I just listened to a really interesting episode of The Enneagram 2.0 podcast, hosted by two highly-regarded enneagram teachers, Beatrice Chestnut (2) and Uranio Paes (5), about misconceptions found in the common understanding and discussion of wings. Their main point is that wings are often mistakenly treated as if they were subtypes of one's core type; for example, I usually say I'm a 4w5, which suggests that I'm a 4 with a lot of qualities of type 5. The implication there is that the 5 wing modifies my core type (4) and that therefore the 4w5 is a subset of type 4.
However, according to Chestnut and Paes, this is an inaccurate understanding of what wings are and do. As they point out, a bird won't get very far if they have only one wing. All of us have both wings, and they are not subtypes of our core type, but rather resource points we can access that offer us growth, just as we access our security and stress points (wings are more gentle shifts, while the stress and security points are more radical movements). Therefore, as Chestnut suggests, to say we are dominant in one wing is to confess that we're out of balance (and that may be an accurate statement, but the invitation of the enneagram is to use both wings in order to regain and maintain balance).
Further, wings don't modify the core type, they define it: in this sense, type can be understood as the tension that exists between the two wings. For example, for type 4, the feeling of being inherently defective can be seen as resulting from the tension between the belief that our worth is defined by our accomplishments (3) and the feeling that we lack a basic understanding of the world around us unless we offset that lack with acquired knowledge (5). This understanding of wings emphasizes the nature of type not as a distinct point, but as a segment on a spectrum. As well as the enneagram’s nature as a dynamic system rather than a set of static coordinates.
Finally, Chestnut and Paes argue, the understanding of wings as subtypes comes from the need to explain why people with the same core type can often be substantially different, a need that's satisfied more functionally and more actionably by the instinctual variants (SP, SO, SX); and from the fact that the work of Chilean enneagram teacher Claudio Naranjo, who introduced the concept of instinctual variants, wasn't easily accessible to English speakers when several seminal English language books were published on the enneagram (namely, Riso and Hudson's The Wisdom of the Enneagram).
The whole podcast episode is really fascinating and informative, and can be found on their feed here.
