The Instinctual Drives are three basic, interrelated drives for biological and emotional regulation that influence every aspect of human life and have a powerful influence on our consciousness, identity, behavior, emotions, and in both our enjoyment and suffering.
They are:
The Self-Preservation Drive: the drive for physical well-being, to care for the needs of the body including safety, to express our life force, to grow and develop our capacities to care for ourselves.
The Sexual Drive: the drive to sexually attract and pursue attractions, the drive to put oneself ahead of sexual competition, to be sexually chosen.
The Social Drive: the drive to create and maintain relationships and connections of all kinds, from the personal and intimate to securing one’s place within a greater social fabric.
The Instinctual Drives are the engine and foundation of the personality and psychology. The Instincts are some of the most personal, clarifying, and challenging facets of understanding ourselves and they can be studied independently of the Enneagram. The instincts and the Enneagram taken together illuminate the deepest roots of what has trapped our consciousness into patterns that can seem unbreakable.
“Instinct” is a term that can be interpreted in many different ways, sometimes as intuitions, as reflexes, as impulses rooted in survival, or as whatever comes automatically to us, but in the context of the Enneagram, the Instincts are motivational drives to meet specific biological and emotional needs. With the Enneagram, our focus is on how the body and psychology impact consciousness, and therefore, how consciousness becomes identified with instinctual agendas. We don’t become identified with pure physical appetites like hunger or lust, but we can with the motivational drive to care for our physical well-being, with the drive to elicit the sexual choice of a potential partner, and with the drive to create relationships and increase our sense of belonging.
Thus we have an Instinctual Type:
If I’m Self-Preservation Dominant, I become especially identified with how I evaluate my well-being and the means by which I shape and sustain my lifestyle.
If I’m Sexual Dominant, I become especially identified with my “courtship display,” the means by which I foster attraction and elicit intense engagement and chemistry.
If I’m Social Dominant, I become especially identified with the means by which I am able to engage with or stay in relation to others.
We habitually direct the majority of our attention to our Dominant, which serves as the centerpiece of our ego-identity and is ground zero for the majority of our neurotic preoccupations, narcissism, and fears. When we’re fixated by our personality, it is the dominant instinct’s fears that will be the motivating force of the personality. The Dominant Instinct represents strengths and weaknesses, and most of the traits and capacities of our personality we have developed to be competent in meeting the Dominant Instinct’s needs.
Identification with the instincts is what creates the ego. The core of the personality is the struggle of how we meet our basic needs, so when we’re identified with our personality, our whole sense of self is based on how we meet our needs and nothing more. We don’t just have instincts, our sense of self is completely tied up in their activity. Identification with the personality results in conflating our sense of self with activities around self-regulation, i.e. the pursuit and acquisition of instinctual resources. Our sense of self feels tied to the activity of going after instinctual aims, whether it’s building a life we envision, garnering the ultimate sexual abandon, or attaining a kind of interpersonal connectedness or collective value. We unconsciously feel like we are “being ourselves” when we are pursuing certain instinctual needs. To put it another way, the ego believes it will self-actualize by obtaining a desired lifestyle, sexual partners, and esteem or status.
The significance and scope of what understanding and working with the Instinctual Drives encompasses is difficult to overstate.
-The very root of our sense of self, including early wounds, traumas, and personality disorders.
-How we self-regulation versus how we reinforce our sense of identity.
-Instinctual Typology, Instinctual Fears, and Instinctual Autonomy Conflicts.
-Instinctual blindspots, avoidances, and neglect and their personal costs.
-Conscious embodiment versus dissociation.
Combining the three instinctual drives with the three Centers of Intelligence (Body, Heart, and Mind) and/or the Nine Enneagram Types provides a comprehensive view of the psychological “mess” we find ourselves trapped in and the path toward inner freedom and the liberation of consciousness.
Instinctual Types
Our Instinctual Type is more at the root of our personality than our Enneagram Type. Our Domaint Instinct is central to our ego-based sense of identity, so our drive to satisfy our dominant instinct is experienced as a drive to be who we are. Our Enneagram Type represents our style, approach, and attitude in satisfying our dominant instinct. The Instincts are concrete strategies, and our type is both the style of enacting those strategies and distortions of those strategies: