People who pull back from the world and live in their mind. May be wise, farsighted and knowledgeable or abstract, stingy and schizoid.

Fives, Sixes and Sevens share a general undercurrent of fear and form another emotional trio. Unlike Twos, Threes and Fours, people within this group are not confused about who they are or how they feel. Instead, they tend to unconsciously anticipate life’s dangers and react from an emotional baseline of fear. Fives, Sixes and Sevens are generally thinkers—people who live more in their heads than in their bodies. They struggle with taking action, asserting their wills and handling power.

A Five’s fears are specifically social; people with this style habitually guard against being invaded or engulfed by others. This is the most explicitly antisocial of Enneagram styles. When defensive, Fives can be withdrawn and standoffish as a way to manage their hypersensitivity to others. Generally, they fear close relationships as these can lead to feeling overwhelmed, smothered or swarmed.

Fives live in their minds, in contrast to Fours, who inhabit their emotional imaginations. People with this style have well-developed abilities to analyze and synthesize knowledge. They may be perceptive, wise and objective, able to stay centered and logical when others around them are confused or panicked. 

Healthy Fives usually strike a balance between interacting with the world and withdrawing from it. This style is frequently associated with knowledgeability and, sometimes, intellectual genius. Healthy Fives actively offer the world the fruits of their knowledge, often through teaching and writing. But, whatever they do, healthy Fives make their talent for accumulating knowledge count for something beyond itself. Fives can be idealistic and sometimes courageously contribute to the social good.

Healthy people with this style also practice what the Buddhists call non-attachment, an attitude characterized by an equal mixture of detachment and compassion. Within this stance Fives can play the games of life without being overly attached to results and, as friends, they may be able to understand your point of view almost as well as their own. They are sympathetic and kind-hearted but able to see events from a distant perspective and avoid getting personally upset. 

When Fives are less healthy, they slide from nonattachment into disassociation, the inner state of being cut off from feelings. They may be hyperaware of the world’s demands, and yet respond passively by withdrawing. Most outsiders see a Five’s capacity to pull back as a kind of independence. It is a defense as well; the Five is making a strong antisocial boundary to compensate for being overly sensitive in the first place.

Cutting themselves off then becomes a defensive habit. The idea is: If I can just learn to live with less I’ll avoid the influence of others. This leads to a tendency to hoard, to save what little they have in order to need less from others. Fives can hoard time, money, space, land, information or emotional availability. It doesn’t matter what is hoarded, the pattern is the same; the Five tries to protect against flooding by stacking up supplies on some dry inner island.

Unhealthy Fives also stay distant from their own emotions by living in a world of information and ideas. The more they cut themselves off, however, the more they struggle with feelings of emptiness, loneliness and compulsive need. It’s like trying to talk yourself out of being hungry. At this stage, a Five may be slow to know how she feels because she can only reach her feelings through a lengthy sequence of thinking. Unhealthy Fives worship gods of reason and try to look distantly down on their own emotions. This can also translate into a superior/arrogant attitude towards other people.

When Fives are very unhealthy, they may become schizoid and unpredictable, as though disassociated parts of themselves are taking turns talking. They can project an absent, vaguely shocked aura or be pointedly antisocial. Fives can, for instance, sit through parties, speak to no one, but later report having had a good time. Or they might unconsciously alienate others with nasty sneering commentary and unpredictable aggression. The habit of disassociating from their emotions can become so developed that very unhealthy Fives can lose touch with reality, developing weird phobias of invisible objects like germs, and be prone to hallucinations. Aggressive episodes are also possible, followed by bursts of acute paranoia.
 

About the Contributor:

Thomas Condon has worked with the Enneagram since 1980. He has taught classes at schools like Antioch University, and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as hundreds of workshops in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. He is the author of 50 audiotapes, 19 videotapes and two books, soon to be more. You can find more information like this, his books, and his tapes at his wesite here.