Point Four: The Tragic Romantic

The preoccupations of Point Four include:

• The sense of something missing from life. Others have what I am missing.
• An attraction to the distant and the unavailable. Idealization of the absent lover.
• Mood, manners, luxury, and good taste as external supports to bolster self-esteem.
• An attachment to the mood of melancholy. Depth of feeling as a goal rather than mere happiness.
• Impatience with the "flatness of ordinary feelings." Needing to reintensify one's feelings through loss, heightened imagination, and dramatic acts.
• The search for authenticity. The feeling that the present is not real, that the real self will emerge in the future, through an experience of being deeply loved.
• An affinity with what is real and intense in life. Birth, sex, abandonment, death, and cataclysmic happenings.
• A push-pull habit of attention. Focus alternates between the negative features of what one has and the positive features of what is distant and hard to get. This attention style reinforces
• Feelings of abandonment and loss, but also lends itself to
• A sensitivity to other people's emotionality and pain. An ability to support others in crisis.

Helen Palmer

The Enneagram:
Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life
Harper & Row, 1988, 392 pages