Mythmaking and the Evolution of the Enneagram of Personality, Part 1

It’s time to get serious about how we talk about the history of the Enneagram and what we mean when we use the word “Enneagram.”

Like living creatures, bodies of knowledge evolve over time and the Enneagram of personality is an evolving model.

Some Enneagram teachers would suggest otherwise, implying that “the Enneagram” is a fixed body of knowledge dating back to the third-century monastic “Desert Fathers,” the Gnostics, and perhaps even thousands of years earlier and that was carefully and intentionally passed down in secret societies.

There seems to be something very attractive to some Enneagram practitioners to believe they are part of an ancient tradition or lineage of mysterious mystics.

Unfortunately, this is fantasy, and it undermines the credibility of the Enneagram in the broader world.

It’s time to get clear on what we are talking about when we talk about the Enneagram.

Before we continue, it is important to distinguish between the multiple uses of the word “Enneagram.”

First, there is the diagram itself, which is commonly used as a framework to map a variety of phenomena. Second, there is “the Enneagram of personality,” which is a specific application of the diagram related to—yes—the dynamics of some aspects of personality. Third, there is a much vaguer use of the word “Enneagram” that refers to the diagram, the personality model, and various collections of other psychological or spiritual practices. What gets confusing is that these hybrid collections of ideas and practices are different for different teachers, they are continually added to, and teachers don’t always make clear that their version of the Enneagram is not the same as others. And yet people refer to these hybrids as “THE Enneagram” and some even imply that their teachings are the “original” or correct teachings.

This creates confusion and misunderstanding, and when people use the word “Enneagram” they should be clear on which of these uses they mean. In reality, of course, this is difficult to do, especially now. The Enneagram cat is out of the bag and has spread from a relatively small niche into the broader popular culture. It is not realistic to think that people will take the time to distinguish which approach to the Enneagram they are referring to in most situations, or that they even need to.

But for those who are serious about using the Enneagram and want to be able to separate the fact from the fantasy, it helps to occasionally step back and remind ourselves of a few things. This article, which is the first of two parts, is an attempt to create some perspective about what we talk about when we talk about “the Enneagram.”

Despite the mythology, the Enneagram diagram itself is first seen with G. I. Gurdjieff in his “Fourth Way” school in the early 20^th century. Gurdjieff did not associate the diagram with personality. In fact, modern-day Gurdjieffians are disdainful of those who use the Enneagram as a model for understanding personality. (See William Patrick Patterson’s “Taking with the Left Hand” for an entertaining example of a typical Fourth Way teacher’s disdain for the Enneagram of personality and those who teach it.)

Rather, Gurdjieff used the Enneagram to map what he envisioned as “laws” governing the workings of the universe. As I’ll explain later, I find little to no value in this set of “laws,” which don’t actually qualify as “laws” in any traditional sense of the word—they are, at most, models or heuristics. Others disagree with me and find great value in them; I’ll leave it to the reader to explore these applications for themselves and make up their own minds.

In reality, the Enneagram as a personality model only dates to the mid-1960s when it was constructed by Oscar Ichazo as part (and only part) of his “Protoanalysis” approach to inner work taught in the “Arica school” that he founded in 1968 in Arica, Chile. While some argue that the Enneagram of personality is ancient, this question has been settled in court: A lawsuit by Ichazo claiming copyright infringement by subsequent Enneagram teachers ended with the conclusion that while, in general, the Enneagram of personality cannot be copyrighted, “Ichazo [is] the source of the Enneagram of Personality and fixations, its application, meaning, and related material.”  (Effros, Walter A., 2003, “Owning Enlightenment: Proprietary Spirituality in the ‘New Age’ Marketplace,” Buffalo Law Review. 51). Going a step further, the judge stated that the complaint Ichazo lodged was more a complaint of heresy than of copyright infringement. In other words, Ichazo’s complaint was that those who learned from him “stole” the basic ideas of his approach and then distorted them into a creation of their own.  

It is worth pointing out here that unless someone is teaching Ichazo’s model of the Enneagram they are not teaching the “real” or original Enneagram of personality. That’s not a bad thing, and I’m not suggesting that anyone should be teaching Ichazo’s version simply for the sake of historical consistency. Ideas should evolve and models should get better over time. But beware of anyone who implies that what they are teaching is the “true” or “authentic” version of the Enneagram of personality if they are not teaching what Ichazo taught.

The evolution of the system started almost immediately.

Famously, Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo traveled to Arica to study with Ichazo and left under contentious circumstances before putting his own spin on the Enneagram of personality, taking Ichazo’s model of vices, fixations, virtues, etc., and updating it to include a more current understanding of psychological phenomena via association with patterns found in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” that mental health professionals use. (In the video, “Origins of the Enneagram,” Naranjo states that he wholly remade the Enneagram of personality into something different, and made up the story that it came from the Sufis in order to better market his work.)

Naranjo taught the Enneagram to a group in Berkeley, CA who then dispersed and put their own spin on the system, taught it to others who put their spin on it, and so on and so on.

Ironically, each generation (starting with Ichazo himself) thought that those who came after were bastardizing the “truth,” a tradition that some carry on to this day.

That is the funny thing about evolution (which, simply put, is “descent with modification”)—it changes things and people usually aren’t happy about those changes. Those things that change in a way that are useful in their environment, however, tend to thrive and continue to reproduce (for better or worse); those which change in a way that is not useful go extinct (again, for better or worse). 

