Something about the conversation surrounding Enneagram 5 makes it sound like a pathology more than other types. I think anyone on the autism spectrum or schizophrenia spectrum would relate to descriptions of e5 to some extent. I do; I thought of myself as a Five the first couple of years on my Enneagram journey, and even after discovering my Seven-ness I still believed in my 4w5 fix until very recently, and this dissonance is precisely what led me to write this post.

I don't believe there exists a written description that actually captures type Five as a Withdrawn Rejection type in the Head Center without mystifying and idolizing (as much as I like Enneagrammer, the description of e5 on their site isn't better than any other you can find). I understand why type 5 is so popular, for the same reason that the perception of any psychiatric label becomes so distorted that you forget they are supposed to describe real actual people - it's the lack of exposure. But pathology is not what type 5 ultimately is. Once you get to know this type like I do, you start noticing something completely different that can't be explained with DSM labels - that's when the fog of mystery disappears and you start seeing e5 just like any other type in the Enneagram, not any more deserving of admiration (nothing in the Enneagram is to be admired anyways). If you're going to put a type on a pedestal, do it because you find the stories of the individuals compelling, not because of the type's coping mechanisms. If it's the latter reason, then you really don't understand the Enneagram.

To address the elephant in the room: could type 5 itself be a specific manifestation of symptoms of either psychiatric label I mentioned in this post? To which I say: I guess? But it doesn't matter. Whatever the case, there is still place for differential diagnosis, because there's something that typology has and psychiatry does not, and that is a method of consistently identifying and applying the proposed categories. Mic drop.