Customer Reviews

The Healing Path of the Romantic: Type Four of the Enneagram Personality Type System

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I found this book to be an insightful, comprehensive guide to the Enneagram Personality Type System with emphasis on the Type Four, the "Romantic". The author describes the various personality aspects of each type and incorporates her own life's journey along with a compilation of case studies of other Type Four's. There are many healing methods and tools suggested throughout and it reads as a wonderful unfolding story. Being a "Romantic" myself and having studied the Enneagram the past 20+ years, I've not come across another book that encompasses the full spectrum of the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of the Type Four, until now. This is a must read for anyone new to the Enneagram or advanced students of this fascinating subject.

I'm new to the Enneagram System of typing personalities, so this book gave me an excellent introduction, first of all, into the system itself and how it has evolved. Donna Fisher-Jackson is a well organized author so it is easy to pick and choose chapters to learn more about the Type Four, which she writes in great detail about, but to also see how this system can work in various ways to help a person understand themselves better and even find methods of healing the imbalances in oneself. I was especially drawn to her chapters on 'The Four Elements of Healing'. The tools she described can be applied to other types as well I'm sure, and her illustrative anecdotes made it all come alive. While this is intended to be a rather specialized book on the Romantic Type, anyone interested in the Enneagram System itself will find some pearls of wisdom within its pages.

Its cool to find a book written for you only. That's the feeling I got from reading this book. It was, at times, very enlightening, but there are of course a lot of things to spare from this book and many others to add. Recommended for women only, since the approach for male fours was totally missing.

This book is OK, but only OK. Being the only book of its kind, it should have been authoritative but it clearly is not. It is merely a servicable summary of what makes for a "Romantic" (Enneagram #4), with little to add to what has been printed elsewhere. As a single source to focus attention on what a #4 looks like, it serves its purpose adequately. To extend our knowledge in any meaningful direction, it falls flat.

Before getting back to the conceptual content, I need to comment on the book's format and the writing sytle of the author. The print format -- its font, the narrow margins -- all make reading this book unnecessary more difficult. It is not a pleasant book to look at.

The book does not use any section headers. There are 10 chapters including the intro; that is the extent of the organization of the material. And the book prints the author's full name & book title at the top of every page -- a poor choice versus chapter titles as its not like either are going to change.

The author's writing style also leaves something to be desired, made worse by a total lack of editing. As an example, the 3 instinctual styles of the Enneagram are defined in a cursory way on p21, then nearly identical definitions are given again two pages later. Sentences within paragraphs make abrubt change of subject matter. Punctuation is often poor. And the author is inspecific at key places: she thinks she's speaking to #4 qualities, yet uses such vague & universal terms that she is, in fact, talking about everyone. I believe that reflects a weak understanding of the Enneagram itself.

The book's references are thin; they do not cite all of the top-notch works by Riso-Hudson nor others. Examples presented are rather superficial & predictable. The author uses the 4 energies of astrology but fails to acknowledge doing so, leaving the reader without the context from which the 4 elements come and the wider body of the language of energy that is astrology.

Like a good #4, the author is a bit self-absorbed with her focus. Thus, there is almost no attempt to contrast or compare #4s to other Enneagram types (aside from the adjacent types for purposes of the wings). That weakens our understanding and reflects the authors limited knowledge of the Enneagram.

In sum, this is a book only if you are a #4 and can afford to read only a single book, or if you want to read most anything about the enneagram. (Or, third, want to write a really good book about the other outstanding type of the Enneagram, the #2 Giver, and need an example of things to avoid.)