Another thing to understand about evolution (of ideas as well as of organisms) is that it can be either planned or unplanned. An example of planned biological evolution is the breeding of dogs for a particular purpose. Dachshunds were deliberately bred to flush out burrowing animals such as badgers; bulldogs to bait bulls; Rhodesian ridgebacks to assist in the hunting of lions.

Likewise, the planned and intentional evolution of ideas or models is to help them better fit the needs, temperament, and circumstances of the users. Ichazo had a tightly controlled spiritual sect and developed his ideas to support his … idiosyncratic… metaphysics; Naranjo was a Gestalt therapist (among other things) who changed what he learned from Ichazo to better fit his own needs related to his SAT (“seekers after truth”) school; those who grew out of Naranjo’s approach had other needs and goals in their use of the Enneagram and revised their teachings accordingly. A. H. Almaas took what he learned from Naranjo, added to it, and incorporated the Enneagram into what was to become his Ridhwan School; Jesuit Robert Ochs took his partial knowledge of what Naranjo taught back to Loyola and another stream of the Enneagram was born; etc.

The history of the Enneagram of personality is one of constant evolution and change.

Unplanned evolution happens “accidentally” or “randomly,” and the unplanned evolution of ideas can take many forms.

One form can be like the children’s game “Whisper Down the Lane” where a message passed from person to person down a row ends up being dramatically different at the end of the line than from the original message, despite each participant’s best attempts to relay the message accurately.

Another form is when people receive incomplete information but believe they have the full story, so they teach the part as if it were the whole; or they attempt to fill gaps in their knowledge with ideas that are different from those that were originally in the fuller body of knowledge.

Or, people read books by particular teachers that are 20 or 30 years old and don’t understand that even the author has changed their mind and is now teaching things differently. Old and outdated ideas become part of the fabric of the pop Enneagram dogma.

And because evolved ideas thrive when they suit their environment, superficial approaches to the Enneagram of personality based on a limited understanding of and experience with the system thrive in a short-attention-span Instagram world. Likewise, approaches based on fantastical tales about secret mystery schools are well-suited to thrive among a certain kind of seeker drawn to esoteric approaches but unwilling or unable to apply critical thinking to ideas they want to believe.

In short, there are various approaches to the Enneagram of personality, none of which (other than Ichazo’s original) can make claims to being the “real” Enneagram of personality; they are merely variations on a theme and they need to be evaluated individually according to the rigor with which they are constructed.

“Rigor” in this case means that teachers define their terms precisely; make their assumptions, biases, and intended use of the system clear; and meet the requirements of any good model—it does not contradict itself and it describes what it claims to be describing. They need to be honest about the roots from which their teachings sprang, how and why they made changes to it, and the goals for which they are implemented.

Importantly, it’s one thing to say that some ideas someone teaches as part of one’s approach to the Enneagram come from old sources (one can say this about every body of knowledge) but it is different to imply that the old ideas were themselves “THE Enneagram.”

All ideas are the result of the creative evolution of older ideas, just as animal populations today grew out of earlier animal populations. But while homo sapiens are descended from homo habilis, it is not accurate to say that homo habilis were homo sapiens; while calculus grew out of mathematics, it would be foolish to say that the first people to add two plus two were practicing calculus. Likewise, we can’t say that anyone prior to Ichazo was using the Enneagram of personality.

The history of ideas is a fascinating topic for study, but we should keep perspective—what was then is not the same as what is now. Studying the history of ideas is an interesting topic in its own right. But we can’t fall into the trap of implying (or outright asserting) that there is anything more mysterious than the natural progress and accumulation of ideas in what one teaches. (By way of analogy, historians of science might highlight Aristotle’s experiments in biology, but they wouldn’t imply that what Aristotle was doing was in any way the same as what today’s molecular biologists are doing.)

Further, teachers of these approaches should not claim to be part of a tradition of which they are not actually part. They should not cobble together an inferred history that is not justified by observable and verifiable facts and then launch pseudohistory into the world. They should be precise in their claims and not use implications such as “I can’t prove this, but I think…” while cloaking themselves as “academics” to lead people to believe fantastical claims of secret knowledge and mysterious groups of which there is no trace.

Being rigorous means that Enneagram teachers should face the probable facts that the “Sarmoun Brotherhood” from which Gurdjieff claimed to have received the Enneagram did not exist and that the Enneagram did not come from the Sufis. They should not imply they are part of an intact lineage that includes Naranjo, Ichazo, Gurdjieff, Plotinus, the Gnostics, and other “ancients” when Naranjo disavowed Ichazo (and vice versa); Ichazo dismissed Gurdjieff quite robustly in his “Letter to the Transpersonal Community,” and Plotinus wrote a section of “The Enneads” literally titled “Against the Gnostics.”

They should recognize and admit that their efforts to toss into a pot the Enneagram of personality derived from Ichazo, the “process” Enneagram of Gurdjieff, and a variety old and new concepts and practices to create a neo-Fourth Way stew is not the same as being part of an intact and intentional historical lineage, and that their stew is not the only legitimate stew just because it is the one they find tasty and nourishing. 

In part two of this article, I’ll take a stab at practicing what I preach and describe the evolution of my ideas and how my biases, temperament, and use of the system shape my approach to the Enneagram.

See part 2 at