The Point Four Archetype:The Type, Subtypes, and Growth Path
Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
—Franz Kafka
Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house so that new joy can find space to enter.
—Rumi
TYPE FOUR REPRESENTS THE ARCHETYPE of the person who experiences an inner sense of lack and a craving for that which is missing, and yet can’t allow for the attainment of what might provide satisfaction. This archetype’s drive is to focus on what is lacking as a step to regaining wholeness and connection, but through an over-focus on the experience of a flawed self they become convinced of an inner deficiency that prevents fulfillment. While this entails an understandable frustration with regard to deprivation, an overidentification with the frustrated, deprived state leads to an inability to take in that which would provide fulfillment.
This Four archetype can also be found in Jung’s concept of the “shadow,” defined as “the inferior parts of the personality.”1 While Type Threes overidentify with the persona, or the positive aspects of ourselves we highlight in the “public face” we show to the world, Type Fours overidentify with those parts of ourselves we’d rather others don’t see. Although Fours may also recast their sense of deficiency as being “special” or “unique” as a way of valuing themselves on a surface level, they identify with a deficient self more than an idealized self.
The Four archetype also represents the archetype of the tragic artist who suffers in the service of artistic self-expression. It suggests an idealistic vision of the value of emotions, especially the way in which authentic emotions are usefully expressed through art in a mode that inspires, moves, and unites people.
The Four’s resonance with the Shadow can also be seen in the fact that they have a natural gift for understanding the deeper emotional level of experience and seeing the beauty in darker emotions that other types would rather not feel, much less acknowledge. This can make them feel dangerous to others on an unconscious level, as Fours may raise the issue of authentic emotions that others would often rather not deal with.
Type Fours are thus the prototype for that part in all of us that feels dissatisfied with who we are. We all have the capacity to feel bad about what we see as our flaws, and to grieve and long for what we see as lacking in our lives. We can all become depressed in the face of feeling inadequate when we don’t fit the idealized image of what we believe we have to be to get the love we want. This archetype thus represents the tendency we all have to develop an “inferiority complex,” which makes it difficult to feel good about ourselves and take in what is good from the outside.
The natural strengths of Type Fours include their large capacity for emotional sensitivity and depth, their ability to sense what is going on between people on the emotional level, their natural feel for aesthetics and creativity, and their idealistic and romantic sensibility. Relatively unafraid of intense feelings, Fours value the expression of authentic emotion and can support others with great care, respect, and sensitivity when they are experiencing painful emotions. Fours are highly empathic and can see the beauty and power in painful feelings that other types habitually avoid.
Fours’ “superpower” is that they are naturally emotionally intuitive. Fours’ regular contact with their own emotional terrain gives them a lot of comfort and strength in being with intense feelings and empowering others to feel and accept their emotions. Although it would be wrong to think that all Fours are artists or all artists are Fours, they do have an artistic impulse that enables them to see and respond to the poetry in life, and to highlight for others the way everyday experiences can be viewed and communicated in creative and even transcendent ways.
As with all the archetypal personalities, however, Type Fours’ gifts and strengths also represent their “fatal flaw” or “Achilles heel:” they can overdo their focus on pain and suffering, sometimes as a way of avoiding a deeper or different kind of pain. While they have a gift for emotional sensitivity, they can become attached to their feelings in a way that can prevent them from thinking objectively or taking action. They can see what’s missing so clearly that they may be blind to what is good or hopeful in a situation, often to their own detriment. However, when they can wake up to the ways in which they dwell in suffering or dramatize their emotions as a way of distracting themselves from their deeper need for love, they can express a special kind of wisdom that is informed by deep emotional truth.
The Type Four Archetype in Homer’s Odyssey:
Hades and The Sirens
When Odysseus asks the goddess Circe to help him on his journey home, Circe tells Odysseus he must go to Hades and perform blood rituals so he can speak with the spirit of Tiresias, who will give him further guidance. In return for Odysseus’s blood sacrifice, the blind prophet tells him his future, good and bad to the very end:
Glorious Odysseus, what you are after is sweet homecoming, but the god will make it hard for you…But even so and still you might come back, after much suffering, if you can contain your own desire,…Death will come to you from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end you in the ebbing time of a sleek old age. Your people all about you will be prosperous. 2
Odysseus hears from other spirits in the Land of the Dead, but their common message is a litany of regret for their choices in life and envy for those still living. Hades thus represents “the land of what might have been, a place we are all destined to visit at one time or another.” However, Hades also conveys a message about the role of longing and regret in human life. We can potentially get stuck in a “Hades” of our own making if we don’t just visit our internal spaces of grief, but live our whole lives around “the aching sense of loss and failed dreams.”3 After this visit to the underworld, Odysseus can more mindfully choose life, having spoken with the ghosts of his past who symbolize the cravings and unfulfilled longings of the psyche—his shadow aspects—that he must make peace with and let go of to move ahead in his journey home.4
The next destination further reveals the nature of longing. After leaving Hades, Odysseus and his crew sail past the Sirens’ Island. The Sirens can feel the unique anguish of each individual. They enchant whomever comes their way, seducing travelers with their melody so they have no prospect of getting home. They sing to Odysseus that they know all the pains he suffered in the Trojan War. And they promise him wisdom if he will listen to his heart’s content. They will reveal to him the meaning underlying his own suffering. “What song could be sweeter? Who wouldn’t die to listen?”5
Odysseus makes a voluntary personal decision to listen to the Sirens’ song and know the depth of human longing and temptation. He knows in advance he will encounter these temptresses. He knows their exquisite singing draws sailors to their deaths, dashed against the rocks. First, he protects his men by fitting wax into their ears. But he also orders them to tie him to the mast and ignore his impassioned pleas until they have passed the danger.
