonds, where one can be vulnerable and can be seen more fully. In cases where one is seeking belonging within a group, the group is typically thought of as a collection of individuals, with the group serving as the common value or interest that makes a close, intimate connection possible.

Many people who identify as a “one-to-one” type find it flattering. I consistently find people speaking of being a “one-to-one subtype” as if it is they who truly value real, deep, intimate, powerful relationships, unlike those who “just want to fit in” like the Social Types. Or alternatively, some conflate the Sexual Drive with something like eros, passion, or life force, and claim that it is they who are more “passionate”, soulful, and seeking what’s real and meaningful in life with zest and intensity. Of course, besides simply being inaccurate, these definitions only reinforce identifying with one’s personality through self-flattery, and they don’t offer any substance for inner development. What’s to work with? Being less passionate and living life fully? The “one-to-one” definition not only makes the Sexual drive socially palatable (and which instinct would be tracking what is socially palatable?) and provides a social ego boost, it also keeps authentic Sexual energy as something shameful, unexplored, and out of awareness.

These terms socially-launder the sexual instinct, taking the focus away from sexuality and, in essence, using the sexual instinct to claim one is doing the better version of the Social Instinct without all the insecurities or embarrassing parts of Social Instinct. Thus, using these concepts to reinforce their personality’s status quo - using these labels as a way to avoid confronting their instinctual biases and fears. In most cases, someone who is dominant in the Sexual Instinct or has it in a secondary position in their stacking doesn’t have the judgment or self-consciousness around it to need to render it socially palatable. In other words, it already is socially-palatable on its own.

Another stereotype evoked by the “group instinct” Social Type bears addressing is a lack of relational discrimination. The presence of relational discrimination in Social Types can nudge them to believe that they are Sexual Types. Just as an integrated Sexual Instinct helps us discern who we are genuinely attracted to and who we’re not, the integrated Social Instinct helps us be mindful and discriminate about the kinds of relationships we form and participate in.

Certain Social Types under distress can get caught up in whatever social attention is available to them in just the same way a fixated Sexual Type can lose its discernment and get caught up in whatever sexual attention is going their way. The Social Instinct brings a sensitivity to interpersonal relationships, but there’s a wide range of ways individual Social Types can respond to that sensitivity. By contrast, people who are Social Blind can be very socially naive, and they often find themselves in relationship with those who are just “around” without having a socially-intelligent view of the true quality of the dynamic due to a lack of social sensitivity.

A common argument to support “One on One” and “Group” definitions is that people observe that there are some people who are more “socialites” or “want to fit in”, who “want to play the social game of hierarchy or status” versus people who want intense connections, who want to expose and explore other’s souls, and on this basis, the distinctions of “one on one” and “group instinct” must be true. Even if this is a true distinction, which I’ll unpack in a moment, it’s a category error to assume that because people are expressing something differently, it must mean there is an instinctual distinction as opposed to some other explanation.

We observe some people are more athletic and some are more artistic. Does that mean these temperaments belong to different instinctual drives? Obviously, no, but there may be some other explanation without needing to make such a difference fit into instinct. In regards to instincts, we have to both refer to instinctual knowledge outside of the Enneagram as well as to be clear on what an instinct actually is. It’s not just a preference distinction.

This argument is common and widespread, so a few things might be at play in someone observing the above differences. Social preferences are formed through early life experience (described in my book, see Chapter Four), cultural influences, and context. Many of those who are observed just “wanting to fit” may be trying to fit in to create opportunities to connect deeply in contexts not seen by the observer. Some people have attachment issues wherein they want to be involved with others but can’t get too personal or close. Some Enneagram types are more introverted, so their social preferences are more one to one. Different people simply value different kinds of interactions, or have had difficult experiences with intimate relating or with large groups. The potential reasons for differences are vast, but they don’t constitute separate instinctual explanations.

Beyond merely nitpicking for accuracy, the core problem that bad definitions lead to is rendering the instinctual drives, one of the most potent - if not the most potent - aspects of the Enneagram, either ineffectual or reinforces identification with the personality. There is a tendency within the Enneagram for material to be presented in a way that actually obscures the insights that could lead to greater self-consciousness while being presented as wisdom. This is not surprising, as the ego unconsciously turns that which would undermine it into a source of self-reinforcement. This tendency is something to always be vigilant for.

