Archetypally, 9 can be seen as the formless lifeforce and portal or energetic field through which unformed souls enter the physical universe.
3 is then the personality ‘hardening’ into specificity (upon landing on Earth), into a particular set of psychological muscles (i.e.- the personality type).
6 is the archetypal human problem of the personality taking up our head space and repeating itself, over and over, and also represents the superego’s reflex to divide everything into good/bad, right/wrong, desirable/undesirable, etc.
Something I’m pointing out in my Overlaps schema… of the instincts and stackings placed onto the enneagram symbol… which, in the wrong hands, can be more confusing than it is clarifying (in terms of typing people, typing oneself) is that this schema shows why certain mistypings can happen.
But disregarding typing/mistyping, for the moment, on another level — an archetypal or elemental level — in the overlap of the Social instinct and Type 3 (and thus the image center), Personality, itself, could be said to be a Social instinct function (even in Social-blinds). Among other things, Personality is an unconscious ‘putting on a face’ in order to interact, function, communicate, individuate oneself, etc.
This is one reason Type 3 is sometimes denigrated in the enneagram world — because, among other things, it unconsciously represents the condensed archetype of the inherent falseness of the personality in relation to one’s essential self. Everyone is doing this falseness, but unconsciously we’re often putting it all on 3 as the ‘deceptive type,’ or something to that effect.
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