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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
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