Enneatype 5 – Avarice

The Passion of Greed is the neurotic need to conserve the little that one feels to have conquered, or the little that one carries within oneself.

With the existential experience of having lost the original union, the E5 renounces what he does not have, while seeking not to lose what little he has left.

As regards the need to feel that he exists and is loved, the E5 distances himself from the need itself and from the other, who represents someone who could awaken that need.

In order to obtain this renunciation, he is forced to separate himself from his feelings and put his energy into an intellectual passion that he imagines could fill the sense of feeling poor and disinherited.

Like the other mental characters, the Avaricious Enneatype seeks — through the acquisition of intellectual knowledge — to fill the distance he feels in relationships — distance that he himself creates so as not to feel dominated by the emotional chaos that affective relationships imply.

Greed must be understood as a difficulty in giving the other parts of oneself — be they emotions or intimate bonds. Even under the concrete aspect, the E5 does not manage to let go: the neurotic attachment to concrete or symbolic objects is functional to not making contact with a sensation of fragmentation that in its origin goes back to the lack of affective containment.

The E5 describes his childhood as a place and time of solitude that goes beyond the events; relationships always have a formal and affectively aseptic style.

The mother, while intrusive and controlling, maintains an emotional distance. She does not facilitate the expression of feelings, she is not empathetic and does not participate in the child's world.

Care may not be lacking, but it is not transmitted through intimate contact, including physical contact.

For the E5, the body —primary space for the definition of oneself— with its perceptions, impulses and instincts ceases very early to be the basis of access to itself, the other and the world, and cognitive information becomes the channel preferred for relational exchange and for the construction of one's own identity.

Claudius often says that the character five: "replace breast milk with books".

Relationships are costly to maintain, and therefore not only are they limited to a sustainable number, but they are pigeonholed into precise and unmistakable categories: a friend is a friend; if he becomes a colleague, an uncontrollable inner turmoil is created on an emotional level. Isolation, fixation of the five, must be understood not only as isolation from others, but also as isolation of experiences from one another and isolation between the intellectual and emotional worlds.

For the E5, the greatest task regarding interpersonal relationships is to sustain the expectation and demand of the other because these represent a bond and a commitment from which either he will not know how to free himself, or he will not feel in a position to satisfy; In addition, they bring with them the danger of abandonment. There is a basic mistrust of relationships and love.

He constantly has the fear of being invaded by the other, fear due to hypersensitivity and a feeling of vulnerability.

Of all the mental enneatypes, the E5 is, without a doubt, the one that shows a massive splitting mechanism that tends to isolate the pleasure area from the instinctive area: pleasure in all its forms cannot be cultivated because it would be a source of emotional disturbance and a hazard that would lead to loss of control.

The E5 appears cold, expressionless, thoughtful, inhibited, suspicious, and physically withdrawn.

Within himself he is not aware of also being a body, just as he is also foreign to the other's body, as if he were walking in a world that does not belong to him.