Heart. Frustration. Withdrawn. Reactive.

These are the elements you must understand to identify the enneadevil.

The center of emotional intelligence and 4’s position in the heart triad. The object relational affect of uncompromising idealism and which functions are demonised by it. The harmonic subjugation of the head. Let me begin to unravel what you still won’t get.

Withdrawn Frustration

Frustrated with both object relational functions, the objects of nurturing and guidance, 4 will guide and nurture the self internally devoid of means to actualise those inner fruits of heart and mind into the external world of the body without feeling decaying distortion of what once was a frustration ideal of ineffable beauty. This is the trap of 4. It is nugatory to describe the object relational affect of any type without the hornevian function the type has declared its nemesis.

Withdrawn is the separation from the body. It is a uselesness in the moving center, the motor to participate in life. Withdrawn finds no nurturing, no heart knot in any external object. Withdrawn finds no guidance, no direction and clarity in any external object. Withdrawn is the failure to be seen and guided by the target of engagement. In order to find direction for and gratification of self, withdrawn needs to not use the body, but a scrambled cocktail of its head and heart center.

I’ve called frustration a mesh of rejection and attachment before, because frustration hasn’t completely thrown out the need for nurturing and guidance - yet it won’t yield to an external object to receive the need in a mutual exchange. It’s not receptive, it is domineering. It wants to be seen and held, but refuses to settle on a compromise. Frustration types have an ingrained disgust against compromising their needs. Only their vision of heart and head idealism is good enough.

Only the 4 can see its own heart. Only the 4 can know the 4’s mind. The hornevian center - the body - is the intersecting triad that ensures the external (reality, the world and its people in it) won’t meet the 4’s need for guidance and nurturing. The frustration is a double-edged sword aimed at the internal and the external, and any attempt of the 4 to actualise the internal vision is bound to disappoint.

Imagine being on a foreign planet where every one of your offerings is useless, every word you speak is misunderstood, every expression of beauty finds no mirroring, no resonance. Yet you carry a fire inside, a need to reveal your innermost sacredness, a self-willed conviction that you are the one who sees, you are the one who knows. Imagine travelling back to ancient times to read your poetry and sing your hymns to neanderthals, only for them to smash your instruments, to shred your clothes, to tear your skin off because they are incapable to understand. Attachment could be sly to invade the group, blend in first and learn the ooga booga language, to slowly influence the brutes from the inside, to synthesise the heart and mind offerings and find a compromise, find an opening for the cavemen to be receptive for the gifts of self. Frustration knows no adaptation, no slyness, no receptivity for what can be understood and what has more impact reframed. It only knows that one goddamn song, and withdrawn frustration can neither be received by what nurtures their heart nor what ignites the mind. Withdrawn frustration is a failure. Everything it touches falls apart. It is doomed to be trapped in the body and to never be expressed and perceived in reverence.

Withdrawn frustration is a visionary with locked-in syndrome.

If you ever feel seen in just one facet of your heart that few people get, fully seen, if you ever felt like words made everything fall into place in your mind’s castle, if you have just one creature in the universe who understands what you’re about in your totality and whose words you don’t have to reflexively turn over, rearrange, or criticise because they just make sense, you, enneachild, are not a 4. For 4, there is always an agony, even in the most heartfelt touch, even in the most insightful and exciting exchange, a grain in the heart and mind that sticks, abrades, corrodes the resonance of your emotion and discernment. A hunger that lingers.

Reactive Subjugation of the Head

Reactivity is a harmonic strategy for the personality that is implemented when our needs are unmet by the external object. For 4s, there is no externality they can be positively identified with. Their reactivity is aimed at attempts to see and to guide them. Unlike competency types, reactive types don’t seek a solution for the object’s mistreatment, and unlike positive types, they don’t seek to move on. A solution would be a heart compromise, moving on would be a heart betrayal. A state of ease or ‘letting go’ cannot be reached, and the only twisted alternative to calm the agony is excruciating awareness. The head center’s deduction is to serve the heart, a mind tracking every beat, dissecting every tumour, categorising every intruder. Thoughts, like thick oil running in every slot, lasting on every spot, until the heart is saturated with blackening ooze.

