Emotionality and Fantasy

With zeal or vehemence being the passion of this character, we can anticipate the intensity with which the Sexual 1 lives his instincts, and how this strength is reflected in the power with which he experiences his emotions. When the instinct is activated vehemently, the fire

it generates invades your emotional world, directing your attention toward obtaining your desires, with the added nuance of being a personality who feels entitled to get what they want.

"I had to reflect on what my emotions were like before starting my process, when I began writing this testimony, and it wasn't easy for me. I realized how my emotions have always been under control, rigid, repressed, always prioritizing duty and what is right, what is socially appropriate. I suppressed the fear because, as a precocious adult, I felt that everyone expected me to know what to do, turning the fear into a false determination and fantasizing that this was my mission in life."

— Roza Picazzo

From this condition of a child who became an adult at an early age and therefore had to repress his emotions, the fantasy of a Sexual 1 usually flows into the feeling that he has a mission in life. From this, it is easy to deduce the dominant, competitive, and conquering spirit of this character.

As an Enneatype belonging to the visceral triad of action, emotion usually originates and is experienced from an explosiveness that ascends, in the form of a tube (as described by bioenergetics with the obsessive rigid character), from the intestine to the head. If he is overwhelmed by "good manners" and education, he will suppress anger and most likely turn it into recurring thoughts about what is right or wrong, with judgments about how things should be, rather than accepting or experiencing how they are. In addition, he will focus on criticizing others for not realizing their mistakes, for how they can live in such a carefree, joyful, and, of course, misguided way. David Barba defines this exactly, in his book The Enneagram of Mullah Nasrudin, when he says that E1:

“… He's usually a civilized, well-mannered guy: he presents himself to the world as a well-meaning being, he controls himself, he suppresses his anger. So much so that sometimes your interlocutor may have the feeling that smoke is coming out of your ears. The E1 is like a Ferrari with the handbrake on. Others tend to notice their anger sooner or later because something so central is hard to hide. Either way, he tries to hide it, swallow it, and in the end ends up expressing it unconsciously or in the form of outbursts and a great tendency to scold others."

The sexual subtype is the one that has the easiest contact with anger. Therefore, sometimes not only does it not repress its anger, but it expresses it more freely than in the other subtypes, or it transforms it into a desire to change the world, which becomes that stereotype of the great reformer who considers himself perfect and who, from the point of view in which he puts himself, dedicates himself to perfecting everything that, in his indisputable opinion, does not work.

According to Claudio Naranjo's Trinidadian framework, E1's sexual subtype is the most emotional among the angry. But let's not be too quick to think that this character has had deep access to his emotional world: this is not usually the case, nor does he typically take emotion as a compass to guide him in the world. Instead, it is a personality type that tends to get involved in their relationships, while subjecting their partners and loved ones to the free expression of their anger, as they have all the access to it that the other subtypes of this character do not. And that anger is the emotion that obscures all others.

This characteristic of the "reformer," which some "enneagram fans" have pointed out, applies above all to the sexual subtype. From this posture toward life, he allows himself everything: he is a possessor of the absolute truth. Things are as he sees them, with no possibility of discussion, and they cannot be otherwise. To persuade those who disagree, he will use his vehemence to fight for what he considers to be the truth, without paying attention to nuances or other possible truths or interpretations of reality, taking for granted the null possibility of being wrong.

This attitude puts the sexual subtype in an extremely fantastic situation: it is the fantasy of omnipotence, of a feeling of superiority, of a feeling of possession of the absolute truth, and if there is one thing in which he feels he is failing, it is in any case not controlling the other enough to prevent them from spoiling the situation.

Thus, the main fantasy of the Sexual 1 is to believe that he is endowed with a natural perfection that life has bestowed upon him. Secondly, there is the fantasy that with effort he can achieve everything and become even more perfect.

"I remember that, at the beginning of my process, I had the fantasy that therapy sessions were a kind of private lessons, where I could take advantage of them to learn things that I had not yet mastered. I took the therapist's feedback as something I needed to improve in order to be even more perfect. As I got to know the enneagram and saw the 'imperfections' of my therapist, I felt that I should look for someone who was not so affected by his character, someone who was more 'perfect.'"

— Roza Picazzo

In this testimony, you can appreciate this fantasy of perfection. As we delve deeper into personal work and character knowledge, the Sexual 1 becomes aware of the belief that he is really useless if he doesn't do everything perfectly, the fantasy that he doesn't deserve love if he makes a mistake, and that this feeling of superiority covers up a deep fear of not being enough, of being bad.