Dearly missed: the real meaning of envy for the Enneagram type 4

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a sunny and reasonably cool Friday morning here in New York.

I want to do a podcast within a podcast. So I'm going to be doing a series of recordings about the Enneagram, in particular the types four and five, where I find my own personality sort of most at home.

And I want to explore these with a very deep and very close reading of Claudio Naranjo, who is considered one of the sort of fathers, of the modernization enneagram. He worked, in the 1970s, extensively on the Enneagram and produced a really wonderful book called 27 Personajes en busca del ser, or 27 personalities in search of being. As far as I know, this hasn't been translated into English. I've translated it using the help of modern AI tools, but I also speak Spanish reasonably well, understand Spanish reasonably well, so have been able to spot check it here and there.

And it's funny if you find some of my earliest podcasts. I started, a podcast called reading Spanish, where I was practicing my own spanish translation. So in some ways, this is a real throwback for me. I think Naranjo's work is very powerful and full of insight, so I'm excited to dive in. So this is going to be the first recording, and we're going to talk about Enneagram type four. And we're going to read Naranjo and discuss. So I, have here on the left, my translation, on the right, the source text.

So Enneagram type four has the sin or the passion of envy. So right away we're getting right into sin, which is such a fraught word for the Enneagram, and will immediately turn off two kinds of people. One is the religious or Christian type, who feels uncomfortable working with sin. because sin is so loaded, it evokes thoughts of hell. It might evoke cultural norms like, let's say, homosexuality being a sin according to some churches or some religious people. So it might be unbearably heavy for some people, and then for others, it just might feel, outmoded or sort of irrelevant. Sin is not real. Sin is a construct, etcetera.

But actually, I think you can't really take the sin out of the enneagram. So one of the origins of the enneagram dates back to Ponticus. We're on the Internet, so let's google it. It's the eight deadly thoughts. And so this is the precursor to the seven deadly sins, which are much more, well known. The evil thoughts, Evagrius ponticus. So you won't find the seven deadly sins or the eight evil thoughts in the Bible. Rather, they were sort of, written about by a very early christian named Evagrius Ponticus. So I think in the 300s, he was a mystic. He, grew up in Turkey, it says here. And in order to deal with his own sin, he retreated to the Egyptian desert and joined cenobitic community of desert fathers. So I love this. I mean, we're talking about desert monks now. So that's when you talk about the Enneagram and ancient spiritual wisdom. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about people, fasting and going to the desert to connect as powerfully as they can with God, with the Source. I need to look up what cenobitic means and how to pronounce it. Community life. Okay. So I as opposed to, you know, hermetic. Fine.

Anyway, the eight evil thoughts, then you're just one away from the Enneagram nine. And as it turns out, the one that's missing is fear. And Richard Rohr points out, I think, in a compelling way, that fear, in a way, wasn't listed because it's the most common of the deadly thoughts. It's almost too close to name, too close to see. So when you add fear, which is the sin of the six, and the six is the most common enneagram type, and you round it out to nine.

So what is sin? What is passion? That's a big question. And there's a lot of ways to dive into it. I don't think we need to talk too much about it now, but just to ground us before we get into envy and the four, you could think of it as sort of addiction. It's like, this is where passion comes in. It's like, what do you just keep coming back to? What's your vice? What's your home base in terms of unhealth? Your home base in terms of addiction, your home base, we all know that, right? When we have these patterns and these dynamics that we're like, ugh, I can't believe I did it again. That's your sin. So it's important, I think, for the enneagram, at least the way that I know it, it's important to be ready to feel that humility and humiliation of, like, ugh, God. Yeah, that's me. Envy, that's me.

So let's talk about it. Envy is the passion for controlling and calibrating one's own existence by comparing it with that of another. The meaning of existence largely depends on the level of lack and frustration concerning what is perceived as desirable in others. So it's a pretty dense introduction there. And actually, I want to go slow here because this is so important. And I want to start off by saying, as a four, I've had a lot of trouble connecting with envy as a sin, recognizing it as my sin. I'm getting there, though. The more I, understand what envy really is, the more I'm like, yes, that is a problem for me.