The head center is an auto-narrator in the 4’s scramble. It is acutely aware of every emotional stirring, jumping to provide reason like a diligent butler. The head center isn’t free, it isn’t allowed to indulge in any subject before the heart is invested. Without an emotional pull, the head center is immobile. This is why 4s are incapable to invest in a topic when the heart cannot see value in it. Even if a topic may be ‘theoretically interesting,’ the mind cannot move towards it, the chains tying it to the heart are too short. The mind’s on a tight leash, serving the heart mistress. The process for 5 is reversed, with the competent subjugation the heart will follow and give value to the mind’s fascination. For 9, the scramble is unsubjugated, heart and head center being mutual simps for each other. When head or heart are gripped for 9, the other center will follow and provide reason or value.

Withdrawn types have a deepened self-awareness rooted in their heart-head scramble, but if I had to nail a winner on the cross it would have to be 4 due to their heart centeredness and the enslavement of the head. Every emotion is registered and compulsively analysed. To understand the heart and identity is their purpose and eternal flame. The enslavement of the head in a withdrawn frustration heart core creates an intensely self-fascinated, impenetrable, dissatisfied heart that is locked in a catatonic state, bereft of means to pull its rotten teeth out, so instead it studies their decay.

Reactivity is a constant state, in particular for 4s with their double object frustration, yet furthermore, it is a harmonic coping mechanism for engaging with the outside, as I hope to have illustrated - it is tied to the scramble, the distortion of the heart center in 4s. 4 can never be in a pure heart state, the head center is always tied to a 4’s focus on the heart, serving its beat.

If you look at the harmonic triad as a spectrum, the identification of a problem goes from reactive negativity to neutral competency and into positive positivity. The overuse of head is a non-solution, an examination of the problem without ‘doing’ anything about it. The use of heart weighs a problem on a scale, balancing it into something that can be endured by making a compromise. The use of the body, however, is an underidentification with the problem, the search for a silver lining to move towards that necessitates the neglect of the root.

The subjugation of the head can also be seen in the 4’s position on the symbol. Sitting next to 5, it dips into the head center and thus underexpresses the full potential of the heart. A heart needs to emerge to be expressed, a brooding heart is narrowed in its range. Frustration limits the 4’s heart further, the idealism of what is ‘right’ or ‘allowed’ to externalise gives it an an all-or-nothing quality. The hornevian double problem traps 4 in a state of dissatisfaction with actualisation. This is why 4 ‘doesn’t say it all’ despite being an emotional type, and I should have clarified sufficiently why this is not to be conflated with 9.

How does reactivity look in 4?

Examples are dangerous territory, and not to be taken literal. So I won’t provide them, but knowing that without illustration, my words will fall on deaf ears yet again, I can try to illustrate the subjugation further.

The negative bears a promise for depth and self-differentiation. When 4s are emotionally affected, they will seek isolation to dissect the feeling and only cease after a symbol of self-lore was forged by thought. This is unlike the ruminating retreat in 9s, as the 9 scramble is unsubjugated and their heart analysis does not need to serve an image display. 4s have a desire to adorn themselves with their findings as value tokens, carving pearls from their aching bones. To just ‘talk about it’ in the moment is not what 4s are capable of. The raw feeling has no depth yet, the raw feeling is a mundanely human sentiment that does not distinguish the 4’s emotional turmoil enough from to be externalised without shame. There is nothing unique about being sad or mopey or dissatisfied, no value in reacting with immediacy - only after the mind has fashioned the agony into an allegory. There has to be something deeper hidden in the bone marrow. There has to be something only the 4 can excavate as proof for their brokenness.

The reactive affair of processing the emotional intensity into something artful is cathartic for 4s. It is a self-reinforcement of the narrative that the 4’s identity is not mundane, but complex and unique. A type 4 will constantly be dissecting their emotions and experiences, searching for a deeper meaning and significance. Every emotional affection induces intense introspection, often resulting in an artistic symbol or artifact. The resistance to practical solutions and decisive action is evident here. It would feel like avoidance of depth, pulling away from what is so enticingly torturous. And so the cycle of discontent, stagnation and negativity is reinforced.

The subjugation of the head to the heart center is the crux of 4’s trap, a disembodied, over-specifying heart fixated on drilling the finger deeply into the wound. The dismissal or ignorance of the lighter spectrum of the heart’s emotional range - the positive, the ‘heart-widening’ emotions - stems from the frustrated reactivity in the withdrawn scramble. 4s are attached to an identity that is sourced in the dark, frustratedly refining and discarding what does not match the constructed self: amplifying what is harrowing, unusual, different, shocking, non-human, and forever without practical body force or interest to move into ‘positive’ change or growth. Letting go of this grasp would mean to let go of this tight grip on the heart, to let go of the attachment to their narrow emotional palette that feels distinctly them. This over-certitude and uncompromising holding on to feeling is what is decidedly anti-9, an arrogance about their identity that cannot be softened or held back for the sake of an attachment or harmony.

