Helen Smith is one of the most emotionally complex characters in The Man in the High Castle, caught between loyalty to her family and growing doubts about the world she lives in. Portrayed by Chelah Horsdal, Helen shows clear traits of an ESFJ personality type with an Enneagram 2w3 core. Her focus on maintaining harmony, supporting her loved ones, and preserving the image of a perfect family, while quietly struggling with internal conflict, makes her a compelling example of how empathy and duty can become entangled in a flawed system.
ESFJ 2w3 Characters
Why is Helen Smith from The Man in the High Castle an ESFJ? Continue reading for my argument using cognitive functions! The headers for each section are clickable, so you can easily access more information about the dominant function and the Enneagram type, or discover more characters who share the type.
The only ads you will ever see on this page are for my books. If you want to learn more about MBTI or Enneagram types, please support my work. Book sales are how I keep this site ad-free!
Extraverted Feeling
Helen’s entire identity is built around maintaining emotional harmony with those around her, living up to her social expectations, and embodying the image of a “perfect” Reich family. She carefully curates their identity as ideal citizens, and corrects her children’s wrong thinking in favor of what the social consensus is about how to behave (words we do/don’t use, people are useful or not; early on, she spins killing defective people in a positive direction by saying, “Isn’t it nice that we make it so they don’t suffer anymore?” to comfort her husband as he looks at photographs of his crippled brother. But when the situation flips around and becomes about keeping her son Thomas alive, she does not feel that way; she can no longer pay lip service to something that does not match her emotions).
Feelings and compassion drive her, even when she is pro-Nazi. She knows what her role in the family and society is, and tries to fill it by including Juliana Crain and introducing her to their friends, reminding her of her place in the Reich and telling her to brush up on their beliefs. She feels intense guilt over her husband’s murder of their doctor, and tries to console the man’s widow, until she accuses John of covering up a murder. The two women get into a fight, and Helen winds up killing her. She feels remorse over this and shame that she let it get that far.
Her approach changes depending on whom she is talking to. With Juliana she is firm but kind, she is warm and supportive with her children, she warns people off who try to implicate her or her husband, John Smith, is respectful and composed with authority figures, and controlled but tense whenever she gets into an argument with her husband. She suppresses her discomfort with his decisions for a long time, going along with him even when she disagrees to support his career, but she also pleads with him, encourages him, and tries to convince him to take direct action. She doesn’t understand his need to wait and deal with things once he has mapped all of them out, because her instinct is to instantly act on her feelings. (“Our daughter is going to be tested soon… we have to do something now! What if she is a carrier?”)
After Thomas dies, she remains functional but also needs to talk about it. John warns her not to talk about anything with her therapist other than her feelings about Thomas’s death, but in this “safe space,” Helen questions the Reich’s eugenics policies and to insist her son had something valuable to offer from a humanitarian perspective. She also falls in love with her therapist. Ultimately, Helen’s love for John wavers because she can no longer agree with his callous decisions, and she agrees to betray him to the Resistance because she sees him as part of the ruthless machine that is hurting people.
Introverted Sensing
She tells her therapist that each morning starts with her running over a mental list of everything she needs to do for her children, and then she remembers that there are only two of them now, not three, and that her entire life has been upended. She feels most stable within a set routine, with expectations of what others need from her and what she is to provide for them. This is her Si, taking comfort in a predictable and stable lifestyle. She clings to this structure even when things fall apart, and has to live in a different house after losing Thomas.
Some of her memories of pre-Reich America surface in her conversations, and she uses them as a moral reference point in comparing who her husband has become, compared to the man she first married. She wishes she could go back to those days, in which they desired one another all the time. But she becomes an icon of what a respectable Reich mother looks like, and only after Thomas dies does she begin to self-destruct. Helen uses pills and alcohol to self-medicate and to forget. Her view of the Reich develops gradually through her personal losses and by seeing what these beliefs have done to her family.
She attends to the practical needs of her family, as well as the larger community, serving on various committees and heading up social groups. She is honestly insulted when Juliana implies she does not know her husband; her perception of John comes from her personal experiences with him as a loving, compassionate father who will do anything to protect his family.
