Enneagram Type Four: The Romantic

All right, let's talk about fours. So fours are easy to pick on here. And I think it's true that their mechanism is the most ridiculous of all the nine types. So it's a great one to start with because it's completely crazy. I mean, it just doesn't make sense at all.

Their passion is envy. And their fixation is melancholy. Let's say melancholy. We could say masochistic.

How the Four Operates

So how does this operate? The four's view of the world is one of melancholy. Meaning there's a sense of sadness, romanticism. So the four is sometimes called the romantic. And for the romantic, every object is seen as a way to compare to one's love who's just walked out the door, you know. "I shall compare ye to red, red rose."

There's a... that's the level of envy. It's a very, very deep immediate swapping out of the real with the symbol. And it's an aesthetic move done to actually distance oneself from raw pain and instead suffer.

Yeah. See, the Four is so fast that they live in a world of their symbols. And they would rather suffer than feel pain. Pain without words, pain without meaning. So they stay envious of a past or envious of others. Could be friends or could be celebrities, or could be people in history. Could be my own childhood. Could be a sibling.

So then that envy allows me to dwell in this symbolic. And my general mood in that palace of the symbolic is melancholy. And that melancholy quality could be a way in, could be a way to pierce this loop. Because if you feel melancholy, you could just say, "Yeah, I feel sad. There's sadness here." And you might need to be with that sadness for a while, but it won't... it'll be comforting, you know, in its own way. You'll feel like I have capacity for this. Because you've been suffering, you know, for your whole life. You've been in the suffering gym.

So you'll find you have capacity for the pain and you feel strong bearing it. But that's only a way to pierce this. More likely, you'll wallow in the suffering. You know, I used to listen to sad songs on repeat, and I think most of us probably have done that. No, in high school. But I mean, that was just so obviously my way to feel better. I don't think it even occurred to me to play like, feel good songs. I would feel alone. And then in that aloneness, I would feel company.

The Symbolic Refuge

So what is that company and aloneness? It's like "hello, old friend." You know, Churchill called it the black dog. I think his black sheepdog that would be next by his side. So there's a sort of superiority there. Like for a second there's an opportunity to be in real relationship with that depression, the pain behind that suffering. For a second there is.

But it quickly moves into an aloof quality of specialness. "I am the most alone really. I am the most suffering." That's the first kind of arrogance. But it couldn't... this can happen a mile a minute and then I might be the most brilliant, the most artistic, the most truth telling, the rawest.

The four chose isolation. So the consolation prize for isolation will be recognition. You stand apart from the rest. Exceptionalism. But we're not talking about the three here. So we're not going to actually move into that because the four doesn't authentically pursue that because they're too connected with the wound. That specialness is sort of like a poison specialness.

The Descent into Inferiority

And so then we'll just quickly move into inferiority. And if I can't feel inferior to actual others, I'll just feel inferior to my own possibilities. My own possibilities will be presented as frustrations. I'm sort of the opposite of the 7. Where the 7 sees many possible futures. 4 sees many, many possible pasts. And so it's all mourning, it's all frustration.

And it's also shame. Yeah. I mean shame has to be a big part of the Four because when you have this poison specialness, it'll either be recognized and that won't feel good. It will remind me of the unfelt pain. It'll remind me of my aloneness. But my real aloneness. It's almost like that shame. It's hot and it...

What does that heat do? It somehow, you know, it's like that furnace next to the coal to keep it hot. I mean that heat powers and illuminates the symbolic universe. It definitely does that. It's like the one who is alone is doing all of this and his crazy idea is... It's almost like if I tell all these really good stories about an alone person that maybe someone will ask me something like that.

The Three Subtypes

Like well, let's talk about the subtypes because they're famously different, along with the four or the six.

Social Four: Shame

So the Social Fours keyword is shame or debasement. Abasement. I'll just say shame.

Sexual Four: Hate/Competition

The Sexual Fours keyword is hate or competition.

Self-Preservation Four: Tenacity/Endurance

And the Self Preservation keyword is tenacity or endurance.

So, the Enneagram doesn't go easy on the 4. If you compare these keywords to the keywords of the other types.