The shame, on which I will focus later, arises in the realisation that the 4 may be not so different after all, in being a basic human being that needs to eat and sleep and shit and do body things to survive and get on like every living creature. That is why you will rarely see a 4 share much about their ‘basic’ life - their jobs, families or everyday activities. The separated gut is moving, because it needs to move, it is a force just as strong in 4s as it is in every type, but what the 4 ‘does’ in the body-reality space feels the least like them. That 4s have normal lives is an embarrassment, nothing to present without humiliation to others, as this would give room to relate. 4s are hyper-subjective and often uninterested in reality altogether. When others point out what the 4 achieves with the separated body, it often causes a confoundment that preserves the 4 as misunderstood (how dare they focus on my everyman tasks when these are not me) and causes shame about having ‘overshared.’ 9s may also dwell in fantasy most of the time, avoiding reality in the withdrawn scramble, but for 9s the body and its power will always contain a sense of home or a longing to return to actualisation, vigour and aliveness. For 4s, this movement into alignment with the body would mean they’d have to sacrifice their identity, and so the body has to be and will forever be avoided. Where 9s are capable to be fully ‘in the moment’ and soak in sensation, this presence and connection to their gut intuitiveness is deeply unsettling and impossible to access - I, for once, have never experienced a moment of unity with reality and the present.

The withdrawn-reactive intersection doesn’t mean that 4s won’t react in the moment, unlike 9s who can delay or withhold their authentic response for the sake of inner harmony or equilibrium - 4s will state their position to a fault, as the compulsion to differentiate is a reflex. However, throwing tantrums without having refined them into something unrelatable is messy and shallow, so you won’t see 4s being commentators on whatever happens in their surroundings - that would require more body center access anyways and is more of a 6 specialty.

The heart center is the house of our self-image. It is where we derive a subjective experience of ourselves and extract value from it. It is with the heart center that we pay attention to others and receive attention from them. It is the emotional response we feel when looking at something or someone and when being looked at. It involves the personal-ness of our interactions, influencing how we perceive ourselves and how we believe others perceive us. The heart is where we feel closest to our essence, where we feel distinct.

Heart, Identity and Shame

If we truly listened to our hearts all the time, we would invite our true identities to be altered. We would be running around with an open thorax, bearing our vulnerable chests to everyone. We cannot let that happen to be a somewhat functional entity, thus we create a false heart. This second layer of the heart, our self-image, is what we allow to be seen and touched. This is what we express through the third layer, the personality, which is seen and reflected back to us by others.

As infants, we don’t have a conceptualised self-image. But the more we develop and collect experiences of not being seen and met within our hearts, the more we develop a strategy of settling for the next best hit, because we are dependent on emotional resonance. We have to cope with our hearts not being seen - nurturing and refining our self-image, while the gap between the heart and the picture we carry of it becomes deeper and harder to cross. Our type in its full complex construction (core, wing, trifix) is the calcified pattern we are trapped in perpetual repetition in, while the heart becomes an orphan.

4s are the type that represents a magnified lens on the own heart, and the gap between authenticity and self-image is more aware to them than to any other type, as is the experience of being seen for something other than their authentic selves. As frustration types, they cannot accept the replacement heart to be mirrored back at them as who they are, and overdo their efforts to display what is beneath the hologram. The frustration with never being seen correctly and the mental reactivity which abidingly points the finger at what is real and what is not-real puts them into a state of constant, exasperated holding onto the realness in their emotional center, resulting in a neverending self-fuelled dissappointment over not being seen for their bona fide heart. The result is a refinement that brittles the heart, as if 4s carved an intricate pattern into the hologram heart that would be interpreted as something not-quite, spurring them to carve even more delicate ornaments to repeat the process - until they feel there’s not much there to be chiseled, the substance of their self-image being waned away. There will be an increasing hesitance to reveal the fake heart over time, which can be reflected in the 4’s aesthetic resonance with decay of the beautiful.