But all of these sins, they have that quality where they rarely mean exactly what they sound like. When we get to the five, we'll talk about the five and avarice and greed. It's the same thing. It's never quite the most obvious or most common understanding of these sins, but they're there. And so envy, immediately when I think about envy, I think about wanting what other people seem to have. And for some fours that might be more available than others. For instance, by the way, I should add here, I'm just assuming that you have deep familiarity with the enneagram, and so if you don't, some of this might go over your head. And that's fine. Come back anytime. I'm not going to do too much table setting here. So the four and envy. If I'm closer to three, my threeness, then my envy may be more common in the sense of, like, I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm following entrepreneurs on twitter, and they all seem to be crushing it. And I'm like, oh, why can't I crush it? What's wrong with me such that I don't have what they have? Am I not smart enough? Am I not ambitious enough? Do I not have enough charisma or clarity? So the four’s envy may be actually quite available in that sense, but as a four with more of a five wing, I never really found myself wanting to be somebody else or comparing myself unfavorably.

But I do feel a sense of lack. So I think one of the entry points is this word lack itself. And, To get into lack further. Although lack is actually quite a lovely word too. And I don't know enough about its origins, maybe we'll do some searching. But let's go to the Spanish. El sentido de la existencia de­ pende en gran medida del nivel de carencia y frustración respecto de lo que se percibe como deseable en los demás. So it's the level of lack respective to what I think other people have. So I'm doing two things. I'm constructing a view of what others have. And I'm using that sort of, perceived level of the other to then locate my own level. In most cases, unfavorably. But sometimes we'll see the four sometimes does flip it and compare themselves favorably. But it's always comparison, and it's constructed comparison. In other words, I'm perceiving that which is desirable in others, and then noticing that I don't have it. Or again, sometimes perceiving that they don't have it. And I have tons of it. But in both cases, even when it seems to be flipped in my favor, it's still lack. We'll get into that at some point. But it's still comparison. It's still coming from a starved sense of self.

And carencia, I think, is a really beautiful word that we'll use to come back to lack. So cariño is a term of endearment in Spanish. It's kind of a form of, love. It's like, dear one, mi cariño, my dear one. And so I think of the word dear as I want to bring in the word dear. Because we talk about, you know, people being dear to us. But their dearness is so already caught up in how painful it is when they're not with us. And we still see that a little bit in English today when we might say, that cost me dearly or it was a dear loss. There's an economy, there's a way of evaluating the love in terms of the pain of not having that one. You're so dear to me. I, don't know if you can contact that pain. There's heartbreak in dearness. And I think cariño, maybe because of the Spanish culture, I think it's a sweeter feeling. But there's that connection. Carencia is lack, and cariño is dear, slightly nostalgic.

So, paradoxically, the loving is almost informed by I love you, because I feel the pain of not having you. And so even when you're here before me, you're dear, you're cariño. Because I know I'm half living in you not being here. And so we're starting already to move into the word that I use to describe the four. Sometimes the four is called The Individualist. And I think that's just a really poor descriptor. I prefer The Romantic. And The Romantic starts to speak to that same feeling of nostalgia and fantasy and not being in contact. Instead, the form of contact that one is in the story. If you have a romantic idea of your partner or romantic idea of what you're going to do with your life, you have a fantasy. And that fantasy is somehow sort of grounded in the past. You've sort of already imagined how wonderful it could be.

There's a story about Jim Carrey, and I think Jim Carrey is a three, or at least, certainly this story speaks to his threeness. I don't like typing celebrities, and, you know, actually, even with Jim Carrey, I googled it just to be, you know, out of curiosity. Everyone thinks he's a seven. But here's a three thing that Jim Carrey did when he was young. He wrote himself a check for a million dollars, maybe even $10 million, and said, one day a movie studio is going to write you this check for a million dollars. And he kept it in his wallet for 20 years and then made The Mask and got to cash that check. So there's that manifesting quality, that future-looking fantasy that a three might have, and a seven would also have that. I think it's more the way that Jim Carrey shapeshifts and becomes chameleonic and has this ambition, for me, speaks to more of a three energy. Regardless, we're talking about something very different when we talk about romance or fantasy of the four. The Jim Carrey as a four would have fantasies of being a famous movie star, and then would look at his life as it is now, struggling to make ends meet and feel the heartbreak of not having the career that he had fantasized. So are we starting to get the feel of envy again?

