Enneagram Epicycles

The core insights of Enneagram theory appear to me to be useful, but people have laden that core theory with epicycles. They’ve done it in an attempt to explain everything about personality, and I think this does a disservice to the strength of core Enneagram theory. But, I want to be fair. These epicycles are not completely useless. They often point to real patterns in the data, and it can sometimes be useful to identify these patterns to make sense of the core theory. The problems arise when those patterns are treated as causes, which leads to rationalization.The most famous rationalizer among these epicycle theorists is Claudio Naranjo, who popularized the Enneagram in the 1970s and melded the original, more mystical formulation into a psychology theory. Alas, he didn’t stop at framing the Enneagram in psychological terms. He and his students layered on more and more theory until it was able to explain everything, and thereby predict nothing.One of those layers of explanation is instinctual subtypes. The idea of subtypes predates Naranjo, but he expanded the theory to explain more. He saw each Enneagram type as split into three subtypes based on whether self-preservation, social, or sexual concerns dominated. Why these three? As best I can tell, they were picked because, on the one hand, Enneagram theorists love the number three, and on the other, these specific subtypes added enough complexity to explain away inconvenient wrong predictions the base theory can make when an individual doesn’t fit the pattern of their type closely.Rather than admit the base theory describes a complex, multi-dimensional space where the types are attractor states and sometimes individual behavior will not be accurately predicted by those attractors, he instead attempted to “fix” the theory by adding more attractor states. In theory there’s nothing wrong with that, but he did it top down, adding theory to split up the types rather than building up from observations of where the attrac