All that I show is ultimately going to be twisted, misunderstood and declared into something else. Everything, every piece of me, like this writing, will get a life of its own and live as an abomination of me. The wall I have to surmount to unfold myself stacks a new stone with each attempt. This is an ever present problem in my relationships and communities, loose or intimate, and has caused me to wane from many. At some point I have poured all my image fuel into the construction of something that still does not feel like me, and what else could I do? I also notice this in new 4s who join the community of GOD - in the early phases, they are ever so obnoxiously overcurating their 4ness in perplexing riddles for us to solve, yet overtime, they become fatigued and nauseated by the cycle of inevitable distortion so we see less of them. I suppose this is why I cherish novel connections - the process of unfolding, of falling in love, of first exploring a tunnel into someone else’s heart, fresh footsteps in pure snow, when there is still the promise of being touched where it’s real for once. There are so very few hearts that don’t fray for me. I suppose this is also why I rather cut a thread between hearts before I have to witness the withering into commonality. The ending at the shore, after having survived the violent almost-drowning in the deep sea, is my least favourite one. When the fervent, curious dance around each other’s hearts, the fascination has waned into the daily ‘how is your grandma?’, because we have studied every intonation, because we have explored most of our dark spots and now there is but reality to exist in together. So I hold back on sharing my reality with you - this separated gut has no say in my heart and it isn’t what you should include in your painting of me. To not end up there, by the shore, I have ended many connections before they evolved into this. I am known for my poetic goodbyes, keeping you as a symbol for what you meant to me - it is out of love that I purge you before you become human to me.

What often causes confusion with the social instinct is the need for reciprocation that heart types depend on more than head or body types. Reciprocation is not to be conflated with relating, with sameness, with a shared purpose or opinion, but the creek that connects two hearts needs to flow both ways. If it doesn’t, that means my waters will dry. Despite my self-absorption, my emotional tentacles are very attuned to how you receive my heart’s bearings. I will notice what you make of my revelations, and I will cherish if you pick up on them while keeping them pure and as intended. If you build on my lore in the wrong genre, that is when I am rinsed with shame. The ‘lore,’ the artification of my heart, is not just a method to infuse more depth into my common feelings, but also a way to lessen the impact of shame. If you misunderstand my poetry, you still haven’t seen my real heart, and I can simply discard you as recipient of my revelations. If you hit the truth hidden in the poem, you have passed a test and we may continue to forge lore in reciprocation. All withdrawn types use ‘bait’ of symbolism, but for 4s the stakes are higher - the intersection with reactivity (testing if you too see the truth) and desire for heart-to-heart touch not only further obfuscates the riddle, but also enhances the potency for the 4’s heart.

Connections that positively emphasise a heart type’s image are a sources of value. To make their value known, image types often interweave their personal connections even to the point of cringe. In the GOD community, you will notice heart types name-dropping their kins in unrelated conversations (‘I talked to @person about this’) - the person brought in is a value enhancement. Social types also exhibit this behaviour, and ‘doing hearts’ (2s) are more prone to bring in their beloveds as well, but 4, even social last 4, isn’t exempt. What’s underlying is the flex of a unique quality in a connection - our hearts are dear to each other, and we share something you could never understand. The referencing of relationships for how they see us is noticeable in all heart types if you pay attention. It is a protection against the shame of being seen wrongly by most, a holding on to the ones who feel us on a personal frequency.

Reciprocation

Shame

Heart types are prone to shame, the emotion felt when our self-image is exposed as incongruent, yet they are also quite often less aware of its grip as they subconsciously employ tactics to avoid its terror in every moment of their self-expression. To dodge shame, they become masters of the hologram, prison guards to their buried hearts, and like puppeteers they carefully orchestrate the theatre of acting hearts so their true essence won’t be exposed and affected.

It's a weird distortion of shame for core heart types.

At the center of any heart types' struggle lies their deep longing to be valued and seen for who they truly are. Heart types all seek recognition to affirm their worth and significance. This inherent desire for validation stems from an underlying sense of inadequacy and a fear of being unimportant or invisible.

To cope with this, heart types overexaggerate their fake heart, their carefully crafted persona that embodies the idealised (and shame-free) version of themselves. The self-image becomes an armour, protecting them from feelings of unworthiness and vulnerability. This is why heart types often are less aware to their shame, while head types, in particular 6s, relate to being cringe the most. The shame in 6 is a superego induced ‘not being good enough' attachment problem with guidance, its origin is not in the heart center.