Fours, and Naranjo says this, fours have the most diversity of their subtypes. So we're going to talk about all three subtypes, the social four, the sexual four, and the self preservation four. And so accordingly, envy can take on very different forms for the four. But I want to spend some time here talking about the kinds of envy that might be less obvious than sort of common envy. And one of them would be envy of the life that you imagined you should have or could have had. And the other, it might be also envy of your own childhood, envy of a time when things seem to have been wonderful. That's also behind you. So when we talk about others, let's use others in the broadest sense. It doesn't have to be other real beings who are physically in the world now. It could be beings in our fantasy land, beings in our memory.

The desire to have what the other has is not a wish whose end is to obtain precisely what the other possesses, but rather the only possibility of being in relation with them. Really deep stuff. As long as I lack, I have the possibility of being with you. And in the world, being dependent on the other or their qualities gives the E4 the illusion that through lack, they can escape inevitable separation.

False lack is suffocating. It's interesting. It's suffocating. The word I'm looking in the Spanish is fijación. So I want to look into that a little bit more in a minute. But again, another super dense paragraph here. So I think if all we do in this episode is just introduce envy, we will be doing quite a lot. This kind of envy is not about achieving an end where I get what the other has. So this is not an envy that has ambition. Again, go back to the Jim Carrey story. I think he's instructive, because if you follow his journey, he now sort of is like, there is no Jim Carrey. And I don't know, he's going through his own spiritual journey, but he's been very public about his spiritual journey being like the journey of the three. He reached the top of the mountain and then realized, he didn't feel any better. Nothing, nothing really happened for him. So that's that three piece, right, of like, wait: I've achieved everything I wanted. I got it. But then how come I'm not satisfied? That's not the flavor of the floor's envy. Because the four’s desire won't really actually drive them to obtain what others have. Instead, the desire itself is the only way the four knows how to have contact with other people. As long as I don't have what you have, as long as I lack, then I have the possibility of being with you.

It's like I'm a puzzle piece. Blanks and tabs. Sockets, slots, holes. Males and females. Males and females is actually quite evocative because Richard Rohr says that the four is the most feminine number on the Enneagram. And maybe we'll have time to talk more about sexuality and the four. But for now, let's use sockets or holes. The puzzle piece divot. That's my affordance for contact. I want to be filled in by others, not so that I'll actually get what they have. It's just that's the only way that I can have contact. Please complete me. Or please fill me with you. Which is a, powerfully feminine longing. Maybe just go as archetypal as you can with me. So just think about the energy. Not necessarily like the sex organs or anything like that. So, my hole, my opening, my lack, is my possibility of being in contact with others. Compared to the eight, who is the masculine, who would probably feel the opposite. My tab, my phallus is my power, is my possibility of being in contact with you.

Being dependent on the other of their qualities gives the four the illusion that through lack, they can escape separation. So, what a horrible, horribly painful and convoluted way to attempt and ultimately fail to heal the wound, which is separation. The wound of the four is separation. That's the childhood wound. Naranjo is not going to, in this text, talk much about the childhood wound. But someone like a Beatrice Chestnut or Richard Rohrer would more. And so I find that very helpful. Maybe we'll just touch on it now. The four’s divine memory, before the wound, before the fall, is connection, union, non separateness. There's no me. There's no you. There's no I. There's no other. There's no self, there's no world. There's just connection, sacred union.

And then there's a rift. Very painful. And I think fours feel this pain very, very deeply. And I think it's very, very early for them. So it could even be something like birth. Separation at birth. That's why I think fours have a hard time sometimes getting their own stories sorted out, because I think a lot of this stuff can be preverbal. That's how I feel for myself. So let's just take birth trauma as an example. That pain of that separation. Well, I feel the pain of that separation, and I feel that longing for connection. I have that divine memory of sacred union, and the only way I know how to try to put things back together again, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, is by lacking so that I have the possibility of being with you again. So I'm trying to escape inevitable separation.

False lack is suffocating. So it is a false lack. This lack is a lack that I myself have invented. I had to create a false lack in order to try to put things back together again to restore sacred union. Now this false lack is suffocating. When I see fijación, I don't know that word, but I think fixation. Yeah, it's fixation. So I'm not quite sure why this was translated as, suffocating, you know? And here you can see it's just used in the same way as Freud. Fixation is a great synonym, for sin or passionate passion. Fixation is quite good. So if you wanted to take the Christianity and the fall metaphor out of the Enneagram and put in psychoanalytic language, fixation, I think, would be fine.

