E9 : The Synthesist
Type 9
At a deeply unconscious level, Type 9 is overly identified with the body. Specifically, the body as a listening device. And just as one role of the human inner ear is to maintain balance, 9s are continually gauging, re-aligning and adjusting internally (at some stratum of psyche) in an attempt to preserve a sense of equilibrium. Emotions that arise upon sensing a disruption in the environmental field register as sensate impressions in the body (or in the etheric/emotional body), analogous to a whale or dolphin using sonar to feel out their surroundings — the sound waves return from an object and flush through the torso, affecting the listener sensually with articulated shape-impressions. This isn’t to say that people of other types can’t experience something similar, but there’s an oversensitivity in this type — too much attention placed on degrees of balance, an overemphasis on aligning with some esoteric set of kinesthetic meridians. Even subtle increments of incongruity or discordance can raise an alert status as a felt sensation — if only registering subconsciously. Still, some kind of movement or adjustment will have to take place. Disturbing stimuli (‘sharp shapes’ pinging off of someone else’s emotional state, for example) are things to be calmed or placated or avoided and forgotten so as to re-right the course and resume a desired state of body equilibrium.
On another level though, E9, as resident of the Gut triad, has a significant underlying compulsion toward self-reliance/autonomy — the very opposite of all this adjusting and maneuvering to make things OK in their surroundings. So the Gut’s independence streak is continually contributing to some backlog of rebellion and resistance to the concurrent program of appeasing the environment. This is where stubbornness comes in as a strategy. Since direct expression of aggression is largely verboten in this type, a significant portion of 9’s repressed defiance and friction finds safe expression in becoming an immovable object — a thousand pound boulder that can’t be budged in relation to certain issues or beliefs or circumstances.
This association of E9 with the ear follows through, metaphorically, when we notice that the resistance mentioned above, manifests often in the form of not-listening. And on a deeper level, we’d say Type 9 has an unusual capacity for denial, which is a kind of resistance to hearing a given truth, internally. An inner deafness.
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