Author Archive for: Jerry Wagner

Wonder is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a cause of astonishment or admiration; the quality of exciting amazed admiration; rapt attention or astonishment at something awesomely mysterious or new to one’s experience; to be curious or in doubt.”

When I read this definition, I thought of a child’s first encounter with something new in the world. Actually, everything is new to a child.

Then I thought about the Enneagram styles and wondered if wonder flows from and fosters the high side or essence of each style. Wonder seems to accompany the adaptive or divine idea which elicits the virtue or adaptive emotional response. Wonder acts as an antidote to the maladaptive or wrong ideas which stir up the vices of the styles.

By Jerome Wagner, Ph.D.

From the Enneagram perspective, the idols of our personality, manifested in our idealized self image, beckon us to security and happiness. But to reach their promised land, we must pledge our unwavering devotion and fealty to them. And if we disobey them and take another path, they warn us that what we are most afraid of will surely come about.

On the other hand, our essence or genuine self invites us to a deeper security and well-being. It is a gentle calling, doesn’t use threats, is always there, but may not be as easily recognized. We are guided along this path by our values and ideals.

By Jerome Wagner, Ph.D.

When we over-identify or over-idealize certain aspects of our personality, we tend to disavow any opposite attributes. To avoid these unacceptable parts of ourselves, we put them in the basement (our unconscious) where we can forget about them. Instead of being a whole me, we become the good me and the bad me, like Jeckle and Hyde. If we can re-cognize, re-frame, and re-own our unseemly parts, we might find some valuable assets tossed out with our garbage, and re-cycle them. We will gain an inner integration and wholesome connections with other people, both of which lead to an increase of energy since we are no longer divided against ourselves and others.

By Jerome Wagner, Ph.D.

George Kelly (1963) has been called the father of cognitive psychotherapy.  Kelly’s metaphor is we are all junior scientists trying to figure out our world so we can predict and control our environment and the reactions our behavior will elicit from the environment (mostly our social environment.)  We look for repetitions around us and then formulate constructs or representations to map our world.  The mind looks for order and then imposes that order in the form of templates on our experiences and the world. Like scientists we develop theories and hypotheses that will help predict future events, thus reducing uncertainty.  

There is some debate about which Enneagram styles display narcissistic tendencies.  Some put Sevens in the narcissistic category; some put Threes in that basket; some say any Enneagram type can manifest narcissistic leanings.  I propose to completely unresolve this issue by presenting some theories about the origins or etiology of narcissism, quoting some theories about which Enneagram styles might express narcissistic tendencies, and in conclusion drawing some inconclusions.