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:
Type Eight
Self-Preservation: Protects well-being by taking control of resources, territory, and logistics.
Sexual: Claims desire through directness, provocation, and overwhelming presence.
Social: Ensures relevance by mobilizing others, being an interpersonal activator, and setting direction.
Type Nine
Self-Preservation: Maintains stability through routines, comfort, and minimizing disruption.
Sexual: Adapting to a partner's desires, seeking to be an ideal sexual object.
Social: Sustains harmony by adapting to the intimates’ rhythms and suppressing personal agenda.
Type One
Self-Preservation: Regulates life through discipline, routines, restraint, and correcting inefficiencies
Sexual: Displays excellence as an object of desire through intensity of standards of passion and creativity, displays of character, refinement of desire.
Social: Shapes groups by modeling values, correcting norms, and holding others to shared ideals.
Type Two
Self-Preservation: Secures needs indirectly by managing others’ needs, providing, and becoming indispensable.
Sexual: Attracts by attuning, flattering, and making the other feel uniquely wanted.
Social: Builds networks by connecting people, offering help, and positioning themselves as relational glue.
Type Three
Self-Preservation: Maintains viability through productivity, optimization, and visible competence.
Sexual: Competes for attention by showcasing attractiveness, confidence, and desirability.
Social: Advances interpersonal value by seeking to be influential and praiseworthy.
Type Four
Self-Preservation: Crafts a unique lifestyle and aesthetic that reflects their specific individuality.
Sexual: Intensifies allure by emphasizing uniqueness, emotional depth, and personal mystique.
Social: Signals value by representing refinement, originality, or symbolic difference in the group.
Type Five
Self-Preservation: Handles practical needs only to the degree that they can preserve focus and concentration for areas of interest.
Sexual: Seduces through offering a fascinating vision or perceptual world and testing if their object of desire can meet it.
Social: Contributes by providing expertise, insight, or a distinct conceptual perspective.
Type Six
Self-Preservation: Secures safety by tracking risks, obligations, and support systems.
Sexual: Tests attraction and loyalty through intensity, provocation, or exaggeration of sexual traits.
Social: Strengthens bonds by deep loyalty to shared outlooks, defending loved ones, enforcing agreements, and maintaining social structures.
Type Seven
Self-Preservation: Cultivates abundant resources and dynamic lifestyle to support freedom, novel experiences, and sensory pleasure.
Sexual: Attracts through excitement, novelty, and high-energy engagement.
Social: Builds social value by connecting across many people and causes without fully committing to any single one.
When we identify with the instincts, we don’t identify with all three of them equally.
Early in life, the needs of one of the instinctual drives come to be granted greater psychological importance than others, meaning that the fulfillment of certain needs comes to feel more emotionally urgent than others. As mentioned above, one can be a Self-Preservation Type, a Sexual Type, or a Social Type depending on which of the instinctually needs we unconsciously believe are more crucial for our sense of identity. This is our Dominant Instinct.
While the Dominant Instinct receives an excess of our attention, the two remaining instincts still factor into the ego. All three Instinctual Drives become enrolled into the personality through a restriction of attention and focus called the Instinctual Stacking because the instinctual needs become “stacked” in an order of priority. There are six Instinctual Stackings, each with their own flavor and character.
One of the instincts is neglected, actively ignored, or resisted because the ego unconsciously believes that giving it the proper attention could sabotage or drain energy away from the Dominant Instinct. This is our weakest or “blindspot” instinct. “Blindspot” is an apt term because we are psychologically “blind” to the full sense of what it represents.
Due to neglect, we don’t really grasp the significance of our blindspot and tend to overestimate our understanding of, skillfulness with, and degree of engagement with it. This means that one of our three basic expressions of life force is undervalued, and as a consequence, ignored, neglected, and underdeveloped. Understanding and working with the blindspot is one of the most important and practical aspects of the Enneagram, which will be discussed shortly.
The remaining instinct is referred to as the secondary or Middle Instinct. We’re typically not very fussy about the Middle Instinct, and tend to care for it in a pretty straightforward way.
There are six Instinctual Stackings:
Self-Preservation Dominant Stackings: SP/SO and SP/SX
Sexual Dominant Stackings: SX/SP and SX/SO
Social Dominant Stackings: SO/SX and SO/SP
Figuring out our Blindspot is very challenging and humbling work because it can evoke profound shame, grief, and deficiency from a sense of being incomplete, of missing something essential in life, or of ruining our image of ourselves.
It is very important to understand that whatever our instinctual blindspot might be, it is already alive within us, just outside our awareness. This is good news, because instead of having to adopt foreign behaviors and values in an attempt to “fake it until we make it” with our blindspot, all we really have to do is attend to and enliven what we’ve already got, including our personal style of doing our blindspot instinct.
If we’re Social Blind, instead of having to force ourselves to join a networking group, we can do something simple like actually arrange to hang out with the friend you’ve been thinking about.
If we’re Sexual Blind, we don’t need to put on a humiliating performance of sexual desperation, we can do something simple like dress in a way that highlights something about what we’re into about ourselves.
If we’re Self-Preservation blind, we don’t need to adopt some specialized diet and supplement routine and go to the gym every other day if that doesn’t feel natural to us, we can just pay more attention to connect what we’re eating (or not eating) with how it makes our bodies feel.