First, we would like to thank all of our visitors - those who left messages in the guest book, on the message board, or via email. The dialogues that have taken place as a result of the contacts that people have made here have already borne fruit. One person's interest or excitement or disbelief piques the interest of someone else, who is irritated and amused or challenged to sit down and write a reply, and that person also reacts - needs to complain to a third person about what is going on, or share the gold mine that they have found.

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And so there is a ripple effect that extends outward, not only from one individual, but from each person that gets involved - like rain drops in a puddle, creating those delightful and crazy designs that scientists call 'interference patterns' on the surface of the water as the waves emanating from one drop cross the paths of waves radiating out from another.

What is especially interesting to us, and gratifying, is that all of this happens without any special effort at 'directing' the process. In fact, the effort to control the outcome is just as likely to squelch the process, inhibiting individual creativity and rendering contrived results. People know what to do, or quickly learn, when left to their own devices. They form mutual associations, help each other, argue, debate, have fun, fall in love, get angry. And something positive emerges, unexpected, delightful.

We are very happy to have been able to play even the smallest part in beginning to facilitate such a process here - and by the word 'facilitate' we simply mean 'creating an environment that makes possible'.

Special thanks go out to those who cared enough about the issues to come forward and speak their minds, share their views about personality type, ask questions, make suggestions, talk to others. And to those who volunteered their art work, tried to put into words what doing art means to them, and how they do it, what they see and feel and think about.

Sure, we are excited to receive articles - carefully worked out, thoughtful pieces. And we thank those who have contributed and will contribute in the future. But there is something slightly misleading, if truth be told, about that strange phenomenon of writing an article and attaching one's name to it. When one stops to acknowledge all of the forces that come together in producing even the shortest essay, or a single thought - when one looks at who did what and when - one is quickly humbled. Even though it may not be 'wrong' per se to attach one's name to a piece as its 'author', the author is only the tip of a social iceberg that reaches not only beyond herself, but also beyond the small circle of friends and discussants that were directly involved in producing the work, back through an ocean of time. It is like a kind of social variant of the famous 'butterfly effect' in chaos theory - yesterday the wings of one individual flaps virtually unnoticed halfway around the globe, and today that action creates a significant shift in somebody else's way of seeing things.

So we would like to dedicate this first issue of 'The Enneagram and the MBTI' not to some specific individual (although there are many worthy candidates) or to a celebrity amongst us, but to the deep social 'pool' itself and the mysterious way that raindrops form out of empty sky and fall to pool their contributions. So here's to the puddle and the raindrops! The patterns on the water may vanish as quickly as they emerge, but this does not detract from their beauty. It is, in fact, one of the things that make them dynamic pieces of art to be treasured ... and also to be released, permitted to merge back into the whole from whence they come.

The 'Art and Personality Gallery'

Four works of art have been contributed to this issue's 'art and personality gallery'. Over time, we hope to be able to show pieces by individuals of all types, and all combinations. We believe that there are fundamentally different approaches to art, intimately related to personality type. Let's look (and listen) to what people do, and how they do it, and see if we can begin to appreciate how their processes and products are related to personality type. There are also probably just as many 'theories' ABOUT art as there are approaches to art - and we suspect that these ALSO parallel personality types. So this piece could be a lot of fun.

Amongst the four individuals participating in this issue there is a professional artist who has been highly successful as a graphic illustrator and art editor (you have all seen his work, and experienced the effect that he has had on his field), a young man who shows one of his very first pieces, a participant in Natalie Rogers' Expressive Arts Therapy Institute, and a guy who experiments with charcoal and music composition. Below each work there are three 'buttons' - one which enables you to activate a pop-up screen that shows the artist's statement about his/her work, a second button that presents you with an opportunity to comment on the artist's work and register your impression of his/her MBTI and Enneagram types, and a third button which will, on August 25th (and thereafter), reveal the artist's type - once we have given any viewers who want to make an educated guess about the artists' types ample opportunity to do so.

This is not a 'juried' art show. The purpose here is not to stand in judgment over the art that individuals display - or, for that matter, to evaluate the individuals themselves, their methods, or what they say about what they do. And we are hesitant, as many of you probably also are, to attribute the product of an individual's creative efforts exclusively to 'type'. What we DO hope to hear about, however, is what you subjectively experienced in viewing the pieces, and what that experience tells you, if anything, about the personality type of the individual who created it. We give you the opportunity, in registering your comments and guesses, to state your own personality type, which will give other people some idea of where you may be coming from.

If you are inspired to submit a piece of your own work here, please do! If you know somebody else who might be interested in doing so, please encourage them to email us. We are looking for pieces that can be adequately displayed using this medium (the web), and we prefer to show pieces that were not deliberately created by persons who were trying to demonstrate their personality type.