When their value or worth is challenged or criticised by others, heart types often exhibit a straightforward rejection of such critique. They reject the notion that they are anything less than their idealised self-image to avoid the touch of shame. Their persistent focus on their image means tracking every component of themselves for how it reflects a narrative or impression about themselves they want others to pick up, down to the level of miniscule intonations and movements. Maintaining a persona is a full time job and heart types are incessently affirming their image to themselves, even when nobody is around, in a million different ways. All heart types need competency influence to maintain and curate their hologram heart - competency is heart subjugation, a purposeful, oppressed and one-directional use of the heart, and type 3s as core competency types can be the most consistently ‘on brand’ with their image as their heart subjugation is permanent. 2s and 4s too have competency wings - the heart center is the center related to hornevian nurturing and harmonic competence. To feel seen in our hearts, some facets need to be oppressed. This is what image means - the curation of what is authentically us in our core to receive validation.

Core hearts in their longing for authenticity (yes, not just 4s) overdo the competency curation of the raw heart into something perceivable. Through their identification with the fake heart and all the upkeep that entails they become a walking trophy of value. They do not have to prove their worth to you as their presence alone is a live theatre of overcompensated heartache - Here is ME, bearing you all that you must know and see on a silver platter (whilst hiding what is shameful). Only if you point at something I did not intend for you to see, if you misinterpret the hologram, shame will creep in.

Of course, heart types are still shame types. I am not to declare them free of shame, but it is important to differentiate between the definition of shame for head and body types versus core heart types whose image in itself is an armour worn against shame. Every type has a way to avoid the underlying emotion of their center of intelligence, just as 9s can be out of tune with their anger or 7s distract themselves from fear with doing.

For 4s, the shame washes over them when their image is being received as relatable, obvious or common. This is what further distinguishes their shame from the shame that some 6s and 9s feel - there is no shame in 4 about being defective, inadequate, dysfunctional; whereas there can be for 6s and 9s (unless 4-fixed), as this could threaten their attachments. ‘Woe is me for being less’ is extremely anti-4, whereas it causes them shame to recognise how universal or relatable their experience as a human being is, that everyone struggles with what they make out their depth as.

This is why it is unbearable to see 4 depicted in ennea literature as overcompensating for shame by seeking belonging or understanding or hiding their flawed sense of self, when this is exactly what a 4 avoids. For 4s, seeking belonging or being understood would mean to erase their core mechanism. Regardless of health level or the amount of Inner Work a 4 has done, a 4 will stay an image type that subjugates the head to create self-narratives that separate them from the world. A 4 will always be gut-less, overdoing heart introspection and underdoing heart expression, entangled in trying to make their external image more intimately reflect their inner experience of themselves. In doing so, they may unintentionally create an image that appears caricaturish, one-dimensional, and excessively specific. However, this image also serves as a proxy for their real heart — a shield against the wrong kind of attunement that could reawaken the core heart pain of not being truly seen.

Essential Depth & Holy Origin

4s ‘significance’ as one of nine facets in the Law of One is ‘Essential Depth.’ This absolutely does not imply that 4s are more deep than other types. It relates to the trap of 4 that rewinds their cycle of suffering. For 4s, depth is conditional rather than inherent, and therefore has to be distilled from the core with a reactive frustration grasp and in protection against pollution in the withdrawn scramble. From the 4 angle below the Enneagram’s surface, depth is rare and in opposition to the earthly qualities above and outside. The ego strives for depth and thus has to be defined against the external, the identification as unique is the consequence.

The Holy Idea represents the non-dualistic perspective of essence - the dualism refers to the scrambling of centers. The ego fixation (melancholy for 4) is the response to being trapped in a 2D perspective in a three-dimensional reality, caused by the loss of this Holy Idea. In the fixation (a heart subjugating the mind, locked in consistent self-fetishising analysis and distillation of depth) 4s attempt to restore the freedom of Holy Origin.

The Holy Ideas can be thought of as an objectivity our personalities are incapable of, so I find their usefulness very limited. They only interest me from a conceptual point to deepen my understanding of the types.

Holy Origin is the thruth in Being that originality does not require reinforcement nor can it be artificially deepened by the fixation on sustaining a particular identity that is different from others. It is the idea of a deep connection to the source which goes beyond the ways we see ourselves as singular identities. Writing these words makes me feel violated in my core, but I know 9s who can truly connect with the concept of ‘Gaia.’

