History of The Enneagram

The origin of the Enneagram is a bit mysterious (and still the subject of substantial debate). The earliest appearance in the historic record dates to a Greek man named Georges Gurdjieff ( 1866-1949). He was interested in the meaning of life and travelled around North Africa and Asia learning various spiritual traditions. Alledgedly, one of these was called 'The Work' which supposedly had been passed down from pupil to teacher for thousands of years. The Work made such an impression on Gurdjieff that he made it his life mission to teach it to the western world. The evolution of The Work into the Enneagram of today is attributed to a Chilean named Oscar Ichazo who in the 1960s developed a theory of nine personality types corresponding to the nine points of the enneagram (although he claims total originality of this concept). Ichazo taught his system to a Chilean psychologist named Cladio Naranjo. Naranjo reframed the Enneagram into the language of modern western psychology and taught his system (called the Enneagram of Fixations) in America during the 1970s. In the 1980s, Naranjo's Enneagram of Fixations was popularized as a psychological profiling system by authors Helen Palmer and Don Richard Riso. Today, the Enneagram is widely used, in this form, in clinical psychology and corporate America and is also very popular among Jesuit and Catholic priests (a Jesuit was one of Naranjo's students).

Another more simple explanation of the Enneagram origin is that it is nothing more than the seven deadly sins (pride, envy, glutton, lust, anger, greed, sloth) + fear and narcissism. Its possible that the Enneagram originators merely repackaged these common behavioral divisions consciously or unconsciously, like a musician writes a song made up of common melodies.

My View on the Enneagram

The core of the Enneagram, based on my experience with it, is a generally useful assessment tool of oneself and one's acquaintances (friends, colleagues, employees, etc.), which I think can be further improved through empirical scientific research. I think the 1 - 9 layout is superior in its simplicity to Myers-Briggs (another personality profiling system) and consequently it is more useful to the general public. A lot of the ideas connected to popular Enneagram teaching I do not agree with at all I don't think you are necessarily one type throughout your life. I also think what you score on all the types is very important. If you get one point higher on one enneagram type than the next, you are not much more that type than the other.

The problem with the Enneagram is that its roots are intuitive, not scientific. Most Enneagram authors provide useful general descriptions but their ideas start to unravel into vague new age-iness when they attempt to explain the motivations or interrelationships between those behaviors. The inherent vague logic of most of the Enneagram writings really causes problems in resolving inconsistencies. It is understandable that an intuitive based system could be pretty accurate on the simple aspects, like general descriptions, but break down on more complex aspects like underlying motivation and type interrelationships. Using empirical research methods, I am exploring the Enneagram scientifically in an effort to generate a version which is statistically more accurate and conceptually more useful (and sound) for personality assessment. It is possible that the predominantly new-age authors of the Enneagram are more right than I give them credit but beyond the nine type descriptions (which are not entirely consistent from one author to the next) the peripheral aspects of the Enneagram (like integration/disintegration) remain empirically groundless. Most of the Enneagram authors are recycling what they learned directly or indirectly from Naranjo study groups, adding only intuitive additions, totally ignoring the scientific method (i.e. proven objective checks) both in what they are recycling and what they add. It is also very plausible (and more likely probable) that the Enneagram has holes, and that the nine types don't cover all people (which may be why some really like the system - because their persona is represented by one of the 9 types - and others don't because their persona is not represented by one of the 9 types).

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