Two Enneagrams From One Training

Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean born psychiatrist already established in the American psychotherapy world, was among the fifty who trained with Ichazo at Arica in 1971. Naranjo took the personality typing component of Ichazo's system, which described nine characteristic patterns of ego fixation mapped onto the points of the Enneagram figure, and developed it further after leaving Arica, teaching it independently to his own students in California in a form increasingly detached from Ichazo's broader cosmological and esoteric framework and increasingly framed in the language of psychological character types.

The two lines of transmission that followed, Ichazo's own Arica teaching and Naranjo's independently developed personality Enneagram, are historically related but are not the same system, and the popular Enneagram of personality types now widely taught in business and therapeutic settings descends chiefly from Naranjo's version and the further popularizers who studied with him, rather than directly from Ichazo's own Institute. The Institute Ichazo founded has continued to teach his fuller system under his own name and direction, distinct from, and at points in tension with, the personality typing tradition that grew out of the same 1971 training but away from his control.