"Suzanne takes you down..." There is no voice quite like it. Even before you start listening to the words, the soulful tone catches you, with its melancholic melody, and invites you to stop whatever you’re doing, sit down, close your eyes, relax and gently sink into a kind of enjoyable despair. Leonard Cohen was the master of mournfulness. Through the authenticity of his serious nature, he was able to touch a place in all of us that understands that happiness is fleeting, fulfilment is far away, and sadness is somehow inescapable…and, after all, as the maestro himself observed, even the heavenly hallelujah is broken. Back in the late Nineties, when Leonard was trying to promote a singing career for his son, Adam, he disparaged his own voice, saying “I croaked my way through my songs,” whereas his son, according to Leonard, possessed a really beautiful voice. But that’s exactly the point. That was why Cohen was able to capture people’s hearts while his son Adam, failed to break out into the big time. There are thousands of people in this world who can sing well, but there’s only one genius croaker. As many people know, Leonard Cohen spent the early years of his adult life as a little known Canadian poet. His turning point came after moving to the US to pursue a career as a folk singer. When Judy Collins scored a hit with Cohen’s song “Suzanne” she invited him to perform at a big fundraiser concert. And so, at the age of 33, after years of semi-obscurity, the sad-faced Canadian guitar player stood in front of a massive audience in New York City and began to sing the ballad that would become his trademark. The audience went crazy. They loved it. But then something unexpected happened: Leonard Cohen stopped singing, half-way through the song, and walked offstage. The audience begged him to come back, but he stood in the wings, hesitating, almost paralysed. Some might say it was just nerves. But when one understands that Leonard Cohen is a Type Four on the Enneagram system of nine personality types, a different reason offers itself: According to their inner program, Fours firmly believe they cannot have what they really want. So, if they dream of success and actually get it, then success cannot be what they really desire. Once they have it in their hands, it becomes almost worthless. Fortunately, Judy Collins was on hand to save the situation. "I'll go out with you," she told him, so they went back onstage together and sang "Suzanne". That, of course, was the beginning of Leonard Cohen's long career. The Enneagram, by its very nature as a psychological system, is incapable of being objectively proved. However, if ever a character might be transparently clear and beyond argument, it would be the labelling of Leonard Cohen as the Number Four, the Tragic Romantic. That voice, crooning deeply, like a foghorn in the night. Those doom-and-gloom lyrics, lamenting lost loves and bitter regrets. Those mournful eyes staring at you from the album cover. It all combines to seduce you into a soft, sinking feeling that Fours know so well. Fours remember that in childhood they experienced a deep sense of loss, which in Cohen's case is not hard to identify: his father died when he was nine years old. The strategy may have been adopted earlier, because this young boy was subjected to a very serious religious upbringing, in which there was little in the way of light-hearted, carefree frolicking. "I had a very Messianic childhood," Cohen recalled, in later years, referring to the intense Orthodox Judaism into which he was born. One grandfather was founder of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the other was a Talmudic writer, and he was soon informed that he was a direct descendant of Aaron, brother of Moses and founder of the Israelite priesthood. Quite a solemn burden for a pair of young shoulders to carry. As he grew into adulthood, Leonard Cohen evolved from writing poetry, to writing novels, to composing song lyrics. In these creative expressions, we find his attitude to life: For example, in his best-known song, “Suzanne”, the woman who mesmerizes him is beautiful, but she is also "half crazy", while in the same song Jesus becomes “broken” before the skies can open to redeem him. In Cohen’s equally famous song, “Hallelujah”, the secret chord that pleases the Lord is part of a "cold and broken hallelujah”. In "Bird on the Wire" he tells us: "Like a worm on a hook, like a knight in an old-fashioned book, I have torn everyone who reached out to me..." Cohen suffered periodically from depression, about which he said "I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse." But this is not the whole picture. As you may have noticed among your friends, Fours don't necessarily go around with long faces, spreading their misery. "People think Leonard is dark, but actually his sense of humour and his edge on the world is extremely light," Judy Collins once commented about her friend. Here is the paradox that typifies Fours: they rarely think of themselves as miserable. Rather, they see themselves as realistic and authentic, courageous enough