Instincts

The instinctual subtypes or variants add an additional distinction within each of the nine Enneagram personality types.

There are two approaches to using the instincts for each type.

With the more traditional approach, each of the nine personality types has three subtypes based on whether the individual has a primary interest in self-preservation (sp), one-to-one (sx), or social (so or soc) activities. A subtype is often indicated by prefixing the type with the instinct abbreviation (e.g., for type 1, the subtypes are indicated as sp 1, sx 1, so 1 or soc 1).

A more recent approach, often called variant stacking, orders the instincts according to primary, secondary, and tertiary preference (e.g., an sp/sx 1 individual has a primary preference for the self-preservation instinct, secondary preference for the sexual instinct and a tertiary preference for the social instinct - notice the tertiary preference is generally omitted from the stacking descriptor).

An interesting feature of the instincts is that individuals can appear similar in terms of their instinctual preferences even though they have a different Enneagram type (e.g., a self-preservation type 1 and a self-preservation type 4 would both have a primary interest in self-preservation activities even though their types are different).