Understanding the Subtypes

The social type is the one who externalizes their suffering the most. This might be kind of a "woe is me" type that has the crazy idea kind of if I complain then people will make it better. So sort of there's an immaturity to the 4. The 4 still has kind of in some ways the survival strategies of an infant.

So the social four is like a lament. That's how their envy gets expressed. That's how their frustration. "Nobody ever... Why doesn't anybody... Why don't you..." You know that that kind of. "I'll never, no one will. They'll never let you know." That kind of soggy.

That's what... There's a sadness that sends them into the symbolic land where they're having an encounter with loneliness. But rather than stay there, they kind of get fascinated by their loneliness again and then reclaim it as this sort of badge of honor, the scarlet letter. So that's the social type.

The sexual type is hate or competition. So this is a much more adversarial kind of frustration, a biting frustration. So if we had the infant who cries, now we have the infant who bites. So there's a heat there, there's a relational, flirtatious, biting that of course serves to send others away. So actively creates the symbolic palace by pushing people away from it. Whereas the social type will sort of withdraw themselves into the palace.

And then the self preservation four is the one with self directed anger. So if we have the social type is complaining or crying and the sexual type is biting, the self preservation type is biting themselves, self biting. So they choose their frustration as almost kind of an act of heroism. This is the endure type. So this is the infant who kind of represses its needs and kind of like an orphan energy. They all might be, but the self preservation four embodies that more as part of its identity structure.

The Common Core

So really the bottom of the ellipses is the same for all three. All three touch a very lonely place. Touch the long endured pain there. But move away from that into this proud, alone quality, this special quality. They make up the idea it's so important to be special that, you know, I'd rather be alone if it means I can be special, which is the opposite of the truth.

And then their specialness manifests differently. Either I'm especially loathed, in which case I move to shame. I'm especially hated and hating. I move into a conflict, I mean competition with others. Or I'm especially suffering. I'll keep suffering.

The Gift and the Trap

And what is it about suffering that... I mean, there's something about loneliness that is good for artistic expression. Because the fours do feel. I mean, they do feel. In some ways they feel more deeply than every other type. And in some ways they feel, I think, less deeply than every other type.

See, the specialness of the four is coming out, but... And I think the fours kind of are special. I think the fours have a gift for going very deep into the symbolic tapestry that's shared between people. So they're going deep into phenomena, deeper than their own personality, but it's still symbolic.

So I think fours are going to make great poets and artists, etc. And I think they really are special that way. But paradoxically, you know, so I think, for instance, many spiritual teachers are fours, and many people who have written great spiritual texts, I would guess, are fours and fives. And these texts are remarkable for their precision of phenomenal descriptions and ways that speak to people. Many, many people over many, many centuries, which is incredible. So influential because they plucked something.

The Paradox of Symbolic Living

And my hunch is that that comes at the expense of real engagement. Pre-symbolic engagement. So, you know, the four would be incredible at writing a poem about the mango, but probably has the least access to tasting the mango. Like the... I have a feeling like that the felt sense of the thing that four wrote that incredible poem about for another person wouldn't have been a particularly good mango. Like the... The thing that I'm trying to describe, but I don't have a short way of describing it.

It's, you know, beginner's mind. This is like amateur mind. It's like... It's the amateur. You know that word, it comes with love. It's, you know, the person who loves film as an example. Well, that's not a good example. What I want to say is that it's easy for the four to get confused and in their remarkable descriptions of things, think to themselves that they have better access to those things.

I think their incredible descriptions comes from their lack of direct access. The more you dwell in symbols, the more you dwell in symbols. And so the four falls in love. This is the deepest expression of that specialness. The four would rather dwell in symbols than experience real contact.

The Hard Truth

But that's what's hardest for them to admit. That's what's hard for them to admit, that it's not... even that they're exceptionally... That's the last kind of trick. That's that, "Well then I'm exceptionally bad." It's just like you're unremarkable. You're just unremarkable like that.

Exit Points

Yeah, I guess if we were creating exit points, there could be here like, you know, raw pain without story. That's one exit. Then the other exit would be unremarkable. Like when your specialness gets taken away from you, can you just join everybody else? Instead of making your lack of specialness special? You could call this belonging.