Arica Institute

Oscar Ichazo had studied and taught in Chile and Argentina through the 1960s, developing a system he presented as a synthesis of the world's major esoteric and psychological traditions rather than as an original invention of his own: elements drawn from Sufi practice, from the Fourth Way teaching of George Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky, from Kabbalistic cosmology, from yoga and Buddhist meditation technique, and from Western psychology, organized around a small set of diagrams, chief among them the Enneagram, a nine pointed figure Ichazo used both as a map of cosmic and psychological structure and as a practical tool for diagnosing an individual's characteristic pattern of ego fixation.

In 1971 Ichazo brought a group of around fifty Americans, most of them already active in the American human potential and psychotherapy scene, to the town of Arica in northern Chile for an intensive residential training of some ten months by most accounts, though later publicity often compressed it to three. The training combined physical exercises, meditation, group process work and Ichazo's theoretical system into a single intensive program, and participants who returned to the United States afterward became the core of the Institute Ichazo went on to found and lead from New York.

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.