Enneagram. Character and evolution in Gestalt therapy L 'E nneagramma , ancient method of self-knowledge and spiritual evolution, seems to have originated in Persia more than two thousand years ago, where it was used as an initiatory journey from Sufi masters.
is a tool to increase awareness of themselves
helps them discover their own uniqueness and to grasp the similarities with other people helps you see the acts and conduct automated personal inclinations, the selective trends of their way to observe and understand the world around them, in other words, it helps to recognize the dynamics that affect their lives.
What is the nature ?
back at the history of psychology can be seen that, as always, anyone who has taken an interest in human behavior have noted this in mind, depending on the author, a centering, a fixation or a distortion of his personality .
First of all is the theory of Karen Horney, who had identified three types of character : those focused on 'independence , those centered the power and those centered on ' love.
Another position is that of Heinz Kohut, who studied different types of transference (and therefore indirectly of character), I called three pillars: the mirror transference, the idealizing transference and the transference twin .
These clinical observations centered on personality differences assume greater importance when they are identified and proposed also in experimental research, such as the theory of John Bowlby. He
, noting in an experimental setting to the report of dyad between mother and child, described as potential predictors of personality development, three different modes of attachment of the child toward his mother: that avoidant, ambivalent than and the disorganized.
Despite this brief introduction, it is still not answered the original question: what is the nature ?
In fact, the analysis focuses on manifestations of character, its different functions, but has yet to define its nature.
To try to get closer to its definition may be appropriate with some analogies and metaphors.
A first interesting metaphor is that of Jung: "the character is like a necklace made up of many beads connected by a single thread."
He believed that personality is a dynamic structure through mutual cooperation of the archetypes, which represent the basic components through which psychic energy is manifested.
His metaphor identifies and places within each archetype of a pearl and sees a whole, the formation of the series, the relationship between them.
The harmony of nature and welfare of the person is in relation to the harmony between archetypes, and the discomfort and psychological distress was dependent on a poor match between the archetypes.
disharmony back to the metaphor of a pearl necklace when unsaturated starts to absorb more energy at the expense of others, and continuing in this behavior hypertrophy causes a decompensation of the collection.
Another interesting metaphor is that of Money: "the character is like a government that administers the nation."
A republican government exercises its power through the ministries: they are its executive functions and the work of these depends on the good performance of the nation.
This metaphor sees the government as the ego, the ego functions as the ministries and the nation as a body or self.
The harmony and the welfare of the nation is given by the goodness of its democratic government, while his suffering is the presence of a dictatorial government which was established by a military coup. In a dictatorial state
all incoming information, energy resources and economic resources are filtered by the activity of a single ministry, military, and is the only decision that the way in which they are made available to the nation.
This can be called the character , as for instance a deputy to the management of personal and emotional resources of a person.
goodness and harmony of nature depends on the well-being or discomfort to a person.
L ' Enneagram identifies nine major forms of alteration of the character .
The types of character differ from each other for different modes of management, control and manipulation of affective emotional relationships with others and the world. The
character is neither anything good nor anything bad in itself. It plays a fundamental existential, behavior management of the person within its environment. The goodness of
a person's character lies in its dynamism and flexibility in its ability to adapt as best you can in relation to different types of environments and situations, such as those relating to employment, those related to love and those relating to pleasure and fun.
alterations of character make adaptation difficult and hard, thus reducing the chances that a person has to trade satisfactorily with others and the world.
restrictions and reduction of the exchange functional with the other comes the pain and psychological distress.
Work psychotherapeutic aims all'aiutare the person to focus their alteration of character, all'aiutarla in understanding how certain modes of behavior are not arbitrary and spontaneous, but the automatic modes, rigid and repetitive management and control of affect themselves and others.
The goal of therapeutic work centered on the character is not to eliminate or change this, because if anything were possible to do this, would lead to a reversal of a "coup" to present a different, or to a kind of way instead of another.
The work aims to make the more democratic and flexible its character , so would resume the process of functional behavior that Fritz Perls called "organismic self" , or the rebirth of their inner wisdom.
