Type Four
The Intuitive Romantic

Center of Intelligence: Heart center
Motivation: To be seen as unique, sensitive, deep, creative, and flawed
Core Fears: Being without meaning, mundane, emotionally flat, and inadequate

Fours are insightful, melancholy, creative, and analytical. Fours are motivated to be seen as authentic, deep, intuitive, and original. They are the Enneagram's emotional barometers and have a deep need to express their emotional experiences and share their innermost feelings to retain a sense of themselves. Fours seek emotional intensity to make up for a deep feeling of inadequacy. They learned early in their lives that if they can maintain an intimate connection with their emotions, they can maintain a sense of self. Fours' emotional intensity makes them adept trackers of others' emotional states, and they often describe themselves as intuitive and empathetic. They want to bear witness to the pain and suffering of others because they are familiar with these states.

Insight Mastery
Fours often have an extraordinary gift for identifying what is missing. As one of the three reactive types (along with types Six and Eight), they call off what is emotionally absent or not acknowledged in any given situation. For example, they may identify emotional triggers or psychological patterns that others may not see. The propensity to explore their psyche affords them the skills to quickly understand others' motivations and emotional structure and offer insight and compassion. Fours are champions of emotional expression, authenticity, and exploration of human life's painful and uncomfortable aspects. Fours both idealize their flaws and feel shameful about their perceived lacks.

Envy, Compensation, and Analysis
Fours are aesthetically driven and seek beauty in their lives to compensate for the ugliness they perceive in the world around them (or within themselves). Some Fours can find beauty in the grotesque or avant-garde because the Four identifies with what is different or the exception to the rule. Fours intensely experience envy because they perpetually compare themselves to those around them who seem to have more than they do. They are all-too-aware of their envy and may become spiteful or vengeful toward those who possess gifts, talents, relationships, careers, beauty, strength, or intelligence that they believe they don't have. Fours are intellectual and introspective, and their emotional world is often analyzed and over-analyzed to locate the "fatal flaw" that makes them feel bereft, deprived, and constantly longing.

Fours can be therapy addicts, preferring the analysis of a problem, trauma, or their psyche to moving past an issue toward freedom. Fours are "insight masters" but may reach the same insight multiple times without taking steps to shift the emotional pain. Their aptitude for self-awareness stems from the Four's need to maintain a state of suffering or frustration.

Frustration, Dissatisfaction, and Hatefulness
For the Four, being chronically frustrated opens the possibility of being rewarded in some way for their suffering. However, Fours often feel angry and discouraged that the rewards or benefits of life never happen for them but seem to happen for other people. The feeling of frustration allows them to see themselves as exempt from the rules of "regular people" and, as such, exhibit haughtiness or diva-like qualities; "I can't do the dishes, I'm upset today."

Because of the Four’s focus on beauty and refinement, they may be exhibit elitism around their chosen interests (whether music, art, or an intellectual pursuit). Fours are moody, but their emotions are often outwardly understated and refined. As such, they do not exhibit frequent extroverted displays of emotion, but may pout, withdraw, and display irritation, frustration, and dissatisfaction. Unhealthy Fours can be self-involved and can have difficulty seeing things from the perspective of others. Their emotional pain and suffering become paramount. They can be dismissive and disdainful of others' experiences, believing they suffer more intensely than others and that no one can understand what they're going through. They begin to control others with their emotional moodiness, expecting others to exempt them from regular life and tending to basic everyday tasks. Unhealthy Fours can become hateful and emotionally erratic. They prefer wallowing in negative, unpleasant emotions more than finding productive solutions to their emotional distress.

When Healthy and Balanced
At their best, Fours can transform their subjective emotional pain into something universal (art, music, poetry, or just their perspective on the world). They recognize that their suffering is human suffering and thus representative of our humanity. They bear witness to others in crisis or distress, and people generally feel seen as healthy Fours see past facades and illusions to help uncover the true essence of others. Others look to Fours to create refinement, beauty, and nurture depth.

Healthy Fours manage to stay true to their emotional experiences and maintain a balanced, practical existence, tending to mundane daily life with the same passion they tend to intense emotions. Self-aware Fours understand the spiritual truth that depth comes from the transmutation of pain, suffering, and trauma.

Exemplars: Prince, Prince Charles of Windsor, Diana Ross, Naomi Campbell, Marilyn Manson, Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, Jewel, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Anna Wintour, Judy Garland, Angelina Jolie, Kate Winslet, Frank Ocean, Frida Kahlo, Diane Arbus, Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Alan Rickman, Stevie Nicks, Annie Lennox, Martha Graham, Rudolph Nureyev, Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Meryl Streep, Alan Ginsburg, Lauryn Hill, Cat Power, Bette Davis, Tom Ford, Timotheé Chalamet, Maggie Rogers, Gary Oldman, Angel Olsen, Mary Kate Olsen, Marion Cotillard, Billie Holiday, Tori Amos, Dracula, Anne Rice, Florence Welch, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Cobain, Jeff Buckley, Alanis Morrissette, P.J. Harvey, Julian Casablancas