to face life as it is, rather than being deceived by sugar-coating and superficial appearances. In the 1990s, Leonard Cohen withdrew from his musical career to become a Zen monk for six years. He also took time to study the world's major religions but abandoned the project because he discovered that his own "cheerfulness kept breaking through." This remark is significant. It shows how, in comparison to conventional religious attitudes, Leonard Cohen saw himself as light-hearted and even optimistic. And in many of his songs there is a promise of redemption and fulfilment, although only after a lengthy period of soul-searching and anguish. Hence Naranjo’s name for this type: “Seeking Happiness Through Pain”. This, again, is typical of the Four approach to life. You can find happiness, it is possible, but you must struggle and grope your way through a long dark tunnel of suffering and pain in order to find it. “The effect of a sad song is not to depress, but to bring you closer to the emotion and make you feel better,” Cohen once explained. “It’s not uplifting in the sense that it’s like ‘keep a stiff upper lip’ or anything like that, but it does have, for me, when I listen to a so-called sad song, it has a healing quality.” Ichazo called the Four type "Melon", which was shorthand for "Melancholy." If you listen to the tone of Cohen's voice, without even understanding the lyrics, that's the word that captures its sound. Naturally, as his fame increased, so did Cohen's attraction as a potential lover. One girlfriend, Marianne Ihlen, who stayed with him during his years on the Greek island of Hydra, reported afterwards that she'd found herself in competition with an ever-increasing number of devotees who wanted to share his bed. But Cohen rejected his image as a ladies man, commenting "I was never very good at enjoying it. I was drawn to those intense experiences, and obsessed with those intense experiences for much of my life. But I can’t say that I really enjoyed them. Afterwards, I generally gave myself a bad review." In other words, he did his share of sleeping around, but didn’t enjoy it. How very typical of Type Four! This bleak self-criticism was mirrored in his song “Death of a Ladies Man”, the title number of an album released in 1977, in which Cohen relates a torrid affair, then concludes: “So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed.” This, again, is a classic Four attitude. Whatever experiences you can have, even in bed with a beautiful woman, it's never quite what you're looking for. This, of course, reflects the pain of the original loss in childhood - the loss that nothing can replace. Marianne Ihlen, by the way, attained near-immortality after her breakup with Cohen, having provided inspiration and cause for his nostalgic lament “So Long Marianne”. Another ‘by the way’ aside: the album “Death of a Ladies Man” stunned Leonard Cohen’s fans, not because of its sexual imagery, such as “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On”, but because Cohen collaborated with producer Phil Spector, who completely wrecked the singer’s style. Cohen’s raw, undecorated, minimalist use of voice and solo guitar was replaced with Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’, adding enough multiple tracks of instrument overdubs to make Cohen seem like he was surrounded by an orchestra. It didn’t work. Dismissing this bizarre marriage of Spector and Cohen, Rolling Stone condemned it as “the world's most flamboyant extrovert producing and arranging the world's most fatalist introvert.” From the Enneagram point of view, if ever Cohen tried to trade his downbeat Type Four for an upbeat Type Seven, this was the moment. But, alas, it didn’t work. He himself called the album “a catastrophe”. Another quality of Fours is their appetite for drama. This certainly suits a poet and song-writer like Cohen, because, after all, ordinary life can’t easily be wrestled into fable. It needs to be artfully blended with dramatic imagination to move from the mundane into the realm of myth. For example, in Cohen’s classic “Suzanne”, the young woman is portrayed as half-crazy, but in reality Suzanne Verdal was the perfectly sane wife of a Montreal artist when she met the Canadian singer. She declined Cohen’s sexual advances, which may be the reason why she made such an impression on him - Fours are typically fascinated by the unavailable - and then went on to travel the world, eventually becoming a choreographer in Los Angeles. Speaking of drama, in one of his final songs, published years later in 2016, Cohen announced “I’m ready Lord”, meaning he was ready to die. But then, soon afterwards, he changed his mind, saying jokingly, “I think I was exaggerating. One is given to self-dramatization from time to time. I intend to live forever!” Ready or not, he died just a few weeks later. People who enjoy speculating on the internet about which songs can be categorized as “the saddest songs ever” frequently include Leonard Cohen’s “Alexandra Leaving” in their top ten. The track was released in 2001, marking Cohen’s return to the public