"The Enneagram in Love and Work" by Helen Palmer | An Introduction

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In this episode of the Reading Room, we begin our journey through Helen Palmer’s The Enneagram in Love and Work, one of the foundational texts of the modern Enneagram.

We introduce Palmer and the narrative tradition, explore her emphasis on learning from people speaking from inside their own type, and consider why attention, relationships, and lived experience are so central to her approach.

Along the way, we work through Palmer’s concise portraits of all nine types—especially how each approaches love and where each naturally focuses attention. We then move into some of the deeper assumptions beneath her Enneagram: personality as a “false self,” essence as our deeper spiritual nature, and the passions as the organizing forces that shape the way each type experiences the world.

Lastly, we explore Palmer’s account of the passions, virtues, fixations, and arrows while asking where her framework is illuminating and where it deserves more scrutiny. Is our Enneagram type primarily something to transcend, or does it reveal something genuinely good about who we are? And what happens when we keep Palmer’s remarkable observations about type while questioning some of the metaphysics underneath them?

#enneagram #HelenPalmer