Type 5w6 - The Problem Solver - The Intense, Cerebral Type:

• Perceptive
• Innovative
• Secretive
• Isolated

In brief

• Fives are alert, insightful, and curious.
• They are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills.
• Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs.
• They become detached, yet high-strung and intense.
• They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation.
• Basic Fear: Being useless, helpless, or incapable
• Basic Desire: To be capable and competent
• Key Motivations: Want to possess knowledge, to understand the environment, to have everything figured out as a way of defending the self from threats from the environment.
• Examples:
  • Siddartha Gautama Buddha
  • Albert Einstein,
  • Oliver Sacks,
  • John Nash (A Beautiful Mind),
  • Stephen Hawking,
  • Vincent van Gogh,
  • Edvard Munch,
  • Georgia O’Keeffe,
  • Salvador Dali,
  • Alberto Giacometti,
  • Emily Dickinson,
  • Friedrich Nietzsche,
  • Agatha Christie,
  • James Joyce,
  • Jean-Paul Sartre,
  • Susan Sontag,
  • Stephen King,
  • Ursula K. LeGuin,
  • Clive Barker,
  • Bill Gates,
  • Mark Zuckerberg,
  • Jane Goodall,
  • A.H. Almaas,
  • Eckhart Tolle,
  • Meredith Monk,
  • Glenn Gould,
  • John Cage,
  • Kurt Cobain,
  • David Byrne,
  • Peter Gabriel,
  • Laurie Anderson,
  • Jane Siberry,
  • Trent Reznor,
  • Thom York (Radiohead),
  • Alfred Hitchcock,
  • Marlene Dietrich,
  • Stanley Kubrick,
  • David Cronenberg,
  • Werner Herzog,
  • Tim Burton,
  • David Lynch,
  • David Fincher,
  • Jodie Foster,
  • “The Far Side” Gary Larson,
  • Annie Liebovitz,
  • Bobby Fischer,
  • “Wikileaks” Julian Assange,
  • Aaaron Swartz,
  • X Files’ “Fox Mulder”
  • Dr. Gregory “House”

Levels of Development

• Healthy Levels
  • Level 1 (At Their Best): Become visionaries, broadly comprehending the world while penetrating it profoundly. Open-minded, take things in whole, in their true context. Make pioneering discoveries and find entirely new ways of doing and perceiving things.
  • Level 2: Observe everything with extraordinary perceptiveness and insight. Most mentally alert, curious, searching intelligence: nothing escapes their notice. Foresight and prediction. Able to concentrate: become engrossed in what has caught their attention.
  • Level 3: Attain skillful mastery of whatever interests them. Excited by knowledge: often become expert in some field. Innovative and inventive, producing extremely valuable, original works. Highly independent, idiosyncratic, and whimsical.
• Average Levels
  • Level 4: Begin conceptualizing and fine-tuning everything before acting—working things out in their minds: model building, preparing, practicing, and gathering more resources. Studious, acquiring technique. Become specialized, and often "intellectual," often challenging accepted ways of doing things.
  • Level 5: Increasingly detached as they become involved with complicated ideas or imaginary worlds. Become preoccupied with their visions and interpretations rather than reality. Are fascinated by off-beat, esoteric subjects, even those involving dark and disturbing elements. Detached from the practical world, a "disembodied mind," although high-strung and intense.
  • Level 6: Begin to take an antagonistic stance toward anything which would interfere with their inner world and personal vision. Become provocative and abrasive, with intentionally extreme and radical views. Cynical and argumentative.
• Unhealthy Levels
  • Level 7: Become reclusive and isolated from reality, eccentric and nihilistic. Highly unstable and fearful of aggressions: they reject and repulse others and all social attachments.
  • Level 8: Get obsessed yet frightened by their threatening ideas, becoming horrified, delirious, and prey to gross distortions and phobias.
  • Level 9: Seeking oblivion, they may commit suicide or have a psychotic break with reality. Deranged, explosively self-destructive, with schizophrenic overtones. Generally corresponds to the Schizoid Avoidant and Schizotypal personality disorders.