The Passion/Eros/Intensity/Libidinal Instinct

The Enneagram Institute is, by far, the best and most accurate of the main Enneagram schools of thought, but it’s not without its shortcomings and vagueness. Unlike the others, it doesn’t seem to be describing a survival strategy.

The website states, “The key element in Sexual types is an intense drive for stimulation and a constant awareness of the “chemistry” between themselves and others. Sexual types are immediately aware of the attraction, or lack thereof, between themselves and other people. Further, while the basis of this instinct is related to sexuality, it is not necessarily about people engaging in the sexual act. There are many people that we are excited to be around for reasons of personal chemistry that we have no intention of “getting involved with.” Nonetheless, we might be aware that we feel stimulated in certain people’s company and less so in others. The sexual type is constantly moving toward that sense of intense stimulation and juicy energy in their relationships and in their activities. They are the most “energized” of the three instinctual types, and tend to be more aggressive, competitive, charged, and emotionally intense than the Self-Pres or Social types. Sexual types need to have intense energetic charge in their primary relationships or else they remain unsatisfied. They enjoy being intensely involved—even merged—with others, and can become disenchanted with partners who are unable to meet their need for intense energetic union. Losing yourself in a “fusion” of being is the ideal here, and Sexual types are always looking for this state with others and with stimulating objects in their world.”

It’s very hard to follow the conceptual “tree”, of how one facet of this description follows from another part. It’s rooted in sexuality but not about sexuality? How does that make sense and in what way?

Instead, it seems to be a kind of displacement of sexual energy into a generalized “libido” instinct, referring to the term for generalized psychological activation toward a specific object (as opposed to sexual libido). Yes, libidinal energies are activated by the sexual instinct, but it is likewise activated by the Social and Self-Preservation instincts. Our instincts are what we’re passionate about, so the experience of feeling passionate can apply to any instinct. Libidinal excitation is sparked by objects that could potentially provide us regulation, which is experienced internally as passion. There is no discrete “passion” instinct. Libidinal energies are better thought of as instinctual energies in general, (instinctual excitation) directed at objects of potential regulation, like anticipation of a delicious meal or the excitement of seeing a dear friend arrive at the airport greeting area.

Different instinctual resources activate different instinctual drives, and different instinctual resources require their own quality of excitation. Pursuing a resource that promises regulation of our physical well-being (self-preservation) is going to call on different qualities of attention that are more patient, focused, and methodical versus resources (people) that promise regulation of our need for connection, which requires a more of an open and interpersonal kind of awareness.

Think about the difference in attention, boundaries, and energy and where your focus of attention is you use when talking to a friend over coffee versus in a sexual act versus rock climbing. These are all potentially activating and regulating activities. All three draw out different qualities of libidinal activation.

Thus, despite many Enneagram enthusiasts thinking of the sexual drive as a vague “passion”, “intensity”, or even “eros” instinct, the fact is that what we’re passionate and intense about is determined by what instinctual drive is activated, not by activation itself. The instinct that is excited is tied directly into the kind of regulation that “object” suggests. If we are passionate about connection, that’s not sexual, that’s the activated social instinct. If we’re passionate about gardening, that’s the activated self-preservation instinct.

However, a “libidinal activation instinct” is only inferred and not actually stated in the description above. Further complicating the Enneagram Institute’s definition is a excerpt in their Social Instinct description that is drawing a contrast against the Sexual Instinct, “Moreover, Sexual types seek intimacy, Social types seek personal connection: they want to stay in long-term contact with people and to be involved in their world.” The prior Sexual Instinct description said nothing about intimacy, so is this falling back onto similar definitions as the other schools? Or is the “energetic merging” of the Sexual instinct, then, the same as intimacy or an addition to intimacy?

The description states that the keys for this instinct are a need for stimulation and an awareness of chemistry, and while these qualities of stimulation and chemistry are rooted in sexuality and, it seems, sexual attraction, they extend toward a generalized “pull” toward things and people for the sake of merging, losing themselves, and energetic union.