Only careful planning saves Odysseus from his own irresistible longing for this experience. Otherwise, the temptation to explore unfathomable emotional depth would have ended, as it so often does, in total self-destruction.
Hades and the Sirens are a dark passage of the Odyssey reflecting the pain and wisdom of Type Four. Longing, envy, and regret are seductive emotions from which some can never escape. But these emotions also bring us the unvarnished truth about our own needs and pains if we are brave enough to receive it. And facing these important emotions is an important part of the journey home to the true self.
The Type Four Personality Structure
LOCATED AT THE LOWER-RIGHT CORNER of the Enneagram symbol, Fours belong to the “heart-based” triad associated with the core emotion of sadness or grief. While Type Twos are in conflict with their sadness and Threes underdo grief, habitually numbing out their feelings so they don’t get in the way of their goals, fours overdo an attachment to grief. The three heart types also share a central concern with image—a self-consciousness about how they might appear in the eyes of others. While all three types in this triad have a formative, underlying need to be “seen,” they each act this out differently based on the ideals they try to fulfill in order to be recognized and appreciated by others.
The sadness at the core of the heart type personalities reflects their feeling of not being loved for who they are and their grief over having lost touch with their real selves because they’ve disowned who they really are and created a specific image to try to get the love (or approval) they need. All three heart types have core issues related to unmet needs to be deeply seen, accepted, and loved for who they are. Their respective coping strategies are designed to gain approval from other people in three distinct ways as a substitute for the love they seek but fear or believe they can’t get as they are. While Twos strive to have a likable, pleasing image, and Threes create an image of achievement and success, Fours present themselves as unique and special.
In many ways, Type Fours are the most comfortable of all the types with the experience of emotions. They value connections with others based on authentic feelings. A Type Four’s relationship to their emotions is both primary and complicated, as the Four coping strategy involves an attachment to some emotions as a protection against the experience of others. As Naranjo points out, while Type Threes identify with an idealized image of the self, Fours identify with that part of the psyche that “fails to fit the idealized image, and is always striving to achieve the unattainable.”6 As part of the “heart triad,” of which Type Three is the “core point,” Type Four individuals express a version of the Type Three passion of vanity in wanting to be seen and loved by others; but Fours’ desire for admiration leads to a sense of failure because of an inner sense of “scarcity and worthlessness.”7
The Early Coping Strategy: Type Four
Most Fours report having suffered some sort of actual or perceived loss of love early in life. Things usually started out well, but at some specific point in time the Four child experienced some sort of abandonment or deprivation, and to make sense of this loss—and to achieve some sense of control in light of it—the young Four unconsciously became convinced that they somehow caused it. While this is almost never true in reality, it gives the Four child a feeling that they can do something to regain what was lost through their own efforts, even while their mistaken sense that something about them caused the rejection persists as a inner sense of unredeemable deficiency.
To cope with the pain of this loss, Fours adopt a strategy of focusing on and longing for that which was lost, and at the same time making themselves “bad” as a way of explaining and controlling it. They dream of finding an idealized, special love connection that will make up for or reverse their loss. But because they can’t help feeling hopeless about ever regaining what they lost—both as a natural response to feeling deprived and a defense against being disappointed again—they often get stuck in feelings of grief, melancholy, and shame, which makes it difficult or impossible for them to really open up to receiving the love they long for.
The memory of something valuable that was lost also causes Fours to dwell on the past and continue to mourn what they once had. As Naranjo explains, “unlike other people who forget and resign themselves, [Type Fours] harbor a keen sense of ‘lost paradise.’”8
Fours thus end up seeing themselves as “not good enough” to be loved as a way of defending against opening up to the possibility of love, because allowing themselves to hope for love leaves them vulnerable to the worst kind of pain: the re-experience of that early loss, and the confirmation of their worthlessness that goes with it. They dwell in painful feelings of hopelessness and melancholy to protect themselves from the sadness and shame that comes from believing they are essentially unlovable and so will never get the love they need and want.
At the same time, Fours can’t help yearning for an ideal or special kind of love and recognition that will prove they are worthy after all. Looking for an idealized love connection that will redeem their inner sense of lack quells the sense of shame they may feel as a result of the sense that their inadequacy somehow caused their initial experience of loss. But even while they fantasize about being loved as a way to soothe themselves, they thwart their attempts to receive love in the real world because they are so convinced that they aren’t worthy of actually being loved. They tend to pursue unattainable people and engage in “push-pull” patterns in relationships: they idealize and move toward the perfect partner in fantasy, but reject the possibility of connection in actuality when they perceive the reality of it as too mundane or flawed.
Overidentification with feelings of hopelessness and melancholy, together with the search for confirmation that they are special or superior, distracts Fours from the real way out of their particular defensive trap: actively taking the risk of hoping for real love and opening up to receive it. While they long for the love and acceptance they need, Fours habitually prevent themselves from realizing their quest for love because their false self (personality) firmly believes they can’t get what they are looking for.
All of the Enneagram personality types put up defensive obstacles to attaining what they need out of a fear of repeating the experience of the early pain of not getting it. Fours do this by harboring negative beliefs about themselves and over-identifying with feelings related to loss or abandonment, closing themselves off from the possibility of finding satisfying and nurturing relationships. Allowing for the possibility of being loved for who they are feels like a dangerous setup for further loss and further shame-inducing experiences.
For non-Fours, the Four coping strategy can seem counterintuitive, as it rests on feeling bad about yourself as a way to avoid feeling worse about yourself. As Naranjo points out, this is a strategy of “seeking happiness through pain.” By hiding out in suffering, by having a need to suffer, Fours distract themselves from the inner work they would need to do to open up to receiving what they really want—what they incorrectly, but defensively, believe they can’t have.
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