Enneagram Types
The Loyalist
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Origin 1916 to 1949
Type Six, the Loyalist (also called the Skeptic or Guardian), is one of the nine Enneagram personality types. The Six is committed, responsible, vigilant, and security-oriented, scanning for danger and seeking something trustworthy to rely on, whether authority, belief, or community. Its basic fear is of being without support or guidance, unable to survive on its own, and its basic desire is to find security and support. Its characteristic vice or passion is fear (chronic anxiety and doubt), and its balancing virtue is courage. The Six belongs to the Head or Thinking triad, whose central issue is fear and security, and it sits between the Five and Seven wings. Under growth (integration) the Six moves toward the calm and steadiness of the healthy Nine; under stress (disintegration) it takes on the driven, competitive quality of the unhealthy Three.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1916 to 1949 2Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff) Origin Period1971 to 1975 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Origin PeriodHe taught the scheme in Chile through the later 1960s and formally from his Arica Institute from 1970, mapping nine ego-fixations onto Gurdjieff's figure 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Origin PeriodThe nine types are Oscar Ichazo's 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Origin PeriodThis is the moment the personality system comes into existence and there is no earlier one 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Place of OriginArica in northern Chile, and then Berkeley, California 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Place of OriginMoscow and Saint Petersburg, where Gurdjieff was teaching in 1916, and then Constantinople and Fontainebleau, where the work continued after the revolution. 2Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff) Place of OriginThe system is South American and North American in equal measure and belongs to the countercultural psychology of the years around 1970 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Creator / OriginatorOscar Ichazo, who made the nine-type scheme and attached it to Gurdjieff's figure, and Claudio Naranjo, whose psychological elaboration is the version the later literature descends from. Both are named, both are recent, and neither claim is disputed by anyone who has looked at the record. 2 Origin of the Name"Enneagram" is Greek: ennea, nine, and gramma, a figure or a thing drawn. The word names the DIAGRAM and nothing else. Its transfer to a nine-type personality theory happened in the twentieth century and is the source of most of the confusion about the system's age, a reader told that the enneagram is old is being told something true about a shape and something false about a typology. 2Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff) Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryUsed, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 3 Debunked
Attributed Author / CompilerPopular writing traces the system to a Sarmoung Brotherhood in central Asia, to Sufi masters, to the desert fathers, to Pythagoras. No independent evidence for the Sarmoung Brotherhood exists; Gurdjieff's account of visiting it is read even by sympathetic scholars as teaching narrative, not reportage; no Sufi order used the figure this way; and the figure is not attested before Gurdjieff. 2Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff) Carole M. Cusack's article "The Enneagram: G. I. Gurdjieff's Esoteric Symbol" (Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, vol. 20, no. 1, Brill, 2020, pp. 31-54) traces the nine-pointed figure to George Gurdjieff's own early twentieth-century teaching and examines the lineage claims later attached to it, that it descends from a Sarmoung Brotherhood, from Sufi masters, from the Christian desert fathers, or from Pythagoras. Checking each claim against the documentary record, Cusack finds no independent evidence a Sarmoung Brotherhood existed, no Sufi order that used the figure this way, and no attestation of the symbol earlier than Gurdjieff's own circle. The personality-typing use of the enneagram, distinct from Gurdjieff's own geometric teaching, was added later still, by Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo in the 1960s and 1970s. On that documentary record the ancient-lineage claim is not historical. Attributions
Wing TypesSourced to the subject's own accountType Six's two possible wings are Five (the Investigator, giving 6w5) and Seven (the Enthusiast, giving 6w7). 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceIn Gurdjieff's own teaching the figure is a diagram of how any process unfolds: a circle divided by nine points, carrying the law of three and the law of seven, with the inner lines showing where a process must be fed from outside if it is not to run down. It describes events, not people. Nothing in it identifies a type, and no published student of Gurdjieff attaches one. 2Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff) Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe passion Ichazo gives type Six is FEAR, the second of his two additions, and like deceit it appears in neither Evagrius' eight nor Gregory's seven. Types Three and Six are the two seats in the scheme that the Christian ascetic tradition does not supply, and they exist because nine points needed nine passions. 2Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo) Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseVery widely used and very thinly evidenced, and both halves are true. A systematic review of 104 samples found the subscales relate to established measures as the theory predicts, but that factor analyses typically recover FEWER THAN NINE factors and that no study derives the nine types by clustering. It is not a validated instrument and must not be used for hiring or clinical decisions. 3 Learn More
Type Six in the System
Type Six, the Loyalist, Skeptic or Guardian, stands at the centre of the head triad and is the type most directly identified with fear. Its basic desire is for security and support, its basic fear is of being without support or guidance. Its passion is fear itself, and its virtue is courage. The system distinguishes two expressions, the phobic Six, which seeks safety in alliance and authority, and the counterphobic Six, which meets the same anxiety by running at what frightens it, and this doubling makes Six the type hardest to identify from the outside. Its wings are Five and Seven. Under stress the system places Six at Three, becoming driven and image-conscious; in growth it moves to Nine, becoming settled and trusting.
