Foreword

The common theme of these pages is situated in the field of the applications of the enneagram to the personality.

For those who have never read or heard of the enneagram, it will suffice to say for now that it is a geometric figure that was made known by G. I. Gurdjieff, who referred to it as a symbolic representation of certain universal laws and attributed it to certain esoteric tradition still unknown today in the Western world.

The enneagram of personality, however, comes from Oscar Ichazo, who presented the enneagram of passions, as well as the enneagram of fixations and other applications of this geometric map, before the Association of Psychologists of Chile in 1969.

Ichazo said that the set of notions related to this subject —which he called Protoanalysis— constituted a discipline transmitted by a "Christian esotericism" with which he had had contact in Afghanistan.

Later, after having participated in a study period of a few months with Ichazo in the company of forty colleagues near the city of Arica, in northern Chile, I felt prepared to integrate my previous experience in the world of therapy (as well as Buddhist meditation and other elements) with what I had learned from him. In the context of the work that originated from such integration, I understood better and better and explained in more detail a set of notions that I have been referring to as the Psychology of Enneatypes.

Over time, I have already published three books on various aspects of the Psychology of Enneatypes: “Character and Neurosis”, “Transformation Through Insight”, and “The Enneagram of Society”, in addition to having developed other aspects of the subject in the book “Between Meditation and Psychotherapy” — where I explain the Enneagram of Meditation — and in my political books “Changing Education to Change the World”, “Healing Civilization”, and “The Patriarchal Mind”—in which I delve into the application of the Enneagram to social pathologies.

This book differs from the previous ones in that, through its pages, it communicates something that until now I have reserved for my experiential workshops, in an effort to prevent certain information, when passing to the psychological and academic market, not only from being distorted by vulgarization, but separated from the living experience in which they reach their full meaning.

It contains 27 characters in search of being, in addition to the present prologue, a presentation of each enneatype — which the editor of La Llave has seen fit to include and which

Grazia Cecchini has been in charge of preparing. After that, a brief introductory text written by me for each of the papers of my invited collaborators is also included. These texts come from a conference that I offered years ago — at the beginning of a congress held in Arlington, Virginia, by the International Enneagram Association — about the neurotic needs of the 27 characters recognized in Ichazo's Protoanalysis.

When I first introduced the Psychology of Enneatypes during my work at Berkeley in the 1970s, I limited my topic to the nine passions and the corresponding nine fundamental fixations, without going into the subject of subtypes and their corresponding neurotic needs. Thus, I did not want to teach about the virtues, the cognitive aspect of the ego and other issues that, in my subsequent work in the Latin world, I wanted to reserve for those who participate in the experiential program that I have been developing: that is why I have omitted such topics in my books.

With the passage of time, I feel confirmed in my reservation policy, since I have had ample opportunities to verify how the popularization of knowledge becomes an obstacle for future transmission, generating many errors and prejudices that later interfere with a serious application; a situation comparable to that of amateurs who learn musical instruments in the wrong way and then have to work very hard to unlearn their bad habits.

Having reached the threshold of 80 years of age, however, I feel that it is time to put on record some of the topics that I have so far reserved for experiential situations; and I think of this book as a first volume in a larger project. Through its chapters, the reader can form an approximate idea of the 27 characters in which the nine basic forms of personality that have already inspired so many books are subdivided. More specifically, in the following pages the theme of how each of the corresponding people lives the maturation process that is the essence of therapeutic and spiritual progress is developed.

I imagine that most readers of this book will already have some understanding of the basic typology of the nine enneatypes: the present distinction between 27 characters is but a refinement of it. But, for those who have not had enough contact with the Psychology of the Enneatypes, I will tell you that the application of the enneagram to the explanation of character constitutes something close to the classic Christian doctrine of deadly sins (to which cowardice is added here). and vanity, considered as something different from pride). That said, there is really no need to add more in this foreword, apart from recommending reading the simple description of the aforementioned nine basic characters that I presented in “The Enneagram of Society”.

To conclude, I would like to thank my co-authors for their work, and I also thank those who, through the Claudio Naranjo Foundation, contributed to the organization of the Symposium on the Psychology of Enneatypes, held in Seville in 2008, in which these works were initially presented as presentations. I also want to express my gratitude to Grazia Cecchini, who has been in charge of transforming the series of transcripts of that symposium into a book, mainly through

the substitution of such oral presentations for written ones through a contact of more than a year with those who write here.

Having been someone who has seen many of his ideas passed into the community through premature and misappropriation, it is an additional satisfaction for me to feel that for the first time a book appears in which a legitimate and mature transmission operates, and I think readers will appreciate the difference. But, above all, I hope that by making available to the public these findings hitherto reserved for those who have participated in experiential seminars, the corresponding information will not become a substitute for the living learning process that is the path of transformative self-knowledge.

Claudio Naranjo

Tonalli, Mexico, April 2012.