The Passion of Envy

The passions are emotional undercurrents to the loss of contact with our essence or Holy Idea. In this context, envy is born out of lost origin. It encapsulates the disappointment of being unoriginal, and is a distortion of 4’s virtue of equanimity. Equanimity can be seen as an unattainable idea of the ‘healthy’ 4, a 4 that is emotionally balanced and open-hearted, and since I do not believe in the average spiritually interested person to be capable of ‘achieving’ this higher state, I won’t focus on equanimity in this article. The key towards growth lies, as I repeatedly stated, in the integration of one’s separated center - so through embodiment, 4 can theoretically release the tight grip on its heart-head scramble and become more three-dimensional - less brooding and melancholically fixated on the frustration between inner ideal and outer experience.

Drawing from the dynamic interplay between the adjacent types, 4s experience envy as a complex amalgamation of yearning for their idealised image projected by type 3 and the avaricious hoarding of sacred internal resources in protection against scarcity in type 5.

Envy is thus born out of the push & pull between vanity (3) and avarice (5), a vain image which needs to be safeguarded internally to keep it from falling apart.

The non-enneagrammatic meaning of envy still causes confusion and is responsible for mistypings. Envy in 4 relates to a persistent dissatisfaction which arises from a subconscious acknowledgment that the self-concept falls short of providing a robust identity, despite futile attempts to elevate it to something unique and individualised that 4 conflates with depth. The ego becomes the focal point of intense fascination, occupying the mind with incessant thoughts and self-absorption, all while harboring doubts about its ability to foster profound authenticity. Instead of relaxing their true selves (equanimity - holy origin), 4s fixate on crafting a semblance of identity in definition against the outer world and the own body. This manifests externally through deliberate actions aimed at projecting a desired image and internally through clinging to a specific, narrow set of emotions, reactions, and self-perceptions that align with their idealised self.

Frustration is requisite to understand envy, an idealism around identity that always falls short as the personality never feels ‘real enough,’ compensated for with the reactive enslavement of the mind to uncover and distill the real self within. 4s do catch something significant about personality in their envious frustration here - that the ego is false, yet they do not ‘solve’ this dilemma in ways superior to other enneatypes. Instead, they get overly possessed by their reactive scramble over this deficiency, coping for the loss origin with self-fetishisation that further alienates them from the source. In the frustrated reactive withdrawn scramble around their identity and the faint recognition of the holy idea lies their obsession with symbols: Self-creations that express both the lost origin itself and the path back to it. The kafkaesque fascination with metamorphosis arises from here too - Life as a purgatory of suffering to return to a paradise lost, if only they can hone themselves into a being worthy of entering the sanctuary. A world in which the 4’s true self can be what it was meant to be: Beautiful.

As hexad types, 4s lack objective clarity about themselves more substantially than primary types subjugating the self to an external object. The ‘essential depth’ is an envious overcompensation - digging, self-penetrating, carving the brittle heart to purge it from pollution - a subjective, self-reasoning heart violation that denies any interconnectedness or familiarity in the outside, thus it becomes superficial - an image of depth.

Envy is not a comparison of self with the external and the conclusion that the self falls short or is lacking. Envy does relate to a subconscious knowing of how lacking the personality is, and to the impossible act of compensating it with a generated hologram that personifies authenticity.

If you truly understand the junctions of withdrawn gut separation, frustration with nurturing & guidance in the outer world, and the subjugation of the head to one’s identity, you should have a grasp on what envy suggests and how it has nothing to do with desiring the external but feeling inadequate or undeserving to attain it - and especially how seeking belonging counters everything you hopefully learned about the type thus far.

The Lines of Purification

The hornevian group of 4 (withdrawn) in its doubled gut separation contrasted with the superego types 1 and 2 demonstrates that 4 can integrate the separated body through both its lines in a subjugation trade. 4 resembles a doing heart (2) by scrambling in body, or a feeling gut (1) by scrambling in heart. Both lines of 4 are superego. I shall focus on the subjugation trade in lines in a soon-to-be-released article. For this piece, I will focus on the expression of the lines in a more descriptive way.

