ESFJ 6w7 Characters
Tom Welling’s Clark Kent from Smallville is a powerful example of an ESFJ 6w7 personality type, balancing his role as Superman-in-training with his desire to live a normal life in Smallville. As an ESFJ, Clark is driven by Extraverted Feeling, which shows up in his loyalty, compassion, and relentless sense of responsibility for others. His Introverted Sensing ties him to the farm, his family, and his long-standing attachment to Lana Lang, while his 6w7 Enneagram type highlights his caution, loyalty, and constant struggle with insecurity. This personality analysis explores Clark Kent’s MBTI cognitive functions (Fe, Si, Ne, Ti) and his Enneagram 6 core, unpacking how his fears, ideals, and need for belonging shape his relationships, choices, and heroic journey throughout Smallville.
Extraverted Feeling
Clark assumes he is responsible for everyone else’s safety, happiness, and well-being. He carries a burden for humanity at large, even though he has no personal contact with most people, out of a larger sense of social responsibility and obligation. Because he is special, he feels he “owes” the world by saving it from evil. EFJs often feel this way, because they see themselves through the lens of their relationships and measure their actions by how they impact others.
He is invested in changing others’ minds, rather than being comfortable with diverse views; when his father criticizes Lex and judges him based on Lionel’s reputation, Clark argues that he deserves a second chance, that his motives are probably good, etc. He is annoyed when Lana and Chloe dismiss his opinions about people out of hand, because it shows him their lack of respect for his insights, and he calls them out on it (“Stop treating me like a jealous boyfriend, when none of us are actually dating”). Clark lets no time pass between when he feels an emotion and acting on it, whether that is to angrily storm into the mansion to confront Lex or to save someone’s life.
He tries to make decisions based on how he knows others are going to feel about them, such as when he has the perfect opportunity to date Lana while her boyfriend is not paying attention, but when he finds out about Whitney’s father being sick, he encourages them to get back together instead. Because Whitney asks him to look after Lana while he is in the military, he feels incapable of violating his trust.
Clark feels guilt and shame when he must lie to the people he cares about to keep them safe. He wants to be honest with them and share “all of himself,” without feeling he can. Clark constantly talks about this with his parents, lamenting that he has to keep secrets and wishing he could be honest with Lana. But he also has a quick tendency to judge others’ actions based on objective standards of behavior (how they treat others, whether they are honest with him, etc.): things are either right or wrong, good or bad, and he has no qualms about stopping bad guys, but also refuses to do them harm, since that would violate his beliefs.
Introverted Sensing
Clark spends most of his time and efforts helping out around the farm, and when his mother leaves to become a senator, she tells him he doesn’t “have to stay” on the farm and live his father’s life. But Clark prefers it there and it takes him a long time to move away from home, in a physical and an emotional sense. After his father dies, he takes on a lot of the chores and upkeep and tries to maintain his ties to Smallville despite his work at the Daily Planet.
His obsession with the girl next door (Lana) lasts for eight years/seasons, in which he only holds her in his heart, pines for her, and wants to build a normal, lasting domestic life with her. The way he cares for her also shows his attentiveness to detail; he remembers everything about her, her preferences, and tries to please her in sensory ways (taking a story she told him about spending time with her parents at a drive-in movie, and recreating the experience for her on the side of the barn in an old truck). But his romance with Lois Lane is more of a slow burn, built on attraction and hatred turning into respect and admiration. He also compares how Lex is in season one to his behavior in season seven and cautions his friend Pete Ross not to take risks with his sudden super powers.
He takes a special interest in finding out anything he can about his ancestry, especially when it comes to the caves outside Smallville and their strange markings that might tell him more about who he is. This taps into his Si-driven need to feel connected to something ancestral and deep, the history of his “tribe,” and his desire to find somewhere to “belong.”
Clark wants to have a normal high school boy experience and to play football, and finds it difficult to obey his father’s refusals (Jonathan fears he might accidentally reveal his powers or hurt someone). He repeatedly draws parallels between his life to Jonathan’s and wants to know why he can’t have the same things his father did at his age. Under the influence of Red Kryptonite, Clark also reveals how much he resents being poor and not having all the cool “sensory toys” that everyone else has (motorcycles, stereo equipment, big screen televisions, leather jackets, etc.).
Extraverted Intuition
Clark is forever leaping into direct action to save someone, and then worrying about the consequences of it later, as his lower Ne starts fretting about how it might come across, or how it might threaten his family. He rushes out to stop a bus from plowing into a homeless person, gets seen by a corrupt cop, and then blackmailed into helping him rob a museum. Clark anxiously voices his fears about this to his parents, but then uses a split second of the cop letting down his guard to take advantage of him and expose him to the police. It doesn’t completely work, though, and puts him at even greater risk.
He also tends to take people’s actions at face value whom he cares about and is blindsided by their true motivations and betrayals. Clark is so happy about Lana finally knowing his secret and being with him that he fails to see how much she has changed, how “dark” she has gotten in terms of being bitter and wanting revenge, and is shocked to find out the “sweet girl” he once knew (Si) has become violent and vindicative. It blindsides him that she embezzled money from Lex, framed him for her “murder,” kidnapped and had Lionel tortured, and wants to kill him when she gets Clark’s super-powers, because he’s holding onto his idealistic interpretation of her over the reality of who she is.