In the Hornevian groups, Riso and Hudson's second classification drawn from Karen Horney's three neurotic trends, Six is placed among the compliant types that move toward others, alongside One and Two, a placement some readers find counterintuitive for the counterphobic expression of the type, which can look assertive on the surface; the system resolves this by treating compliance with an internalized authority, rather than surface behavior, as the deciding trait.
The Enneagram in Christian Settings
The system entered the English-speaking world partly through Jesuit channels: Naranjo taught it in Berkeley in the early 1970s, and among those who learned it were Roman Catholic clergy, notably Robert Ochs, who introduced it into Jesuit retreat and formation work at Loyola in Chicago, from which it spread rapidly through Catholic and later evangelical spiritual direction. The link to the capital vices made it look continuous with the Christian ascetic tradition, which helped. Reception has been mixed. Some Catholic and Protestant bodies have welcomed it as a tool of self-knowledge; others have objected to its syncretic origins and to the historical claims made for it, and a 2000 draft document of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' committee on doctrine raised concerns about its use. Both responses are part of the record.
One of the most widely read Christian treatments, Richard Rohr's and Andreas Ebert's The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, reached English readers in a 2001 edition adapting Rohr's earlier 1989 German-language treatment; it presents the nine types as spiritual patterns to be worked through rather than as a secular personality inventory and did much to extend the system's use in Catholic retreat work beyond the Jesuit circles where Ochs first introduced it. Rohr, a Franciscan friar rather than a Jesuit, represents a second and independent Catholic channel by which the system reached a wide readership.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
Disintegrates Toward
Riso-Hudson stress/disintegration direction: Type Six moves toward the unhealthy qualities of Type Three.
Disintegration Point For
Riso-Hudson stress/disintegration direction: Type Nine moves toward the unhealthy qualities of Type Six.
Integrates Toward
Riso-Hudson growth/integration direction: Type Six moves toward the healthy qualities of Type Nine.
Integration Point For
Riso-Hudson growth/integration direction: Type Three moves toward the healthy qualities of Type Six.
Sources
1. Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987Type Six, the Loyalist
1. Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987Integration Point For: The Achiever
1. Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987Integrates Toward: The Peacemaker
1. Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987Disintegrates Toward: The Achiever
1. Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987Disintegration Point For: The Peacemaker
2. The Enneagram: G. I. Gurdjieff's Esoteric Symbol
Carole M. Cusack, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 20, no. 1 (Brill), pp. 31-54, 2020on Arica and on the Berkeley groupsView the Source 3. The Enneagram: A systematic review of the literature and directions for future research
Joshua N. Hook, Todd W. Hall, Don E. Davis, Daryl R. Van Tongeren and Mackenzie Conner, Journal of Clinical Psychology, volume 77 number 4, 2021the review's conclusions and its cautions on applied useView the Source Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View
Claudio Naranjo, Gateways/IDHHB, 1994the transmission of the system in the 1970s
Essays About This Entity (2 essays)
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