Since this is meant to depict “instinct”, what biological purpose does the above depiction serve? Confronted with this question, a common response is that it must be that this instinct is a sublimation of a socially inappropriate sexual drive. If that’s the case, why would a sexual drive need to be sublimated? Why would one third of our instinctual energies become inappropriate instead of just commonly accepted as part of the fabric of being human? What would this drive look like if it wasn’t sublimated?

This perspective greatly ignores the power of the instinctual drives in the ego structure and overestimates the effectiveness of a mechanism like sublimation. The dominant instinct occupies a position in the ego structure where such sublimation, at least in any consistent and pervasive sense that a whole dominant instinct in every person of that type is sublimated, is simply not possible. The suggestion that sublimation is so effective and default on a dominant instinct instead reveals more about the internal bias against the sexual instinct of the person making such a claim - that it’s something that cannot be expressed openly and directly, which would indicate a sexual blindspot.

Often, people will insist that they’re a Sexual Type, but they don’t live or act as a sexual type. They’ve sublimated their sexual energy into building interpersonal connections, achieving status, or building wealth because these things are considered desirable in a partner in our modern world. This perspective is not necessarily wrong, but it is clearly the bias of someone who prioritizes the Social or Self-Preservation instincts. Their sense of sexual attraction is experienced through the lens of another instinct. Sexual attraction itself can be “put on hold” enough to divert one’s energy and attention into something belonging to purview another instinct, and, finally, they assume that a person who is a sexual type would be content to feel attractive by proxy to Social and Self-Preservation signifiers.

This point cannot be overemphasized because it reveals a crucial aspect of the Sexual Instinct and how it plays out in Sexual Types - they want to be sexually chosen for themselves and their flavor, not for Self-Preservation or Social proxies. A Social Type can see the value of social status in sexual dynamics. A Self-Preservation Type can see the value of wealth in sexual dynamics. Sexual Types don’t track the value of status or wealth like Social Types or Self-Preservation types do because Sexual Types’ sense of self is not involved in material status or social position because those things belong to Self-Preservation and Social Instincts. A Sexual Type unconsciously views their personality, including their talents and means of displaying themselves, as basically a giant sexual ornament. To invest in wealth or status as a sexual display is to divert precious energy away from their sexual goals.

In response to this point, a popular counterargument is along the lines of, “ok, if that’s true, then how come so many people do go for wealth or status to attract a partner? Where are all these sexual types?” Which falls into an assumption of a relatively proportional distribution of instinctual types within the general population.

This distribution bias (along with Attachment Bias) actually impacts a great deal of how the Enneagram is interpreted and taught, so while we cannot make objective studies to know people’s types nor the distribution of types. Anecdotally, and against even my own initial assumptions, it seems that Sexual Types are in fact much rarer than Self-Preservation and Social Types. Most of the world seems to be Sexual-Blind. Career wise, Sexual Types tend to gravitate toward ways of earning a living that function as extensions of their “attraction displays” - things that display their creativity and virtuosity, that make them more sexually appealing as a personality rather than what will earn them money or status. That we live in a world that is largely Sexual blind makes sense when the collective attitudes toward sexuality and sexual display are explored.

The Social Instinct isn’t a Group Instinct

As mentioned above, a great Enneagram misconception that goes hand in hand with the view of “Sexual-as-intimacy” is that the Social Drive is left over as a vague “group instinct”, a need to be in or contribute to groups. This perspective also merits attention because its an important piece of the conceptual landscape.

The Narrative Tradition’s website defines the Social Instinct as “creating social structures within communities”.

The Chestnut-Paes Enneagram Academy’s site states, “[The Social Instinct] focuses attention on and shapes behavior around issues related to belonging, recognition, and relationships in social groups. It drives us to “get along with the herd”—our family, the community, and the groups we belong to. 9is [sic] instinct also relates to how much power or standing one has relative to the other members of “the group” in terms of whatever that might mean for a person of a specific type.”

Awareness to Action rebranded the Social Drive to the “Navigating Instinctual Bias”, which describes those for whom this bias is a priority as “They are focused on “orienting to the group” and on building alliances, creating trust and reciprocity, and understanding how oneself and others fit into the group.”