Part of Ne is seeing the potential in others, and Clark very much holds to this in an idealistic sense and pushes people toward it. He sees the best in Lex and wants him to become a better person; he believes that Lex is not a carbon copy of his father and should receive a chance to redeem and prove himself. He wants to accept Lex’s friendship without questioning it, until it becomes impossible for him to deny that Lex is prying too much into his secrets.
Clark is also comfortable with theorizing about why people might be doing things, what they could be up to “behind the scenes,” or how to stop them with Chloe. It takes her theory of “meteor freaks” to open his eyes to his own potential and to expand his worldview.
Introverted Thinking
Clark often acts before he thinks and regrets it, but he also is able to be objective about his loved ones, even though he does not like to unfairly speak to them. When he finds out the truth about Lana, it’s hard for him to accept, but he does readjust his thinking and see her in a different light. He can be quite certain of his own logic and opinions, arguing for/against people based on their actions and reasoning out why others are being unfair (his father is too critical of Lex, Lana should not judge all the meteor freaks by the actions of a few, Chloe needs to stop treating him like her ex-boyfriend when they never had a real relationship).
Under the influence of Red K, he becomes extremely cutting, and shares his true and blunt feelings (he hates being poor, he hates not having cool toys, he hates feeling confined to the farm).
Clark wants to know “why” people do what they do, and why they made the choices they did. He wants to know what caused Lex to murder his father, and what kind of a person would ever do that.
The Enneagram 6
Clark is more distrustful and suspicious than Chloe or Lana (two heart/image types); he’s more suspicious when he meets people, and tends to wonder about their agendas; he often cautions his friends against trusting people, and is concerned with any red flags he sees about them (instead of finding it romantic that a boy is writing Lana poetry and leaving it in the cemetery at night, he wonders what he is hiding; when Lana is saved by a masked vigilante from a meteor freak who is trying to kill him, Clark doesn’t like the idea of an armed gunman running around, and wonders what his agenda is; when Lex teachers Lana how to kick-box and protect herself, Clark is worried she might get in over her head).
He doesn’t want Chloe digging around in his life, because she might unearth his secret, and worries about the effect knowing the truth is having on Pete, Chloe, and later, Lana. Clark frequently pushes back at Lex whenever Lex digs into his family or his secrets, out of fear he will be exposed and wind up “in a lab somewhere” being dissected.
A true 6, Clark is extremely loyal to his loved ones, standing up for them, arguing that their motives are pure, and giving them endless second chances while also holding himself and others to impossible standards. Clark often blames himself for things that have nothing to do with him and that are not his responsibility, because he feels responsible for everyone and everything.
Because of his insecurities, Clark sends Lana a ton of mixed signals. One day he’s confident they should be together, the next he’s pushing her away because he’s afraid being with him might get her hurt (and he’s devastated to hear her say the only person that keeps hurting her is Clark). Though he often rushes in to save the day, out of a desire to help humanity, he will immediately start second-guessing himself and wishing he hadn’t done that, because it has somehow endangered his family.
The 7 Wing
He shows a lot of wing 7 tendencies, in his multiple attempts to re-frame things positively and escape from dealing with other people’s hurt feelings. Clark thinks if he “makes good” or gives Lana a rose, everything he did and said as the worst version of himself will magically go away. This is delusional thinking, but how a 6w7 tries to patch things up; with the assumption that just being super nice will “fix it.” That because they, the 6, would forgive you (it’s the “right thing to do”) that others should forgive them and never mention their mistakes again. He wants to bypass the hurt and the pain and continue on as if nothing went wrong.
Clark also shows some of the frustration that comes from 7, in how he is unhappy with his current circumstances and always longing for something exciting and fun to happen to him. Unlike a 7w6, he doesn’t just go out there and make things happen, but he wishes they would. That he could be free from his obligations and have what he wants.
He feels responsible for what happened to his mom and the miscarriage at the end of season two, so he chooses to put on a Red Kryptonite ring (which he knows will make him not care about anything) and drive off to live the high life in Metropolis. Literally running away from his problems, his intense feelings, and his responsibilities, because he can’t stand dealing with the pain.
He doesn’t like his dad reining him in and constantly pushes back against his authority. A big part of Clark wants to be popular, and to have the nice things all his friends have, and resents being poor. Clark often defies his father and does what he wants, within reason—signing up for the football team without his father’s permission, because he knows he can “control my abilities.” His tendency to leap into things without thinking them through shows how assertive he can be in going after what he wants, when his super-ego core 6 “allows him” to do it.
Heroism in Small Moments & Big Choices
During Smallville’s initial run, I didn’t like Clark all that much, in favor of the more stylistic Lex. But now that I’m older, I appreciate Clark more. I recognize that a lot of the traits we have in common were what annoyed me about him—the tendency to be fearful, to overreact, to think that the worst is going to happen, as a fellow Enneagram 6. But he also has good things about him. His staunch morality, his loyalty to his loved ones, his commitment to doing the right thing, and his willingness to take the heat for confronting his friends when they are in the wrong. Smallville is a better place for having him in it.
