Enneagram continued...

When relaxed, you take on positive traits of your Enneagram personality type. Under stress, you assume the negative traits of your type .

One: The Perfectionist: conscientious, rational, critical and rigid.

Two: The Giver: empathetic, demonstrative; can be intrusive and manipulative.

Three: The Performer: competitive, efficient, Type A, obsessed with image.

Four: The Romantic: Creative, melancholic, attracted to the unavailable.

Five: The Observer: Emotionally remote, detached from people and feelings; private, wise.

Six: The Questioner: plagued by doubt, loyal, fearful, always watching for signs of danger.

Seven: The Epicure: Sensual, cheery, childlike, reluctant to commit.

Eight: The Boss: Authoritarian, combative, protective, take-charge, loves a good fight.

Nine: The Mediator: Patient, stable, comforting; may tune out reality with alcohol, food or TV.

Are you a One - a Perfectionist, critical of yourself but secretly convinced you're ethically superior? Or could you be a Nine - a gentle peacemaker who may be too agreeable and self-effacing? If you can link those numeral with those traits, you're in one the Enneagram a personality-typing system that could soon become the trendiest way to look at the world. And not only in self-help circles.

Studying the Enneagram, its enthusiasts say, helps them better understand themselves and others by providing a guide to people's differing emotional makeup's and their various strategies for facing life. But unlike astrological signs, Enneagram categories are based on human psychology, not the stars. Now, after lurking on the fringes of mysticism and pop psychology for more than 20 years, the Enneagram is turning mainstream and respectable. Last year the Stanford University School of Business course called "Personality, Self-awareness and leadership" focused on the Enneagram for the first time; the class proved so popular that it will be expanded from 40 to 50 students next winter. The CIA now uses the Enneagram to help agents understand the behavior of individual world leaders. The US Postal Service recently turned to the Enneagram to help employees resolve conflicts. Clergy from the Vatican signed up for an Enneagram seminar let year.



The star-shaped Enneagram groups human emotions and behavior - negative and positive - into 9 personality types. According to the Enneagram theory, personality develops as a result of early childhood experiences, and undesirable traits can be modified once they are understood through exploration and study. Adherents can undertake the transformation themselves by delving into one of the 30 books on the topic (which have sold more than 1 million copies) or taking training courses and workings that are proliferating around the country.

Unlike other popular self-help crazes, the he Enneagram philosophy has no media-courting leaders, celebrity boosters or profiteers. And while the movement does have spiritual aspects, practitioners insist its' not a religion. Indeed, few of the Jews, Roman Catholics (including nuns and priests), Muslims, Buddhists and many atheists who attended the Stanford conference seemed like cult types.

Practitioners say the Enneagram lets them see what make themselves and others tick in the business world, as well as in personal relationships. Millington McCoy, a partner in a NY headhunting firm, calls the Enneagram "a powerful hiring tool" in find the right person for an executive position. "Sometimes I catch myself being too demanding in my work or my marriage, but the enneagram opens to door to compassion, says Karen, a NY publishing execute. She now tries not to exhibit the rigidity or intolerance that can characterize Ones like her. But when she first read about those aspects of her type, she recalls, she threw the book across the room. "I asked my husband if I'm really like that," she says. "He just shrugged and said, "You kind of are."

Not far down the road, speculates Arthur Hastings, who teaches at Plao Alto's Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Enneagrams could become so much a part of mass culture that we'll be hearing songs like "I'm a Two From Kalamazoo" and reading personal ads that announce: "Four Seeing Eight." But just like gender, race and other classifications, the Enneagram already poses the risk of "typism."