These definitions seem to be operating under the premise of instinct-as-survival-strategy. They don’t account for how this “Group instinct” provides regulation, or, at least, fails to distinguish how the quality of regulation brought on by “getting along with the herd” or “building alliances” would be different from and even merit a separate drive distinct from one that finds regulation through individual connections. If “survival in numbers” is the aim of this instinct, how would it then be a separate drive from Self-Preservation?

Further, definitions like these suppose that humanity’s ancestors evolved as separate individuals and eventually came together out of practical necessity rather than sociality being inherent to the human species from the earliest known origins. Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson describes the origins of the Social Drive stemming from when the biology of animals became complex enough that organisms required additional care after birth or hatching. In other words, it's rooted in parenting, a profound revolution in how organisms relate to one another via care. Does this mean we care about anyone who is the focus of our social instinct? Absolutely not, but the relational capacities we have to evaluate the nature of a relationship or to read other individuals stems from the fundamental human relationship - parent to child.

Evaluating if one is “getting along with the “herd”, building alliances, evaluating one’s standing, and understanding how one fits into the group” all seem to be cognitive evaluations. In other words, the instincts are drives of the body, and we experience them directly through the body and physical sensation because they are directly linked to our quality of regulation. It’s the mental center having thoughts about instinctual needs.

While we are animals that have a Mental Center, our thoughts and perspectives are not the same things as the instinctual drives, just as our emotional reactions or mental evaluations about how physically safe we are also do not constitute the drive to maintain our regulated physical state of Self-Preservation.

These definitions might serve Social aims, but they are mental-center evaluations and abstractions that are several levels removed from the embodied instinctual experience of social regulation. The root of the Social Drive is relationships and personhood, our own personhood and recognizing the personhood of others. The Social Drive is what allows human beings to be personal.

In a one on one social dynamic, people are not just taking in one input - they are tracking facial expressions, tone, spoken and body language, and much more. It’s a lot of disparate information. The same goes when one is interacting with two or more people. It’s just that our capacities to track become more generalized, rather than specific to individuals, but one is not doing something instinctually different. One to one or group relating are both relational preferences.

Groups are made up of individuals, and to build a sense of consensus or group dynamics, one has to have the ability to read individuals and then evaluate what's in the greatest accord or incongruent with multiple individuals. The foundation of any sort of “Group view” is in a capacity to read individuals, and therefore, a “One to one” instinct is not a separate instinct from awareness of groups. It just may be that group awareness is a more sophisticated extension of those same relational and perceptual systems that make individual relationships possible. I am not arguing that group awareness is not part of the Social Drive. It is an important part, but it is incomplete and doesn’t account for the core relational foundation on which it rests: a drive for relationship altogether.

There are Social Types who aren’t deeply involved with people, and this is often brought up to reinforce the point that Social is group awareness and not personal connection. Some Social Types may have intimacy issues, insecurities, and other influences in their personality, just like some Sexual Types are more monogamous while others are extremely promiscuous. The instincts are far more nuanced and complex than simple preferences.

I’ve often encountered numerous examples of people who have identified with this view of Social-as-group-instinct actually be Self-Preservation Dominant with a secondary Social Instinct both underestimate the influence of their Self-Preservation Drive and overestimate their Social Instinct while still perceiving the “self-pres boundary”. Our dominant instinct, and especially a Self-Preservation Dominant instinct, can seem so basic and necessary, as well as common in the population, that its outsized influence on us is often overlooked.

Another very common argument in this vein is people stating that they “used to” be a Sexual Type, especially around adolescence and early adulthood, but they were “forced” into giving attention to Social or Self-Preservation due to career, family, life circumstances, health, or some other reason. In this case, they’re mistaking youth and fewer responsibilities for the Sexual Instinct. They are almost always both not totally clear on what the Sexual Instinct actually is on its own and underestimating the role one or both of the other instincts were playing at the time.

It doesn’t matter what our dominant instinct is - we can be a sexual type and love to garden. That would be a sexual type’s self-preservation instinct being activated. We can be Sexual Blind and have passionate, incredible sex. That would be that person’s sexual instinct getting activated. What makes an instinct dominant is not if we engage universal aspects of life, it’s that our personality has constellated around the needs of the dominant instinct in a very specific way.

