What is the Enneagram 4w5 personality type? What are its key traits, strengths, weaknesses and fears? We’ll answer these questions in this article.
This is one of the 18 Enneagram Wing Types, which don’t exhibit traits of just one profile, but blend two adjacent ones. The 4w5 is a blend of the Enneagram 4 and the Enneagram 5. These are part of different triads, which makes for a particularly rich, interesting personality.
We’ll start by talking about how this profile is composed of 4 and 5, then talk about its core traits. We’ll round off with a field manual for the Enneagram 4w5: a summary of its core strengths, weaknesses, fears and desires.
What is the Enneagram 4w5 Type?
First, let’s clarify what the Enneagram 4w5 is. It means an Enneagram 4 with a 5 Wing. It helps if you understand the 9 Enneagram Profiles in some depth.
If you have a 4w5 personality, it means you’re predominantly an Enneagram 4, but exhibit some traits from the adjacent profile, number 5. It’s also possible to be a pure 4, or a 4w3.
If you want an approximation of what a 4w5 looks like, take the core 4 and 5 traits and blend them together, with 4 dominating. If you know somebody who is primarily a 4 but has significant traits of 5, they might well be a 4w5.
The folks at personalitydata.org found that 23.8% of Enneagram 4s exhibit a 5 wing. 74.1% are pure 4s, while the other wing type, 4w3, makes up the remaining 2.2%.
Remember, the 4w5 is predominantly a 4 but shows significant 5 traits.
4s are creative, curious and self-expressive (Individualists), while 5s are knowledge- and idea-focused, introverted, and innovative (Investigators).
The 4w5 is predominantly a 4, so have a rich inner world and are deeply artistic and contemplative, but the 5 wing means they exhibit some of the core Individualist traits. This gives the 4w5 a thirst for knowledge, information and expertise. They tend to express themselves through their work while being more heady and standoffish than a typical 4. It is intellectual and reserved.
In a nutshell, the 4w5 is highly motivated to express their uniqueness whiledigging deep into various subjects, racking its brains and making new discoveries.
For your information, I refer to personality types as “it” because they’re abstract profiles derived from real-world data, detached from any one person. Though the Enneagram possess huge explanatory power, nobody is a cookie-cutter 4w5.
The Core Traits
The Enneagram 4w5 Type is called the Bohemian because it is at once introverted, creative, innovative, and skeptical of the social world.Its basic desire is to be unique, search inside for the answers and push the boundaries of knowledge, relying on all its learning and investigation. It’s edgy, unique, untameable.
The 4w5 is more intellectual and less emotional than a typical 4, thanks to its 5 wing.
Thanks to the 5 influence, it sometimes locks itself away from social life, hell bent on accumulating knowledge and solving a mystery, like a rogue scientist. This jives with the strong 4 drive towards autonomy and authenticity. That said, its headiness can hinder 4’s tendency for introspection and connection to emotions.
As with all Enneagram Profiles, there are downsides to the 4w5. For one thing, the Type 4 never feels quite satisfied with its life. There’s always some better world just over the horizon, some starry Ideal to realise.It’s a melancholic soul. Combine this with 5’s never-ending thirst for knowledge and carving its own path, and you can get a nasty combination. The 4w5 can wind up endlessly chasing some intellectual dream, detached from reality.
The 4w5 really doesn’t want to be perceived as incompetent. It needs to be recognised as the wise elder, the gatekeeper of knowledge that it constantly strives to be. As a result, it can endlessly accumulate knowledge and competency. It’s prone to introversion and loneliness. It becomes aloof, detached, anti-social, socially awkward.
Whether we have a 4w5 personality or not, we can learn from its successes and struggles. It’s a universal fact that if our prime directive is to express ourselves and accumulate knowledge and competence, we can lose touch with the social realm and cold, hard objective reality.
The best professions for the Bohemian are those that favour self-expression, knowledge and curiosity and don’t require being a socialite, such as writers, journalists, architects, artists and researchers. It must be allowed to do its own thing, its own way.
The Enneagram 4w5 Field Manual
The core fear of the 4w5 is to be seen as plain and bland and be misunderstood by others. It fears being incompetent and lost in thought, unable to produce anything meaningful.
Its core drives are to be unique, competent, innovative and explore itself to the nth degree.
The strengths of the 4w5 are its curiosity, disobedience, thirst for knowledge and expertise, and problem-solving skills.
Its weaknesses are its tendency for withdrawal, its oft-excessive inner focus, and its lack of practicality.
The 4w5 is at its best when it can dive deeply into a task, explore its inner world, and be recognised for its unique contributions and perspectives.
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The post The Enneagram 4w5 Type Explained first appeared on Deep Psychology.
The post The Enneagram 4w5 Type Explained appeared first on Deep Psychology.