Extroverted Intuition
Helen only starts asking, “Does it have to be this way? What if there is another way?” after Thomas surrenders himself to death rather than be a wasteful “eater.” (Someone unable to contribute to the Reich.) She points out that Thomas still had useful things to contribute, and there was no need to end his life; that just because you are defective does not make you worthless. His loss opens her up to considering alternative possibilities and seeing how John could push for them. She nudges him to take a different path, to steer the proverbial ship away from the old policies, to embrace a new future, hoping he can salvage something and have their son’s death be meaningful.
When she realizes John is incapable of this, Helen draws away from him and even leaves him for a time, out of a lower Ne fearfulness that he is a dangerous man and a threat to her family. She rather irrationally sees him as the problem and reverses her thinking away from him as their protector to being part of the problem. This dramatic 180 reversal happens when Ne becomes disillusioned and gives up on its previous hopes and assumptions.
Helen is a little suspicious when their doctor dies, and Thomas admits to having seen him a few days earlier. She gradually grasps that his illness may be more serious than she first thought, and that leads her to assume (rightfully) that John has bought them more time by terminating the problem. As her daughters get older, she becomes more apprehensive about history repeating itself (John’s bad blood, because his brother was a “defective,” passed on to their son, which means their daughters could also be carriers, and wind up dead too), and convinced that their family will not survive this.
Introverted Thinking
Helen is poor at disengaging her emotions from her thinking process; she does not understand the things John does which are tactical, because on the surface it looks like he is doing nothing (he doesn’t tell her his plan to cover up their daughter’s blood tests, regardless of what they tell him). She needs verbal affirmation and for him to reassure her, rather than trusting that his silence means he is coming up with a plan to protect them.
She often feels things are wrong before she can understand what they are or articulate them, and her arguments are all moral or fear-based rather than being logical. She becomes irrational under stress and takes her children away from John, the one person who could protect them, because she fears his influence over them. She blames John rather than herself for Thomas’s decisions, because she can’t accept that she did anything wrong.
Rather than question the system she is caught up in, Helen lets it unfold around her and goes along with it, only becoming critical when it’s dangerous to do so. She voices her feelings of opposition and her judgments of the Reich to her therapist, thinking that he is obligated not to tell anyone, and never once considers whether he might report her for these views, or tell her husband about their “confidential” sessions.
The Enneagram 2
Helen puts on the perfect image of being a good citizen of the Reich, and takes pride in being someone others can look up to as an example of appropriate behavior, well-mannered and intelligent children, and loyalty to the Reich. She prides herself on the first season on heading up committees, on being the person who welcomes others to the Reich or to the neighborhood, and on fantasizing about being a power couple with John as he advances.
Mostly, though, she prides herself on being a loving mother and a supportive wife. “I am here for you, John.” She roots for and supports him, and only questions him later, as her unease with their situation spirals out into anger about his inability to protect Thomas. She doesn’t dare think that her own role in educating their son and telling him how to think created a boy who would commit assisted suicide to avoid shaming his family with his genetic defects. That would not fit her self-image of a good mother.
2s are talented at caring about people and then… one day, not caring anymore, because that person has fallen out of being theirs to protect and love. And that happens at first with the doctor’s wife, when she tries to support her, only to wind up killing her, because she won’t stop attacking Helen… and then later with John, when she cuts him off from his children, leaves him, and only returns to help bring him down for the Resistance. She also deals with a lot of anger and aggression in her feelings about Thomas’s death.
The 3 Wing
Even though she is highly emotional, part of Helen can also push her feelings aside to embody whatever others want or expect her to be—the ideal woman. She is “perfect” as a wife and mother, a queen bee of society, always the person who assertively steps into powerful positions and takes charge. Many times, she doesn’t feel like showing up or putting on an image, but she does it anyway. Smiles and flatters, charms, or threatens people, as she adjusts herself to whatever the situation asks of her.
But beneath it, as she explores her feelings with her therapist, is an inner hollowness that is overly tied to her image as a parent. Without her children, Helen feels as if she is nothing. If John does not desire her, she is no longer desirable. She can be false, but she would rather be real, and she isn’t sure who that Helen is.
Click here to read other Man in the High Castle character profiles.
