The self-preserving instinct is associated with vigilance, protectiveness and aggression; in one way or another you have to fight to stay alive, and you must destroy in order to eat.
The social instinct corresponds to the herd instinct in animals; it involves the sense of belonging to a group, and a preoccupation with your interactions with and place within the group, the pecking order.
The sexual instinct strives towards syntony with the world, to be in tune and vibrate with it; you have to cover a lot of space, emit the strongest and pick up the subtlest signals when searching for the most or best of mates.
The Freudian stages of development are closely related concepts: the oral stage is equivalent to the self-preserving, the anal to the social, and the genital to the sexual instinct. In the first, the primary concerns revolve around nourishment, safety, the maintenance of the homeostasis. In the second, the issues are defined by that first attempt at civilization, toilet training, with its attendant notions of pride and shame, giving and retentiveness. In the third, the most private body parts, and the most intimate and intense experiences are involved.
The self-preserving instinct represents the lowest and the sexual the highest energy level. However, neither this ranking nor any other differentiation of the ITs constitutes a value judgement, just as the ennea types are all equal to one another. Early on, I detected a tendency in many to classify themselves as the sexual IT, as if a certain desirability was attached to it. It may help to be reminded that your dominating instinct is the one which is the most impaired.
Self-preserving (SP):
• I am my body
• Heaviness
• Anxiety all the way to hysterical visions of annihilation; cold panic (if I move, something awful is going to happen; think of a Hitchcock movie)
• Paranoid streak; blaming and accusing others for damaging/endangering/ exploiting self
• Aggressive/defensive
• Money
• Nourishment
• Health; hypochondria
• Logistics
• Generous at feeding others, helping others out in SP crises
• The people who shop only in health food stores, filter the water, install triple locks and security system, refuse vaccination
• Excessively cautious or self-destructive, even suicidal
Social (SO):
• Can be the most decent yet often fake, manipulative, or subtly to grossly antisocial (essence present or left out when relating)
• Prestige, popularity, fame
• Superiority/inferiority problems (forgetting that we’re all equal in our essential functioning)
• Delusions of grandeur or of outcast
• Involved in causes
• Clubs, parties, groups
• The scene, the beautiful people, chic, fashionable, what’s in
• Going with or against the flow
• Socialite/philanthropist/misanthrope
• Political or religious crime (terrorists, anarchists)
• Confusion of boundaries between “you” and “me,” “yours” and “mine” (i.e. using one’s home as a public place, picking from another’s plate as it were one’s own)
Sexual (SX):
• Vibrating out there, looking for a mate; peacock displaying his feathers, deer locking antlers
• Susceptibility to states of intoxication, tripping
• Schizoid disposition (split between affect and intellect, invalidating one with the other)
• Lightness, playfulness
• Curious, seeking, searching
• Often has shiny, leaky eyes (leaking the high energy of sexuality)
• Not about orgasm (which one can have alone) but about letting go, dropping barriers, intimacy, closeness, union through revealing/denuding oneself
• Madonna or whore, abstinent or promiscuous
• Frigid or impotent, unusual sexual preferences
• Crime of passion
• Least likely to become famous (SP goes for immortality, SO intent on glory; SX has other things to do)