Conversations

In the conversations section of the Journal we hope to present snippets of dialogue that occured more or less spontaneously - on the subject of the relationship between the MBTI and the Enneagram. These may have taken place via email, displayed on a message board, or captured in a transcript of a chat. If an interesting discussion has taken place on this subject, as informal as it may have been, and you have been able to record that conversation and can display it in a way that might makes sense to others, please let us know. Very small excerpts from a conversation are okay, too - sometimes, as you know, treasures come in small packages.

Letters to the Editor

We greatly appreciate those brave souls who signed the 'guest book' and left messages for us there, and the time and effort that others spent in composing formal letters to the editor. What both groups had to say can be found on the 'letters to the editor' page.

Open House

We invite you to a house warming party, in celebration of the opening of the Journal. It will take place on Thursday evening, August 20th, at 9:00 PM EST, in our chatroom at Delphi. We'd like to meet you and talk to you - about who you are and what you'd like to see. Now that the Journal is up, we will have more time to devote to scheduling and conducting discussion groups at the chatroom site. To check the chatroom schedule click on the 'upcoming events' circle at the front door of our site, or on the front page of the journal. It looks like this -

What's

Javascript Tool
for Exploring Typological Space

Please keep an eye open for this tool, which we will be adding to the site very soon (within a week's time, we hope).

Type Indicators
and Experimental Instruments

Check out the type indicators on the Front Page - especially if you are new to either Enneagram or Jungian/MBTI type, and are interested in getting some rough idea of what types you may be. If you want to explore whether you have one of the 'functional preference orders' traditionally associated with the MBTI (eg, S-T-F-N) or one that is, by definition, not allowed (eg, S-T-N-F), you can play around with the experimental instrument that we have included for that purpose.

'Geldart's Fifth Function' seeks to show how Geldart's move to a 'five function theory' is a plausible, almost irresistable strategy for reconciling the two systems that underlie the Enneagram and the MBTI respectively - Ouspensky's and Jung's. Both men offered their own separate 'four function' theories. As it turned out, however, although their respective lists basically agree on three out of the four, there is apparently fundamental disagreement about the nature of the fourth function. An obvious, but ingenious solution, is a five function theory.

Michael Huber's article, Misidentifying Individuals as 'Ones' details how type Sixes can be mistaken for Ones. With penetrating insight, Huber shows how this reveals a deeper level mistake in using the Enneagram - when one trait exhibited by the individual (often the most obvious) is brought into relief at the expense of a description of the whole personality - resulting in mistyping. These misidentifications, as Huber points out, have led authors to mistakenly infer that the MBTI and the Enneagram CHARACTERISTICALLY identify opposing qualities in the individual.

'On Wyman's Theory' makes a related point. It argues that Wyman's use of the Enneagram, as innovative and therapeutically useful as it may be, does not justify her enneagram-mbti theory, or the inferences that others have made about the relationship between the two systems on the basis of her work. One may use either the Enneagram or the MBTI to type subpersonalities in the individual, but one should not mistake this activity for an accurate identification of the personality type of the individual as a whole.

Geldart's discussion of the analysis of the EM survey data done by Fudjack/Dinkelaker, The Distribution of Reported MBTI Types Across Enneazones, and S-N Blindness focuses on the various 'data lenses' that can be used to explore patterns in survey data. Walter has always claimed that the Enneagram can be better understood in terms of Jungian type than MBTI type and was therefore particularly appreciative of the methodologies that F/D invented to look at this level and other levels of description of the data. As chaos theory and fractal geometry has so aptly demonstrated, different patterns will appear at different levels of magnification.

In 'A Third Principle Governing the Distribution of MBTI Type Across the Enneazones', Pat and John show how Jungian 'pure' type may provide an important key to how MBTI type distributes - with specific pure types acting as hidden 'strange attractors' for MBTI types in each of the enneazones. Pure types are those in which the first and second functions of the individual have the same orientation - eg, 'introverted thinking' and 'introverted intuition' as the first and second functions in an individual. Because MBTI typology does not permit this combination, pure types will test, using this example, as INTJs and INTPs. When one looks closely at the distribution data, the phenomenon of 'pure' type not only accounts for a very particular pattern of distribution that appears across all of the introverted zones, it neatly reconciles the Fudjack/Dinkelaker model with Rio's assignments.

Interestingly, this paper came out of a series of discussions that occured at this web site, a dialogue that is excerpted in part in the 'conversations' column. It all started with a persistent 19 year old who was very clever in the argument that he used to challenge the F/D theory. The solution to the problem that he was posing was solved by Andrew Dinkelaker, who proposed that it was the 'pure' types (which are intimately related to the Jungian pairs that we assigned) which characterize the Enneazones.

The final paper, Putting Enneagram and MBTI Types Under Close Empirical Scrutiny is self-explanatory. Only 'sensing' types will be patient and attentive enough to utilize the sophisticated 'data lenses' that Fabio Ciucci provides us with in this article to bring the relevant details clearly into focus.