About Claudio Naranjo

Dr. Claudio Naranjo, renowned Chilean psychiatrist, internationally renowned writer, teacher, and lecturer, is considered a pioneer in his experimental and theoretical work as an integrator of psychotherapy and spiritual traditions. One of the first researchers of psychoactive plants and psychedelic therapy and one of the three successors of Fritz Perls (founder of gestalt therapy) at the Esalen Institute, he later developed the Psychology of Enneatypes from the Protoanalysis of woodcutting and founded the SAT Institute (Seekers After Truth), a psychospiritual integration school. When not writing, he travels around the world, devoting his life to helping others in their quest for transformation and trying to influence public opinion and authorities in the idea that only a radical transformation of education can change the catastrophic course of history.

Trajectory

Claudio Naranjo was born on November 24, 1932, in Valparaíso, Chile. He grew up in a musical environment and, after an early foray into the piano, he studied music composition. Shortly after entering medical school, however, he stopped composing and pursued more of his own philosophical interests. Important influences of that time were the visionary Chilean poet and sculptor Tótila Albert, the poet David Rosenman Taub, and the Polish philosopher Bogumil Jasinowski.

After graduating as a doctor of medicine, in 1959, he was hired by the School of Medicine of the University of Chile to form part of a pioneering center for studies in Medical Anthropology (CEAM), founded by Professor Franz Hoffman. At the same time, he carried out his residency in psychiatry at the University Psychiatry Clinic under the direction of Ignacio Matte-Blanco.

Interested in research on the dehumanizing effects of traditional medical education, he traveled briefly to the United States, on a mission assigned by the University of Chile, to explore the field of perceptual learning, and it is at this moment that he becomes aware of the work of Dr. Samuel Renshaw and Hoyt Sherman at The Ohio State University.

In 1962, he was at Harvard as a Fulbright visiting professor at the Center for Personality Studies and at Emerson Hall, where he participated in Gordon Allport's Seminar on Social Psychology. Likewise, he also studied with Paul Tillich. Before his return to Chile, in 1963, he associated with Dr. Raymond Cattell, at the 1PAT, Institute of Personality and Ability Test, in Champaign (Illinois), and was invited to Berkeley (California), to participate in the activities of the Personality Assessment and Research Center (IPAR). After a new period at the Medical Anthropology Study Center of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Chile, Dr. Naranjo once again returned to Berkeley and IPAR, where he continued his activities as a research

associate until 1970. During that time he became a student of Fritz. Perls and part of the early gestalt therapy community, and later began holding workshops at the Esalen Institute.

In the years leading up to being a key figure at Esalen, Dr. Naranjo also received additional training and supervision from Jim Simkin in Los Angeles and attended sensory awareness workshops with Charlotte Selver. He became a close friend of Carlos Castañeda and was also part of Leo Zeff's groundbreaking psychedelic therapy group (1965-66). These meetings bore fruit in the contributions of Dr. Naranjo in the use of harmaline, MDA, ibogaine and other phenyl-isopropylamines in the field of psychotherapy, partially described in his book The Healing journey.

In 1969, he was recruited as an educational policy consultant at the Research Center, created by Willis Flarman at SRI. His account of what was applicable to education from the field of psychological and spiritual techniques then in vogue later appeared in his first book, The Only Quest. During that same period, he co-authored a book, with Dr. Robert Ornstein, on meditation (Psychology of Meditation), and also received an invitation from Dr. Ravenna Helson to examine the qualitative differences between books representative of "matriarchy" and the "patriarchy" from his factor analysis of children's fiction writers, which led him to write his book "The Divine Child and the Hero", which was published much later.

The accidental death of his only son, which occurred in 1970, marked a turning point in the life of Claudio Naranjo that led him to undertake a long pilgrimage, under the guidance of Oscar Ichazo, which included a spiritual retreat in the desert near Arica, Chile. In his opinion, this is the true beginning of his spiritual experience, his contemplative life and his inner guidance.

After leaving Arica, he began teaching a group in Chile, which included his mother, gestalt students, and friends. This group, which began rather offhandedly, shaped her activity at Berkeley in the 1970s and made possible the creation of a non-profit entity called the SAT Institute. The first SAT programs were visited by a number of guest teachers, including Zalman Schachter, Dhiravamsa, Chu Chu Fang, Sri Johari Harish, and Bob Hoffman.

In 1976, Dr. Naranjo was a visiting professor at the Santa Cruz Campus of the University of California for two semesters, and later, intermittently, at the California Institute of Asian Studies. At the same time, he also began offering workshops intermittently in Europe. In this way, he was able to further refine certain aspects of the mosaic of approaches contained in the SAT program.

In 1987, he launched a reborn SAT Institute for personal and professional development in Spain. Since then, the SAT program has been successfully extended to Italy, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, and more recently to France and Germany.

Since the late eighties, Dr. Naranjo has divided his annual schedule between his activities abroad and his literary work at home in Berkeley. His numerous publications from that time include a revised version of an old gestalt therapy book, as well as three new titles. He also wrote three books on the applications of the Enneagram to the personality, a new book on meditation (The Way of Silence and the Talking Cure), and Songs of Awakening, an interpretation of the great books of the West as expressions of the inner journey and variations of the hero's tale. And, in his book, The Death Throes of Patriarchy (the precedent for Healing Civilization), he first offered his interpretation of the global crisis as an expression of a psychocultural phenomenon intrinsic to civilization itself—namely, the devaluation of parenting. feminine and infantile instinct on the part of our warrior culture—and offered a possible solution to this situation in the harmonious development of our three brains.

Since the late 1990s, Dr. Naranjo has attended many conferences on education and has tried to influence the transformation of the educational system in different countries. It is his conviction that "nothing is more hopeful in terms of social evolution, than the collective fostering of individual wisdom, compassion, and freedom." Through his book Changing Education to Change the World, published in 2004, he has tried to stimulate the efforts of teachers among SAT graduates who are beginning to get involved in the SAT Education project, which offers teachers and students from schools of education a complementary curriculum in self-knowledge, repair of parental relationships and spiritual culture. Due to these contributions, the University of Udine conferred on him, in 2005, an Honorary Doctorate in Education.

In 2006, the Claudio Naranjo Foundation was created to apply Dr. Naranjo's proposals concerning the transformation of traditional education into an education that does not neglect human development on which, in his opinion, our social evolution depends.