4s have no direct access to superego through their core type or wings. They have lines to 2 and 1, both superego types. Superego is the Hornevian triad which defines a problem with the guidance function and the separation from the head center. In the structure we can detect that type 1, a competency type, subjugates the heart, while type 2, a positive type, subjugates the body. Types 1 and 2 both have the body in their scramble. Lines can be seen as a key to partial access of the hidden force or lost center. For 4, the access can be through 1, a direct line to the body, or 2, a subjugated line to the body. This already illustrates why one of the two is referred to as integrating and the other as disintegrating. I do not subscribe to the belief that lines can be a learned tactic or a wilful strategy to become ‘more like type x’ - personally, I do experience lines as a shatter of my usual coping mechanisms that often goes both ways and feels messy and destabilising, not like an empowering embodiment.

By ‘moving to 1 or 2’ 4 will not look like these types. It will sacrifice the subjugated head for an additional competency/positive subjugation frequency that vibrates through the 4’s core heart. Superego is head-less overcompensation of being without guidance through the heart-body scramble, a justification that lacks the clarity of the head. It is obvious how that feels messy to a type that reasons with head and is tightly locked in its state as a thought-infused heart in its natural mode. The lines to 1 and 2 are more embodied and outward, yet they are less discerning.

If 4 moves to 2, that will show up as an amplification of the 4's self-exceptionalism, the self-image of being particularly rare is getting a prideful boost. Woe is 4, the wounded bird, how could you not care for them? They are, after all, so uniquely gifted and special and broken. Pride is feeding the hyper-individualism. 4 going to 2 is 4 in victim mode, backing up their dysfunctionality with a superego justification. It’s giving angel wings to the 4’s self-image marketed as something uniquely broken. The line to 2 further adds a vibration of subjugated body to the heart, so the 4’s usual heart misery gets body fuel to be more outwardly expressed rather than refined. 4 won’t be a doing heart, but the line to 2 adds a subjugated body emphasis on the 4’s frustrated gripe with depth.

4 going to 1 subdues the core heart and leans more into competency, a heart subjugation. The 4’s heart overfocus fades away and the embodiment is emphasised, while the heart becomes the secondary fuel. A rigid, narrow image funneled into a rigid, righteous godliness. It’s sharpening the edgy, already whetted personality into something even more prickly, backed up by god’s omnipotence. 4-1 stacks up on frustration and thus is even more uncompromising and totalitarian, but the heart can serve a purposes rather than be the purpose. Identity flows into actualisation.

If 4-2 is Lucifer, the fallen angel, cast out from the heavenly realm and screeching about its identity to be acknowledged as special, to be forgiven by God and seen for its pure intentions transformed into deeds; 4-1 is the Lightbringer, holier-than-thou in its satanic brokenness and on the path of vindication to install a new order in which the 4’s image is to be affirmed. 

Again, structurally it is illuminating why one line is preferred to ‘get shit done’ for 4, while the other doubles down on heart, but I don’t believe that it’s a sign of health or lack thereof to go to either line. Lines are chaotic, like the movement on the symbol illustrates, and their activation is a sign of discomfort and failed harmonics (head subjugation) in the core.

What 4, partially due to the undercurrent of lines, also has in common with 1 and 2, is is a triggerable proactiveness to reject/expel what does not fit the heart which I found goes beyond the heart frustration affect. In my relationships, I have been prone to discard people for overstepping boundaries or lack of appreciation very swiftly. How can they not affirm my specialness, how dare they? This impurity in my image will be purged from my holding environment without looking back. A loved one has to match my standards and affirm our unique bond or I shall rid myself of them. I am not forgiving of heart failure and my brittle withdrawn boundaries can only be protected through repulsion. Shame activates rejection, overwhelm commands rigid frontiers.

I have no words left to purge out. The baby still slick and crimson red from my womb, my love for this creation is waning. I shall feel estranged from what I birthed once the light rises and creeps into the crevices that meant to be caressed by eternal shadows. There is no storyline which entails a fortunate ending. Whatever I imagine as release, will only ever be a deeper wounding. What I thought to be pus squeezed from the heart, cleansing, was just the last drop of fever blood. Lifeless I am now, drained. This letting was one drop too many. How many times can I cut my heart before the scars inflicted will dampen the sensation? How many times can I hope for you to lick the blood and be infested? How many disappointments can I sustain? How many bloodlettings before I drain? I bear you like a trophy wound. A-tropy.

Though I am not, hope is eternal. Aeons from now, the spurs of my words may dig into a cocoon and stir one heartbeat to awaken in resonance. You will know where to find me. The tunnel is paved with all the hearts that failed.