The Type Five – The Investigator

Oh boy, the Five. The Dear, iconoclastic, elfin prankster, Five. You’ve heard about the support group in California called “The Wife’s of Five’s. It’s the next best thing to being alone.” Ha. That’s a good one. But any good Five knows their need and hunger for space and non-intrusion, and please knock before you enter, and watch out for Pete’s sake, for the alligators swimming in the mote around my house. They will eat you. In fact, you are looking like a juicy steak-burger and they are hungry.

The dear Five, the Intense, Cerebral Type, have a mind that is on fire with innovation, restless for innovation, and thinking thoughts that few of dare to think.[1] Case in point—Gary Larson, the out-of-this- world cartoonist who’s got a view on humanity that so sweetly captures our foolishness, our humanness, our pure nuttiness. Suddenly, the animals seem like the smart ones and humans, very confused rodents. And that’s what Five does, she grabs your world paradigm and shakes it till it breaks, till the rugged contours of your fixated thinking habits shatter, and suddenly you are gazing into a vast world with a new set of eyes. And your delusion of certainty—poof! Gone! Very cool, these innovative rebels who challenge us, and are determined as one wise person said, to shatter the comfortable truths we so lazily and habitually rely on.

So the dear Five is known as the Investigator. Or maybe better put, an iconoclastic investigator. They are a part of the Thinking Triad[2], which means that there is an imbalance in this Center such that the Five’s innate ability to access deep, quiet mind, where real guidance is found, has been disturbed. In its place is a highly activated mind that is hungry and intense, burning with investigative zeal, capable of deep focused attention on the object of their interest, willing to track an idea to its very roots, till every stone has been upturned.

There are several individuals that capture the wonder of the Five. Enter Stephen Hawkins’ mind and you are flooded with brilliancy. Here is a man whose body is completely disabled but who’s mind is filled with galaxies. He has translated the vast invisibility of the world, the stuff of quarks and all else that identifies the microscopic elements that activate our world, into real-time language. Enter his world and you are mind-blown by the vast inner world he has made sense of and actually comprehended. His mind is a vibrating kaleidoscope of deep and probing intelligence, inquiring, going for the source, looking for the microscopic building blocks of matter. He is accompanied by Albert Einstein. And Bill Gates, who’s journey into the kingdom of microscopic technology has translated into a miraculous revolution in communication such that with one click of the keyboard I can send messages across the four corners of the world. And least we forget Stephen King, who’s taken many into deep examination of fear (the Type Five Nemesis) and anxiety (what every Thinking Center Type[3] knows like the blood that runs through their veins—never mind that in Stephen King’s work those veins explode, and the most creepy entity emerges with chattering teeth, to chew your egg-balls out. Welcome to the kingdom of Type Five fear and anxiety. Now, don’t look back because something might be trailing you!)

There are three Types in the Thinking Triad, the Five, Six and Seven. With the Thinking Center blocked or distorted, and access to quiet mind diminished thus cutting them off from a direct connection with their Inner Guidance and Support, left in its wake is anxiety and fear. Questions arise: Who can I trust? What can I trust inside myself? How can I gain support and guidance? Thus, the Thinking Center Types struggle with anxiety and fear. Each one develops a particular way of compensating for loss of connection with inner guidance.

The basic fear that drives the Type Five is that of feeling useless, helpless and incapable, unable to muster support and strength to be in the world.[4] In compensation for this fear they are driven to gain mastery and competency in some domain, often in one that no one else occupies. Being a withdrawn Type (like their friends the Four and Nine)[5] they go internal when their basic fear arises, into what has been called then “Inner Tinker Toy.” In the inner universe of their vast and sweeping mind, they go to work arranging and creating worlds, and studying microcosms within microcosms, probing and examining the depth and width of whatever it might be, nano-technology, the mating patterns of quarks (justs kidding), the deep dimensions of potential fear and anxiety (Stephen King), or the inner archeology of the soul and how to precisely travel inward and awaken it (A.H. Almass). In essence, they can be masters at making what was invisible, visible.

At the healthy levels, as the Five deals consciously with their fear, they are capable of producing sweeping works of brilliance, but as they enter the Average levels, a basic dysfunction of their Type begins to emerge. They get lost in the vast machinations of their inner kingdom-building and begin to disengage from the world and real life. As their unconscious fear of being useless, incapable, and helpless in the world strengthens, they descend into isolation, mesmerized by their thinking and theory building, while more and more minimizing their basic needs for food, shelter, friends.[6] A sort of scorched earth approach arises. Hey, I’ve got my books, what more could I possibly need.

Like all withdrawn Types, they struggle with activating their Instinctual Center, where action, energy and drive to enter the world and impact it, lies. As they descend down the levels, access to this important life- enhancing, life-engaging center disappears, and they literally disembody.[7] No body, no mind, just thoughts. Feeling more and more disconnected from life, their fear shifts to deep paranoia and cynicism, and they in turn begin to chew on more and more bizarre and outlandish thoughts. Like the
descending Five, they enter the kingdom of the Exiled. This is fueled by the fixation of the Five[8], stinginess. By stinginess is meant that the Five, as their fixated personality habits take over, becomes less and less willing to engage life, to share their gifts with life, to contact humanity, but instead hole up in the tower of their thinking mind. Here, they fearfully and compulsively amass more and more information and retract from contact with life. Because they are sinking more and more into the fear of being useless and incapable, and shrinking smaller and smaller, they feel that there is not enough of them to go around, and any sharing of who or what they know could drain them completely. The only food for their psyche is more knowledge, and more privacy. This addictive retreat is fueled by their passion of avarice.[9] In their primary reaction to feeling as though they are rejected by life (like the Two and Eight) they assume a strategy that rationalizes detaching from life (I’m not really a part of this world, I’m just observing). And feeling rejected by life, they believe that they better make due with as little as necessary, because there is no one they can count or rely on, least of all themselves.

Caught on the treadmill of their fixation and passion, Fives can wander lost in the castle of their intense, thinking minds, avoiding contact with life, and with their very souls. The Enneagram provides the doorway and the key to reorienting them in the direction of their essence, wherein they arrive and engage the world with their wonderful gifts of intelligence.