They're very in touch with their desire to be loved and recognized, and they idealize this fulfillment in such a totalizing way that nothing can satisfy them. This paradoxical search for unhappiness is like a home, always lit, waiting for the departed one to return. I think we've hit those beats pretty well. But, what we're adding here, which is very true for the four, is they they are very in touch with this desire. So they have this longing. They're full of longing. There is the tragic quality. Absolutely. But they're not, They are romantic. They want that, love, they want that recognition. But they've set it up such that they'll never have it.

Being passionately envious means, in a way, being eternal children with a demanding gaze directed at the other. But since envy is a neurotic need, the goal is to always maintain the state of waiting and lack. Yes, that makes sense. So again, we're talking about kind of early childhood. And they somehow need to stay a child. They need to stay crying for milk, crying for comfort. And they've, you know, that fixation. They've fixated on that state of lack and chosen that as their home. The home that's always lit.

It's quite common for an E4 in childhood to have had a real experience of frustration and loss. Typical events could be the loss of one of the parents, the presence of a sibling perceived as privileged. Or who held an important position due to the need for special care. Or a family situation which the ephor felt they had to step aside and renounce a paradise they had already tasted. Again, I think this maybe will resonate with some fours. And with other fours, it'll seem quite alien. It did to me when I first read it because had both my parents and my only child and don't remember or have a particular family situation in mind. But in a way I think I have an extraordinary sensitivity. And so I think that the “sibling,” the privileged sibling, the preferred sibling, is sort of me, my own early child with whom from an early age I seemed to be in competition with. And when I know, when I think about my family story, there's recognition there. Even some of my earliest childhood memories are already of nostalgia for me at a younger age.

In relationships with others they perceive themselves as inadequate, guilty and submit to abusive relationships in order to reconfirm their victim position. They are very emotional and empathetic to the suffering of others. Empathy whose function is to highlight their own suffering. So there are a few important things going on in this paragraph. They submit to abusive relationships in order to reconfirm their victim position. So there might be a there there in terms of choosing, choosing relationships and choosing life paths in which one feels at home in that victim, role.

Victim of what? Victim of not getting the love that they wanted. Right. So that they can be fixated on lack. So that there's a perceived non separateness. It's this sort of really kludgy, duct taped together idea of non separation. It's codependency, right? It's total codependency. But it's an unusual flavor of codependency. That means by being with you, I can always feel that pain of lack that you don't have. And so somehow we'll fit together in that.

The four both wants to be experienced as complicated and actually is complicated. So we're in hard mode with this particular neurotic fixation or passion of envy, but they are very emotional and empathetic to the suffering of others. Empathy, whose function is to highlight their own suffering. This is the first thing that I'm not sure about. That might be a little bit unkind, a little bit unfair to say that fours are empathetic so that they can highlight their own suffering. I don't think it's totally wrong. I get it. So, you, know, for instance, I do coaching, and I like working with other people. And there is some sense in which my empathy helps me connect to my own suffering, which somehow feels like home base for me. There's some way in which I have a role that feels like almost like a, steward or a keeper, a keeper of suffering. And so when I work with other people and have empathy for their suffering, there's a way that I am at home in this negative way. So I get that. And I also feel that my most transcendent and healing moments of real connection, of real non separation, those also are in compassion, being with another in their suffering.

And so I would say the unhealthy four likes to be empathetic to others so that they can kind of wallow in their suffering. And I think the healthy four likes to be with the suffering of others because they have tremendous capacity for it, and there's real compassion there and real healing for themselves. So I will make that proposed modification on Naranjo here.

They dedicate a lot to the relationship and are always ready to sacrifice. This dedication to the other does not aim to adapt to them, but to reclaim an omnipotent position as a sacrificial victim. I'm checking the Spanish just to complete it and make sure I understand. Yeah, Yeah, that resonates with me. And so in relationship, particularly in your closest relationships with your loved one, your mother or your father, maybe a boss, a four will find themselves in a sacrificial role. Kind of a bit of a martyr role. Potentially not actually in in contact with the other. Not actually because the other person is demanding or something. But so, again, so that I can feel at home in this victim role. So even if I have something, I will gladly throw it away and give it so that I can just get comfy.

