Deep dive 02 — Tritypes

Three motives inside a single engine

An enneatype tells you what moves you. Katherine Chernick Fauvre proposed that nobody has only one: that you carry a fixation in each centre, and that the three are negotiating all the time. In an INTJ the negotiation is lopsided — the head centre tends to feed Ni, the gut centre tends to drive Te, and the heart centre is the one that finds the least language, until it leaks. Here are the 27 combinations, one by one.

Two things are worth separating before going down the list. The archetype is the set: one type from the gut centre, one from the heart, one from the head — 27 combinations, and that is what this text is written against. A person’s tritype is that same set in dominance order, which is a different piece of information. And there is a third thing happening here that Fauvre does not do: crossing the three fixations with the cognitive stack. That is a reading, not a finding — nobody has tested any of it, and the note below explains why.

Tritype® is Katherine Chernick Fauvre’s model and trademark; she has been developing it since the mid-1990s, and the USPTO registrations (6,474,587 and 6,558,145) were granted in 2021. Fauvre attributes the term Trifix™ to Óscar Ichazo — it is not, as the story goes around, a community workaround for her trademark. The three centres are much older than the tritype: they come out of the Ichazo–Naranjo lineage and reached the English-language reader systematised by Riso and Hudson. On tritypes themselves there is no peer-reviewed literature at all — none. The systematic review by Hook and colleagues (2021) swept 104 research samples on the enneagram and found not one study of the three-fixation model. Read this page as vocabulary for describing yourself, never as a result.

The 27 archetypes are sets, not sequences: one type from the gut centre (8, 9, 1), one from the heart (2, 3, 4) and one from the head (5, 6, 7), with no internal order — which is why they are written here in ascending digits. A person’s tritype is another matter: it is the same set written in dominance order, with the core enneatype leading. So archetype 358 turns up as 358, 385, 538, 583, 835 or 853 depending on who is speaking — six labels for one room, differing only in who sits at the head of the table. And the difference matters: a lead 3 with 5 and 8 behind it is not a lead 8 with 3 and 5 behind it, even though this same page describes them both.

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The text for your variation would go here. Pick a profile to see it — or carry on: the whole page works with nothing filled in.

358

The Solution Master (Fauvre)

Fauvre’s archetype

3Heart · image and hurt
5Head · fear and calculation
8Gut · body and anger

The combination that solves: knows enough, delivers the result, and takes command when nobody else will. Effectiveness lived as identity.

Running on Ni–Te

The three fixations agree with each other and agree with Ni–Te — which is what makes this tritype so effective and so hard to live inside. The vision belongs to the 5: Ni does not speak before it has substrate, and the habit of mastering an entire subject before venturing an opinion is born here. The execution belongs to the 8: Te does not propose, it occupies — decides fast, accepts the friction, and treats incompetent authority as a removable obstacle. And the 3, contrary to what usually happens in this stack, does not stay buried: it is what converts understanding into delivery and delivery into personal worth, and it is what holds the façade up after everything else has given way. Notice what is missing. None of the three argues for rest: the 5 says you are not ready yet, the 3 says you have to prove it now, the 8 says weakness is exposure. Tertiary Fi — the only function that could say what you feel — has not one ally in this tritype. Under stress the order barely varies: the 5 disappears first (you stop answering), the 8 hardens next (which comes out as contempt and is fear), and the 3 falls last, so the façade keeps working for months after the end. The Se grip arrives disguised as productivity. And the move that resolves it is precisely the one none of the three will ever suggest: letting someone know you before you are competent.

Sources

Not every claim about type carries the same weight. The tag beside each work says where it comes from — and what counts as evidence varies a great deal between them.

  1. Methodological critique Hook, J. N., Hall, T. W., Davis, D. E., Van Tongeren, D. R., & Conner, M. (2021). The Enneagram: A systematic review of the literature and directions for future researchJournal of Clinical Psychology, 77(4), 865–883.
  2. Specific model Fauvre, K. C. (1994–). What is Tritype®?katherinefauvre.com/tritype. Marca registrada da autora: USPTO 6.474.587 (2021) e 6.558.145 (2021).
  3. Specific model Naranjo, C. (1994). Character and Neurosis: An Integrative ViewGateways/IDHHB.
  4. Specific model Riso, D. R., & Hudson, R. (1999). The Wisdom of the EnneagramBantam.