Introduction

I don’t remember exactly when, but surely more than twenty years ago, I conceived the book that, with this second volume out of nine, begins to take shape.

It would not be a book written by me alone but one that embodies and develops my understanding of the twenty-seven recognizable characters through the application of the Enneagram to personality, which I learned during the years 1969-1970 (more implicitly than explicitly) from Oscar Ichazo and have been developing ever since. The conception of the book has been to present each of the characters through:

1.A theoretical chapter (the entirety of which could well be considered a treatise on the psychology of Enneatypes), following a structure I formulated a long time ago and proposed to a series of disciples for development, in collaboration with other volunteers.

2.An autobiography written by another of my disciples, someone who could be said to have traveled a rich path of transformation and was willing to produce a document that implied a public confession, given the sincerity required by a biographical account before their family and acquaintances. The usefulness of such an exercise—“transparency through the publication of one's own autobiography”—is something I had come to believe in based on previous experiences. I proposed it in that spirit, and indeed it became a rich experience for the participants.

Naturally, the presentation of the various characters through these two complementary modalities—the psychological essay and the narrative—will appeal to the two cerebral hemispheres ("scientific" and "humanistic") of the readers.

Surely, the twenty-seven chapters that will make up the treatise on the psychology of Enneatypes will be of special interest to academic psychologists. It is also to be hoped that the set of twenty-seven exemplary biographies will attract every reader who wishes to find their psychospiritual brother or sister among them. It is very helpful for us to become aware of ourselves when we encounter the process of self-knowledge of someone very similar to us, someone who has had the courage and humility to discover their shadow and put their "descent into hell" into words.

The project for this work slowly matured into nine volumes (each dedicated to the three Enneatypes corresponding to one of the nine passions recognized by Ichazo's proto-analysis) until David Barba suggested that we set publication dates for the volumes. This step implied more active editing work than I had been offering to my collaborators or than the co-authors themselves had taken on until then. For this reason, I invited Grazia Cecchini to participate in this task. Since then, she has maintained close correspondence with them, working to improve the texts.

Having passed eighty-four years of age myself, I cannot help but feel that the completion of this work coincides with the closing chapters of my life, giving this task a certain sense of "mission accomplished."

Curiously, I never felt, during my early years of teaching this subject, that I had a duty to develop it or any particular merit for doing so. Only in response to the commercialization of the Enneagram and the quackery of imitators of my early work in Berkeley (the originators of the community or international Enneagram movement) did I begin to recognize my own merit in offering a more serious and transformative approach. However, it is only recently, with the hindsight of decades, that I have come to feel that, just as Ichazo predicted, the task of mediating this knowledge for the Western world of our time would ultimately fall into my hands. I hope that putting all these insights into writing will aid rather than hinder understanding, for I have often thought that the Egyptian god Thoth was right in imagining that the gift of writing would turn humans into mere repeaters of words, distancing them from wisdom. I imagine that, in this case, my future readers will be divided between those who use our efforts for their own transformation and those who dedicate themselves to their academic, cultural, and material enrichment.

Finally, I want to thank all those who contributed to this second volume for their efforts and their tolerance of my criticisms. I wish for them the satisfaction of knowing that their work serves the massive process of self-knowledge characterizing our generation. I am especially grateful to Grazia for taking over as editor at a time in my life when my teaching activities and other unfinished books demand my attention, and to David Barba, from La Llave, whose encouragement ensured I did not postpone the completion of these nine volumes until it was too late for my supervision.