There really is a coziness. There's a coziness to that lack. Naranjo called it earlier, home, always lit. And there's so much power in that too. Because when I lack something and it cannot be filled, that's the presence of an absence. It's the strength of a weakness which is invincible because nobody can fill me up most of the time.

The seductive call, especially in the social subtype, is that of the fascinating, whining siren that stimulates in the other the need for protection and to be narcissistically powerful. Quejumbrosa is whining. I want to look that up. I don't know that word at all. Quejumbrosa. Beautiful word. Yeah. Plaintive, maybe. I think of the siren as screeching or screaming or singing. But this is more plaintive, or querulous.

The fascinating wailing siren stimulates in the other the need for a protection and to be narcissistically powerful. I think we're just gonna keep, keep on keeping on. I don't have much to say about that.

Unexpressed aggressiveness, except in the sexual subtype where it is expressed, produces retroflection of the body level, even leading to self harm. The body itself is used as a channel to draw the other's attention, expressing deep needs through suffering or illnesses. Yeah. So retroflection has been a very powerful, kind of physical metaphor for me of drawing in and contracting and tightening. And also to basically be in getting injected with self hate, essentially, or self-flagellation. So because it's this aggression, Naranjo will later want to talk about biting and cannibalism. And again, going back to the mother and the baby, that eternal childhood of the four, it is a particular four quality. I think it does serve us to always hold the four as essentially in infancy, really quite young, potentially breastfeeding. So like, the biting, the oral wanting. Nourishment of the four. If they don't express that anger, that frustration, that wanting, they end up kind of introjecting or having that become self devouring, self biting. And then their needs only show up through the impact of all that self harm. Getting sick.

In the sexual subtype, the expression of envy takes on different characteristics. Crying is replaced by aggressive shouting and demanding. The demand to fill their lack is overpowering, reaching the point of destroying or hating the one they love when they show their human limits and therefore do not live up to their greatest idealizations. This is a good stopping place where Naranjo is starting to point to the social, the sexual and the self preserving as three different subtypes of how that envy, how that lack, how that romanticism is manifested. And this is exactly why the three subtypes are so different.

We'll just sneak a little bit into the social four to talk about this. Cuando explico este tema en espa­ñol, suelo decir que hay «sufridores, sufridos e insufribles». So it works better in Spanish. The, the three types are the sufferers, the crybabies, you could say, if you were being especially unkind, the ones most in their childhood of like waah, I need milk. So they just, they're crying, they're plaintive. That the wailing siren. Maybe wailing would be better than whining. So that's the social for the wailing siren. The sexual four is insufrible. They're insufferable, they are attacking, they are shouting and demanding and having tantrums. So actually I would say maybe in that sense the sexual fours a little bit, older in their childhood, when Penelope was 13 months, she would have these big tantrums. So she's moved on from crying into her anger, into her shouting, demanding. So the fours really then lean into the injustice or the hate, the anger of that lack. And then finally the self preservation force are the sufridos, the one who quietly suffers, who's done the most retroflection and has buried that inside of themselves. And might come off as stoic. So it's funny, I mean, we'll talk more about my own relationship with these three subtypes. But stoicism, I think, has never appealed to me precisely because I'm sort of born into a stoic mode that I'm sure that's not what the real stoics meant, but it's like a near, it's like a near twin of it. It's like an evil cousin of it. And so the idea of holding things in, it's like I can't possibly hold any more in. That's the self preservation four is the sufrido. So in English, I think they translated it as sufferers, endurers and insufferable or unbearable. We'll change that later.

Okay, well, this is difficult material, so if you made it this far, I hope that you take good care of yourself and be patient with yourself if these things click with you. The way that the Enneagram works, especially in the early stages when you are still on your path to discovering your number and your subtype and all these things, it is confronting. It is like seeing yourself in the mirror and not liking what you see. And so I think that's just part of the Enneagram journey. but it does get better from there because then you can do the work. This is not, this isn't about, you've got some goods and you got some bads, you got some pros, you got some cons. Like maybe the pros of the four will come up. But really the point is healing. The point is the healing journey. And for the four, I'm increasingly convinced that connecting, truly connecting with your envy is very, very important. And it took me probably five years or so to really start to see envy. Not to say she can't do great work before that, but yeah, it takes time. And we will continue in future sessions to explore the subtypes. Okay, see you next time.