The Enneagram Field Guide: Notes on using the Enneagram in counseling, therapy
and personal growth, is all that it promised to be and more.
We teach a 9-month course in the Enneagram for mental health professionals
and have been waiting anxiously for this book to be published. We have enthusiastically
read and used the excerpts on the personality types that have appeared in
the Enneagram Monthly. Bartlett has delivered on her promise, offering a
useful guide for all of us who use the Enneagram as a model for understanding
and working with human behavior.
Bartlett stresses that the Enneagram is not a model of therapy but is more
like a road map that can be applied to any treatment approach. The Enneagram
offers a spiritual and psychological way of understanding how humans unconsciously
undermine their own happiness by getting caught in the fixation, trance,
persona, or false self of their personalities.
Many therapists are looking for models that help integrate spirituality and
psychotherapy. Most of us do not have the language or the training to integrate
the two. To paraphrase Bartlett, a therapist who understands how to use the
Enneagram in a spiritual way can help clients recognize their deep gifts
and their essential nature. Learning how to live with fewer defenses and
learning how to endure the void that opens up after the collapse of the old
defenses, supports the clients spiritual and psychological transformation
As clinicians, we are looking for a model that has:
1. a way of organizing behavior
2. has suggestions about pathology, (DSM IV)
3. offers ways of looking at healthy and unhealthy behavior without pathologizing
that behavior
4. treatment suggestions that include how to form a relationship with the
client and understand their view of the world
5. how to recognize defense mechanisms
6. how to help your client recognize their anger and express it constructively,
and
7. how to handle stress and relationship issues.
The Field Guide has nine chapters, each devoted to a personality type. The
chapters offer helpful comments and insights on such topics as how the personality
type presents itself in therapy, childhood experiences and adult defenses,
what works and doesn’t work with each type, suggestions about transference
and countertransference, in-depth explorations and illustrations of treatment
issues that are particularly relevant to that type, connecting points, suggestions
about the use of dreams and what she refers to as “good enough therapy.”
Bartlett bases her suggestions on in-depth interviews with individuals of
each type who have been in therapy as well as her own clinical experience
over 20 plus years.
In the section on “presentation in therapy for Ones,” it is acknowledged
that Ones can be self-critical and self-deprecating. Ones, however, can also
appear critical of others; they are projecting their own shortcomings. It
is helpful for a therapist to know that Ones suffer from an over-active superego
when they are making efforts to establish therapeutic relationships.
In the section on “childhood experiences and defenses,” Bartlett suggests
that understanding defense mechanisms is central to treatment. In the Enneagram
that each personality has a distinct defense. Knowing the defense of each
type will give the therapist a head start on what will happen in treatment,
as well as providing a guide for the client in understanding life experiences
and life choices.
The sections on “what works and doesn’t work” are the most helpful and original
part of the guide. Bartlett uses material from in-depth interviews to fill
out her own clinical experiences. The stories and reports from different
types in therapy are enlightening. For example, in the section on “what doesn’t
work” for Eights, an Eight says, “therapy needs to be fast and hard hitting
early on.” And “I need someone equal and intellectually able to handle me.”
Because Eights struggle with vulnerability, Bartlett suggests that later,
once trust has been established, having a safe, nurturing relationship is
critical for Eights. In the section on “what doesn’t work” Bartlett focuses
on countertransference and transference issues. For example a Two in therapy
admits that they were successful in flattering and trying to please their
therapist in an attempt to be special; this comes at the risk of not getting
into difficult transference issues.
Many helpful suggestions were offered in the section “what does work.” In
the chapter on Fours, a client suggests that what is “most helpful is when
someone I trust can just sit with me through the defense (introjection),
and not try to help me out of the place that I am in but maybe help me attach
words to my feelings.” In the same Bartlett offers guidance on topics such
as getting grounded, mind/body and right brain approaches, working with melancholia
and depression and emotionality versus authenticity.
The Enneagram is a dynamic system and using the connecting points in therapy
offers yet another way of exploring aspects of self. For example, a therapist
working with a Nine and their Three connection might ask, “what would it
be like if you really went after what you wanted and got it?” Working with
the Nine’s Six connection gives the therapist the opportunity to move against
the “peace at any price” attitude and confront deeper emotions and anxieties.
The only question that we have of Bartlett is why she didn’t include subtypes
as an important part of therapy. Perhaps that’s another book.
The Field Guide to the Enneagram is a necessary reference book for any clinician,
counselor, coach or spiritual director if they are using the Enneagram model.
We are using it as a required text for our training program.
Antoinette M Saunders, PhD
Harriet Porter, LCSW
Institute for Psychological and Spiritual Development
Chicago, Ill.
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