What is the Core Pattern?

Before we discuss the nine types in detail, we should briefly describe the structural properties of the core pattern.

When I talk about the core pattern, I’m using it interchangeably with phrases like ego structure, personality, or character. It is what many of us are implicitly referring to when we say “I want,” or “I need,” or “this is important to me.”

I choose the phrase “core pattern” because our aim in this course is to disidentify from this structure and study it carefully. If it helps, we can even think of ourselves as meteorologists, and our core pattern as a hurricane.

Closely following Claudio Naranjo, we can define the core pattern as:

A way of being originally adopted as a survival strategy in childhood, that now runs automatically through an interplay of emotion (passion) and cognition (fixation) designed to self-perpetuate, frustrate, and obscure.

I recognize that this is dense language, but the core pattern itself is dense: it is a complicated, brilliant piece of machinery, as we can personally attest to given how difficult it is for us to understand despite its omnipresence in our lives.

Rather than conceiving of our pattern as “good” or “bad” or “some mix of both,” what we want to come back to is its automaticity; our patterns operate on old information, and are characterized by a lack of awareness about what’s actually going on. They do not allow us to respond creatively to the present situation, and it’s exactly this ability that we want to recover.

While I’m preserving Naranjo’s language of “passion” and “fixation,” I don’t want us to lose touch with how simple and intuitive these two notions are. By passion, we mean our default emotion, or drive, or motivation. We could also use a word like addiction, or the feeling that we get hooked on. The passion acts as an energy source, although as we’ll learn, this is a kind of “dirty energy” – think coal, not solar.

Our passion causes us to pursue our goals and see the world in a particular way; our perceptions are shaped by our motivations. The conclusions we reach based on our perceptions we call our fixation. This means our ideas, stories, or habits of mind.

The fixation always reinforces our passion, as if to say “Aha! I knew it.” Using the metaphor of light, we could imagine shining a red light (passion) on a dark room and reaching the conclusion that everything is red (fixation).

With this basic introduction out of the way, we’re ready to learn the nine core patterns of the Enneagram.