What is your informed opinion of the validity of the enneagram in the “Enneagram of Personality” sense?”
People are far too complex to be reduced to models such as this. I don’t know of any serious psychologists who subscribes to the notions of the enneagram, though certainly it can at times be a useful tool. Humans need to reduce complex ideas (such as personality) in order to understand them, but depending on such a model and trying to force an individual’s personality to fit into one of these models is just a recipe for getting it wrong. So bottom line, like any other model, it can be useful for helping a professional understand some aspects of an individual’s personality. But a dependence on this for treating someone is potentially dangerous and speaks to a lack of scientific reasoning. I have met many psychologists who are not really scientists and don’t think in scientific terms, but even so I haven’t met any who lend more validity to enneagrams than they merit.
