Horizontal Types

Wilber's View

Wilber draws a sharp line between two kinds of developmental-sounding classification that get routinely confused with each other: vertical levels/stages/waves (the basic-structures spine that runs through most of this wiki) and horizontal typologies — Jungian types, the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, and similar systems. The distinction he's making isn't about complexity or popularity, it's an epistemic one: vertical stages are, in his account, universal and evidenced — everyone passes through sensorimotor before preoperational, with no confirmed exceptions — while horizontal types are optional personality variables that may or may not apply to a given individual at all. You don't "graduate" from being an Enneagram type 3 the way you graduate from concrete operational thinking; the type (if it applies to you) travels with you across levels.

The payoff of keeping them separate is combinatorial rather than reductive: instead of picking one framework, Wilber suggests crossing a vertical model with a horizontal one to build a much finer-grained map of a person — his worked example (nine Enneagram types × eight Spiral Dynamics levels = seventy-two possible personality profiles) is a deliberately vivid illustration of why collapsing "what stage are you at" and "what type are you" into one classification loses information a two-axis model would keep.

What's worth noting as a limitation Wilber states himself, not one this page is imposing: he's explicit that horizontal typologies rest on far weaker evidentiary footing than the vertical stages — "based more on personal taste and usefulness than on universal evidence" — so treating a horizontal system as equally rigorous as the developmental spine would misrepresent his own view of it.

In Integral Psychology

Finally, a word about "horizontal" typologies, such as Jungian types, the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, and so forth. For the most part, these are not vertical levels, stages, or waves of development, but rather different types of orientations possible at each of the various levels. — Integral Psychology, ch. 4

…should be understood that these "horizontal" typologies are of a fundamentally different nature than the "vertical" levels—namely, the latter are universal stages through which individuals pass in a normal course of development, whereas the former are types of personalities that may—or may not—be found at any of the stages. — Integral Psychology, ch. 4

…we have no such confidence with the horizontal typologies. They simply outline some of the possible orientations that may, or may not, be found at any of the stages, and thus their inclusion is based more on personal taste and usefulness than on universal evidence: all individuals do not necessarily fit a particular typology, whereas all individuals do go through the basic waves of consciousness. — Integral Psychology, ch. 4

The Enneagram, for example, is a sophisticated system that classifies people into nine basic personality types (the reformer, the helper, the motivator, the individualist, the investigator, the loyalist, the enthusiast, the leader, the peacemaker, the reformer). — Integral Psychology, ch. 4

Thus, to use the example of Spiral Dynamics for the vertical levels and the Enneagram for the horizontal, you can have Enneagram type 3 (the motivator) at the purple level, the red level, the blue level, the orange level, the green level, and so on. In this example, nine types at eight levels gives us a typology of seventy-two different personality types—and you can start to see what a truly multidimensional psychology might look like! — Integral Psychology, ch. 4

See Also

• Waves and Streams — the vertical levels/lines framework horizontal types are explicitly distinguished from
• The Proximate Self and the Distal Self — the self whose journey the vertical stages (not the horizontal types) track
• Chart 1: Wilber Correlations — includes a gender identity/worldview table that runs alongside, not instead of, the basic-structures spine