Wish Fulfillment: Point Seven

Characters here are enthusiastic, curious, optimistic, adventurous, uninhibited, and can also become manic, scattered, and/or easily bored and dissatisfied.

Peter Pan is one of the most often cited literary characters at point Seven, and it's easy to think of them as a bit lightweight, but that's oversimplifying a psychological constellation that's as potentially deep as any other.

With their positive, upbeat energy, these characters are typified by Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade, which inspired a movie, as did Truman Capote's Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, strengthening the image of these characters as fun loving, sometimes slightly looney, their irreverence played out even to the point of self-harm, as with Larry McMurtry in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Though this image can seem somewhat superficial, the imagination and possibility thinking typical of characters at point Seven can include great inventors, facile court lawyers, mesmerizing teachers, and inspiring public figures.

For example, you can watch Matthew McConaughey giving an impassioned speech for gun reform in a White House briefing about the Uvalde school shootings--his voice is somewhat boyish, but you can see his strength and emotional depth as he talks about visiting the victims' families with his wife Camilla in Uvalde, where he grew up.

McConaughey's memoir Greenlights, though, offers life lessons on how to get to and stay on the bright side of life and not let hard times hold you back. He's turned 50 and wants to share his poems, aphorisms, and "bumper stickers." In the introduction he writes:

"This is not a traditional memoir . . . I am here to share stories, insights, and philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it . . . I'm an optimist by nature . . . I step in shit all the time and recognize it when I do. I've just learned how to scrape it off my boots and carry on . . . Any hardship, any pause we too, any intervention, interruption . . . they have greenlight assets that will be revealed to us later" (Greenlights, p. 3).

So, basically, Matthew McConaughey wants to teach us how to scrape shit off our boots and carry on! That's what drives characters at point Seven.

If you have a friend or partner, or otherwise know someone who represents this Enneagram point, you'll know how almost every conversation can be transporting, how you find yourself telling secrets you thought you'd never share, because point Seven's energy is so engaging, so much fun to be around, as if you, too, have just tasted the most exquisite chocolate and you want to celebrate. That's the tone of almost every page in Mary Gordon's Spending: A Utopian Divertimento.

Spending is narrated in the voice of Monica Szabo. A fairly successful artist, Monica meets a collector of her art whom she refers to throughout the novel as "B," the first letter of a name she doesn't share initially. B is a wealthy commodities trader who offers to pay for her to take a year off from her job and just paint, which she accepts, and they also become lovers.

Here's a scene where Monica is getting ready to paint, describing how she feels in a way I found sexier than the sex scenes:

"I was much happier the minute I began touching tubes of paint. Because what's more delightful in this world than color? When I give myself over to color, I'm back in the time before words, a time of childish delight. Who understands green better than a baby crawling through grass, surrounded by green grass but without the words for either green or grass. When I'm working with color, I become that child without words. Everything is more alive; everything seems saturated with and by color, and I'm saturated . . ." (Spending, p. 133)

The heightened focus on appetites of all kinds is the same kind of "addiction" we see at any Enneagram point when a character unconsciously plays out a circumscribed theme. At point Seven this drive can especially seem like an escape from reality, and often is quite literally an escape from a troubled childhood.

Consequently, these characters can't tolerate any loss of freedom because it closes the psychological doors to their escape from old hurts. Monica's insistence on freedom becomes clear on page 105 where she's feeling anger toward B for giving her so much that he could take away at any time, and now he's agreed to pose for her paintings of Spent Men:

"When I feel I ought to be grateful, when I feel a sense of obligation, I turn into a rebellious slave. I will destroy the cotton gin or set the plantation on fire. I will overturn the galley, I will incite my fellow rowers to bloody revolt.

I was ready to pick a fight with him the minute I heard the buzzer ring downstairs. I stood in the door frame looking belligerent. But then, the sight of him was always pleasing to me. As he came into the light, closer to me, I had to work to feel antagonistic. And then there was his smell . . . the minute my nose hit the collar of his coat, my objections to him melted. I was a happy animal . . ."

Often, the enjoyment of characters at point Seven must match a heightened image of the "best" or the "most tasteful." For example, we don't find out until the next to the last page that "B" as she calls her wealthy benefactor and lover, is named Bernard, or Bernie, a name she hasn't wanted to mention for 300 pages because, "What kind of name is that for the hero of a great love affair? What kind of name is that to be calling out in a paroxysm of inextinguishable passion? Bernie . . ."

Some reviewers have faulted Mary Gordon for the "airy" nature of Spending, the very quality that makes it such a good example of point Seven's style. A reviewer on Amazon recommends that Gordon "grow up," and Kirkus Review calls it "entertaining but ultimately disappointing with its annoyingly moony detailings of the pair's interminable sex play."

A perfect example of point Seven in memoir is Alan Cumming's Not My Father's Son. Cumming's insight into his own psyche and willingness to share his understanding provide a clear trajectory from his childhood with an extremely abusive father to a famed acting career in film, TV, and stage, in such iconic roles as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret, as well as writer, producer, activist, and New York City club owner, an adulthood where he's recognized by his dimples and gorgeous smile:

"I am referred to often as having a childlike quality, or being pixilike. At first, when these sorts of descriptions began to be attributed to me, I didn't like them . . . Eventually I began to feel more comfortable with it all. Childlike, I realized, tends to mean open, joyous, maybe a bit mischievous, and I am happy to have all those qualities." (p. 124)

He was lucky to have a loving mother who countered his father's abuse and who eventually was able to leave with Alan and his brother Tom. This was not soon enough, though, for Alan's psychological safety, and he repressed most memories of his childhood terror until a nervous breakdown at age 28. He'd just begun rehearsals to play Hamlet on the stage:

"Spending so much time thinking about the concepts of being a father and being a son and trying to interpret the slow trickle of memories and feelings about my own silent childhood soon made it very difficult for me to engage with my friends in the cast   . . ." (p. 150)

After working through these memories, he and his brother went to their child-hood home to confront their father, which released even more of the qualities we associate with point Seven, but now with a healthier spin:

"Tom and I had traveled up to the estate to speak to him about our childhood. It did not go well. But the ensuing silence and absence of him from our lives because of this confrontation enabled us both to move on . . . I found myself embracing the childhood I felt I had missed. My flat began to fill with games I had either played as a boy or lusted after. I discovered I loved the color yellow and so I had all my walls painted in a bright shade of it . . . I started to collect marbles again . . ." (p. 124)

Cumming last spoke to his father from his dressing room while preparing for his role as MC in the Broadway show, Cabaret. This passage shows both psychological strength and ownership of his deep sense of play (p. 217):

"'Okay, take care. I'll talk to you soo--' I stopped. What was I saying? If ever there was a time for the truth it was now.

'Actually, I won't be speaking to you again, but take care.'

'Aye,' was the last thing my father ever said to me.

'Bye,' I said and hung up. I looked up at myself in the mirror of my trailer. I had just had the most horrible conversation of my life, and the very last conversation I would ever have with my tormentor. I was free of him at last. I wonder what he would have done had he known that during that conversation, I was wearing high heels, a bra and panties, and a full face of makeup.'" (p. 217, Not My Father's Son)

Poems for point Seven