Last thing to note- our assumptions about what someone of a certain type must “look like” often get in our way of accuracy. There are plenty of Sexual Types who do not come across as intense, passionate lovers-of-life. A person of any dominant instinct can be so ruled by the unchecked compulsions of that instinct that they become empty husks of human beings. There are numerous Sexual Types who come across as empty inside, as voracious and distorted, just like any instinctual type. No one is granted “more” through the lens of their type - it’s how awake one’s essence is within one’s own type structure that grants anyone something real. In fact, some of the most vibrant sexual instincts are in those who have an instinctual blindspot who have worked on activating and awakening their sexual blindspot. These people are often able to access their blindspot “free” of the psychological interference that comes with a dominant instinct.

Inner Work

These misconceptions lead to effectively cutting off the potency of a huge facet of the Enneagram and our psychology overall. It’s my suspicion that the above biases and misconceptions keep the Enneagram from being used in its full, albeit humiliating, potency and contribute to the failure of to embed the Enneagram in the reality of the psychological structure and our biology.

The blindspot is the most challenging aspect of the Enneagram to work with, but it’s also the fulcrum for transformation that goes beyond healing the personality towards a shift in consciousness. It represents an enormous portion of our aliveness that we have failed to fully appreciate, see, and cultivate, but what makes it so difficult to face is that it will bring to the surface all our fears around our dominant instinct, the primary fuel behind the entire type structure. When we truly confront the blindspot, we deal with powerful grief for all that we’ve unwittingly squandered. If that hasn’t been your experience, then you haven’t yet felt the impact of the blindspot yet.

The awake Sexual Instinct doesn’t mean being more attractive to others. Often by deepening our relationship to our sexual instinct and bringing our personal sexual ‘flavor’ forward, we’re getting more specific in our energy, which can be alienating to most but more appealing to a select few. Impact on others aside, the real value of integrating the Sexual Drive is that it awakens an interest in ourselves, a curiosity and excitement about exploring new parts of ourselves and letting parts of ourselves be affected, to get outside a fixed experience of self, and to be changed. It’s the quality an artist has regarding their latest artwork - part of the process of artmaking is an interest and search for what will emerge from their own creativity. What colors, contrasts, forms, etc, will emerge? What sounds will come from the musical? There’s a kind of impartial self-fascination that brings forward aspects of ourselves that we otherwise leave untouched. Following our sexual drive takes us out of rational, sensible decision making, and when supported by an awake Self-Preservation and Social Instinct, brings us to awaken talents, gifts, and more. It brings something personal, something more “gestalt” within us to the fore. This opens up new “flows” of lifeforce, diminishes our inner critic, and transforms our sense of identity.

The instinctual stacking represents a form of dissociation. The instincts are drives of the body, and as such, they are located primarily through physical sensation. When we’re identified with the instincts, we’re infusing the instincts with emotional and mental energies that don’t belong to it while also not relating to them from sensation. Our experience of the instincts is usually reactions to instinctual fears.

Those basic instinctual fears are of scarcity and harm, undesirable and sexually overlooked, and ostracized and abandoned, and these are what our Enneagram Type’s Passions are in reaction to. The Dominant Instinct keeps the blindspot “blind” so that we don’t derail energy from the dominant instinct’s agenda, and therefore have to deal with the dominant instinct’s fear.

If we’re a Sexual type and Social blind, we’ll neglect the social drive because we think it will dilute our sexual “flavor” and make us bland and sexually unappealing. If we’re Sexual Blind, we unconsciously think giving too much attention to our sexual instinct will disrupt our lifestyle (Self-Preservation) and/or our social connections. Maybe we’ll see the relationship with our spouse is lifeless or we’ll want to quit our jobs to pursue something that captures us. Maybe if we cultivate our “sexual display”, we’ll alienate others or simply embarrass ourselves.

These fears alone may seem like no big deal on their own, but if we’ve infused our essential quality into the achievement of our instinctual aims, it could feel as dramatic as by cultivating and prioritizing our sexual display; we're violating our soul or even violating God.

The blindspot is, therefore, where we can most “lose faith” in the personality. We encounter fear and grief, and on the other side, the humility that makes loosening our identification with the personality possible. If we’re flattered by our instinctual identifications or even just misguided about them, then our ego is hiding in plain sight, under the guise of having already been revealed. Therefore, getting really clear about what these powerful drives actually are is crucial to make use of the Enneagram.