spotlight, as the part of his album, “Ten New Songs”, created in close collaboration with his old friend, singer-producer Sharon Robinson. “Alexandra Leaving” conveys a double tragedy. It is based on Constantin Cavafy’s poem about the last hours of Mark Antony, when the Roman leader is besieged in the City of Alexandria by his all-conquering rival, Octavius Caesar. Antony already thinks his great love, Queen Cleopatra, is dead and then he hears the sound of musical instruments and voices coming from the city streets. He realizes that Bacchus, his patron god, is deserting him. Within hours, he commits suicide. Leonard Cohen cleverly weaves the song into a parallel lament for a woman, Alexandra, with whom he shares one last, unexpected night, before she leaves him forever. It’s worth noting that sadness and happiness are not always opposites. In Fours, we find people who enjoy the intensity of their own feelings of unhappiness, so much so that, to them at least, it almost seems like a form of happiness. Cohen definitely fitted into this bracket. He also loved being on the road and between 2008 and 2013 conducted two huge world tours. The fact that he felt compelled to do so by financial troubles - he claimed a former manager had robbed him of millions - may have been a lucky accident for both him and his fans. In conclusion, let’s leave Leonard with his own self-assessment: "Seriousness, rather than depression is, I think, the characteristic of my work," he once told an interviewer. "I like a good laugh, but I think there's enjoyment that comes through seriousness. We all know when we close the door and come into your room and you're left with your heart and your emotions, it isn't all that funny." (Unless, of course, you’re not a Four. In which case, it might be - funny, that is). Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter, is another obvious type Four, with a life filled with drama, artistic expression and passionate love affairs. When she was a child, her parents did not get along and so her family atmosphere was fraught with fighting and unhappiness. She caught polio at the age of five, damaging her legs and making it difficult for her to relate to other children, although it brought her closer to her German father, also an artist, who coached her in painting. At the age of 18, she was a promising academic student and was thinking of training at medical school when she was severely injured in a horrific bus crash that caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. Ironically, it was the crash that made her an artist, since it was during her long recovery that she returned to her childhood interest in art. She became known for her autobiographical canvases, portraying her suffering, her chronic pain, and also her anguish that she would never bear children, as well as her surrealistic portrayal of reality. Her intensely dramatic lifelong love affair with another Mexican artist, Diego Rivera, has become the stuff of legend, as well as her many affairs with men and women. Her work remained relatively unknown until the 1990s, when she became an icon of Mexican folk culture and by feminists for her uncompromising portrayal of female experience. No analysis of Famous Fours would be complete without the inclusion of movie maker James Cameron, who, with Titanic and Avatar 1 & 2, has directed three of the most successful movies of all time. However, James Cameron is not a nice guy. Not when he’s directing. For example, during the filming of one of his sci-fi movies, Cameron’s temper got so bad that the studio crew started wearing T-shirts that said: “You can’t scare me, I work for Jim Cameron.” It’s the same with his media interviews. He can blow up at any moment. A journalist once asked him about the famous scene, after the Titanic had sunk, when Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, slowly dies of hypothermia in the freezing water next to his true love, Rose, played by Kate Winslet, who was floating on a wooden board that seemed big enough for the two of them. The journalist queried, “Why couldn’t Rose just share her giant board with Jack instead of leaving him to freeze in the ocean?” Cameron’s face turned red with fury and he exploded, “Wait a minute, I’m going to call up William Shakespeare and ask why Romeo and Juliet had to die!” Cameron has been married five times and it was actress Linda Hamilton, one of his ex-wives, who gave the clue to his type. In 2009, when Cameron’s Avatar was being nominated for nine Academy Awards, Hamilton was interviewed about her former husband. She said the trouble with Cameron was that he always wants what he can't have – at least as far as women are concerned. 