The Twelve Figures

The Icosa model measures four capacities — Open, Focus, Bond, and Move — each operating in one of three states. The mythic layer translates those twelve positions into characters you can recognize from the inside: a vocabulary for what is actually happening when a capacity shifts.

The Twelve Figures at a Glance

Each row tells a single story. Open governs reception: the Guardsman bars the gate, the Innkeeper welcomes what arrives, the Drowner is overwhelmed by a flood with no membrane left. Focus governs attention: the Wanderer drifts without landing, the Seer sees clearly, the Obsessor locks on and cannot release.

Bond governs connection: the Exile cuts the thread, the Weaver holds it with steady hands, the Devourer merges until neither person can be distinguished. Move governs expression: the Statue freezes, the Dancer moves freely, the Berserker detonates.

Open: Reception and Its Extremes

The Open capacity governs what you let in — sensation, feeling, information, connection, meaning. Its three figures trace the arc from sealed shut to wide open to flooded.

The Guardsman — Closing

The Guardsman bars the gate. Armor thick, visor down, the passage sealed. What defines this figure is refusal. Life arrives and is turned away. The gates are locked from the inside, often without awareness. The world outside may be benign, even nourishing — a Guardsman in a warm relationship may be surrounded by care that never penetrates — but the locking mechanism operates independently of current conditions. It was established earlier, for reasons that may have been excellent, and has not been revised since.

A sixteen-year-old sits in a guidance counselor’s office after his parents’ divorce. His grades are stable, his affect flat. Asked how he feels, he shrugs. He is not performing indifference. Open Capacity in the emotional domain has shut down incoming feeling so completely that he cannot access the grief the situation would ordinarily produce.

The Innkeeper — Receiving

The Innkeeper stands at an open door with the capacity to welcome what arrives. This gate works in both directions — it opens to admit and can close when necessary — but its default orientation is hospitality. What defines this figure is porosity with structure. The door is open, but the house has walls. Guests enter, but their host decides which room they occupy and how long they stay.

An Innkeeper receives through a structure. Difficult guests, painful sensations, uncomfortable truths, and unwelcome feelings are admitted too, because hospitality is not contingent on comfort. It is contingent on capacity. A manager reads pointed criticism in a review, feels the sting, notes which points are fair, and sets it aside to think about overnight. The gate opened, the experience entered, the structure held.

The Drowner — Flooding

Reception has exceeded the vessel’s containment. What should be an opening has become a breach. Whatever the domain, the experience is the same: too much, arriving too fast, with no membrane to regulate it. A social worker at a child welfare conference finds herself unable to function by mid-afternoon. Each case entered without filtration, and she now carries the full emotional weight of stories that are not hers. She sits in a hallway, unable to locate where the cases end and her own feelings begin.

Focus: Attention and Its Extremes

The Focus capacity governs where your attention goes and whether you can direct it. Its three figures trace the arc from scattered to steady to locked.

The Wanderer — Dissociating

Attention has no home. It drifts from point to point, unable to settle, unable to stay with any single experience long enough to register it fully. This is not boredom — boredom is a response to unstimulating input. The Wanderer cannot attend regardless of how compelling the input is. A person may care deeply and still be unable to land. In the spiritual domain, the Wanderer produces the inability to be present to meaning: standing in a cathedral and feeling the significance sliding past without making contact.

The Seer — Attending

Attention that is steady, mobile, and placed rather than scattered or locked. The Seer notices without obsessing, witnesses without collapsing into what is witnessed, tracks without grasping. A father observes his daughter’s posture and the timing of her silence, holds the observation without rushing to intervene, and responds when the moment is right. His attention is focused but not anxious.

The Obsessor — Fixating

Intense attention that has seized the process. The eye has found its target and will not look away — not because new information is being gathered, but because the release cycle has failed. A man monitors every interaction between his wife and another guest after noticing the quality of her laugh. He will replay the evening for days, examining the same moments, unable to set it down. Thoroughness completes its review and moves on. The Obsessor never completes.

Bond: Connection and Its Extremes

The Bond capacity governs how you relate to others — the thread between self and other. Its three figures trace the arc from severed to held to fused.

The Exile — Severing

Connection has been actively severed, the bridge pulled up, the distance enforced. This is not introversion. Introversion connects selectively but the capacity for connection is intact. The Exile’s capacity has dropped below threshold. A woman has maintained the same social circle for fifteen years. She attends gatherings and remembers birthdays. But no one in the group knows what she is going through when her mother is diagnosed with cancer. She is surrounded by friends she cannot reach.

The Weaver — Connecting

Connection maintained through steady work, with clear awareness of where the self ends and the other begins. The thread binds two distinct points — if the points merge, there is no thread. The Weaver’s skill is most visible under strain: during disagreement, during distance, during the slow accumulation of grievance that tests every long relationship. Two business partners disagree on strategy, argue, listen, concede partial points, hold firm on essentials, and emerge with a plan neither would have designed alone. The thread held. The weave tightened rather than frayed.

The Devourer — Fusing

Connection has exceeded containment. The thread has become so tight that neither person can be distinguished. Feelings, needs, and identities blur until the boundary between self and other dissolves. A man in a new relationship has reorganized his schedule, preferences, and social life around his partner within weeks. He eats what she eats, adopts her opinions. Asked what he wants for dinner, he cannot answer until he knows what she wants. What looks like devotion is structural enmeshment.

Move: Expression and Its Extremes

The Move capacity governs what you express outward — action, speech, gesture, creative output. Its three figures trace the arc from frozen to flowing to explosive.

The Statue — Freezing

Expression has been dammed. Impulse to act, to speak, to respond arrives inside the person and stops. A painter stares at a blank canvas for the fourth day. She can see the painting. Her brushes are clean. She cannot lift her arm. At its mildest, words form and dissolve before reaching the throat. At its most severe, the person watches their own life unfold as though through a window.

The Dancer — Expressing

Expression that flows without inhibition, without compulsion, without excess or deficit. A river with banks. A sentence that says exactly what was meant. A gesture that carries the right weight. A woman tells her sister she cannot host Thanksgiving. The conversation is not easy. But she says what she needs to say clearly, without aggression and without the paralysis that prevented this conversation for three years.

The Berserker — Exploding

Expression has exceeded all containment. The river has burst its banks. Actions overshoot their target, rage exceeds the provocation, speech says more than was meant. Subjective experience is often compulsion followed by regret — the fist hits the table, the cruel sentence lands, the door slams, and the aftermath is bewildered remorse. A father erupts over a spilled glass of milk after maintaining calm through an entire afternoon. He is horrified almost before it is complete.

Scale: The Size of the Vessel

Two people can both be the Innkeeper and differ enormously in what they can receive before the system tips. An Innkeeper can run a small roadside inn or a grand waystation. Scale determines how much life can arrive before center is lost.

This explains the person who keeps returning to the same off-centered state despite real work. Growth involves two tasks: becoming the centered figure (moving from Guardsman to Innkeeper), and expanding the vessel so center holds under greater intensity.

What This Means for You

When you take the Icosa assessment, your results map which figures you are currently inhabiting across your five domains. You are not one figure. You are potentially a different figure in each domain — the Innkeeper in your emotional life, the Wanderer in your physical experience, the Weaver in your relationships, the Statue in your spiritual life.

The figures give you a vocabulary for recognizing what is happening inside you. “I am the Guardsman right now” carries a specific meaning: the gate is shut, and the path forward is Opening. Every off-centered figure has a corresponding centered figure and a named path between them. Knowing where you are is the first step toward knowing where you are headed.