'The woman he can't get is always his dream girl,' she said. She was speaking from experience. A decade earlier, while making Titanic and living with Hamilton, Cameron fell for Suzy Amis, who had a small part in the movie. Later, torn between the two, he left Amis, went back to Hamilton and married her. The marriage lasted just eight months before he went back to Amis. This is classic Type Four behaviour. Generally referred to as The Tragic Romantic, Type Four is compulsively attracted to the unavailable. But as soon as the unavailable becomes available, it no longer holds the same attraction. It’s not just with love partners. The ambition to succeed artistically is a powerful drive for Fours. But when success finally arrives it is dismissed as almost worthless. In other words, “If I can have it, then it can’t be worth it.” This attitude has its roots in a childhood sense of loss, in which at least one of the parents became unavailable, either through death, divorce, or being distant and aloof from the child. This, in turn, gives rise to a chronic mood of melancholy, in which nothing is able to replace the missing love. “I knew our marriage was over when he was just as miserable the day after he won his eleven Oscars as he was before,” said Hamilton, after Titanic’s sweep of the Oscars in 1998. Redemption for the Four comes through suffering, motivated by the romantic belief that pain will ultimately bring about the long-desired happiness. This attitude can easily rub off on others and Cameron has been quite effective at spreading his misery, especially on the movie sets. His dictatorial style, controlling behaviour and explosive temper has made him one of the scariest directors in Hollywood. After collaborating with Cameron on the film version of his book, The Abyss, author Orson Scott Card commented: “He made everyone around him miserable, and his unkindness did nothing to improve the film in any way. Nor did it motivate people to work faster or better.” There’s another trait of Type Four that Cameron manifests in a way few people can ever afford to do. Fours are fascinated by depth: in themselves, in others and in life. Hence, Cameron’s obsession with shipwrecks lying deep on the ocean floor, romantically imagining the destroyed lives of those who drowned on the sunken ship. Just think about it: Cameron persuaded the movie companies in Hollywood to spend $200 million so he could symbolically raise the Titanic from its ocean grave and bring its passengers back to life. It was a huge financial gamble, which, to the relief of the movie’s backers, paid off when Titanic grossed over $2 billion worldwide. But Cameron’s preoccupation with depth didn’t stop there. In 2012, spending millions of dollars of his own money, Cameron piloted a special submergence vehicle five miles down to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. It was the first-ever solo dive to the world’s deepest point, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. Scientifically, Cameron’s journey wasn’t needed. As several experts pointed out, unmanned diving vehicles can gather much more data, and in any case the bottom of the Mariana Trench was already known to be a lifeless desert. No, it was a romantic dream, promising some kind of personal fulfilment, that powered Cameron into the deep. I could go on, but the evidence is overwhelming, the verdict never in doubt. James Cameron is a Type Four on the Enneagram. Ironically, he may never know it, because his fascination with depth has been projected outwards, into the world, rather than inward toward himself. Another famous Type Four that few Enneagram experts would argue about is actor Johnny Depp. Brought up by quarrelling parents who shifted home constantly, Depp reflected, “I recall hearing my parents argue and thinking, ‘Come on, this is torture. Just split!’” Intending to be a musician, Depp as a young man switched to acting and was horrified when he found himself becoming a teen idol, thanks to a popular TV series, 21 Jump Street, which portrayed him as a baby-faced cop. This didn’t match with his introverted, melancholic self-image. "If the choice is to be gawked at constantly or to sit in a dark room, I'd choose the dark room,” Depp told an interviewer. “I felt as if I had been turned into a novelty, and it was mortifying. When I was in a social situation, I was nervous and uncomfortable. The only way I could get through it was to drink my guts out!” But Depp’s quirky, gloomy nature served him well in Hollywood and it was no accident that his breakthrough role in 1990 came with the movie Edward Scissorhands, in which he played a forlorn, tragic hero who had scissors for hands. Another anti-hero role was Sweeney Todd, seeking revenge for injustice as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Other quirky characters have included the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, Tonto in The Lone Ranger and, of course, the more upbeat and self-parodying role of Captain Jack Sparrow. “The characters I’ve played, that I’ve responded to, there has been a lost-soul quality to them,” Depp reflected. As many people know, Depp’s personal life seems to have been one long drama, always verging on tragedy, with allegations of abusive relationships, lawsuits against his own managers, several arrests for alleged assaults and an endless struggle with drugs and alcohol. It remains to be seen if this Type Four can pull his life together and continue to be successful as a talented actor.