Enneagram of Personality
Ichazo is considered by many to be the father of the Enneagram of Personality (usually just called the Enneagram) movement which uses an enneagram figure. The United States Court of Appeals ruled that Ichazo is the original author of the application of the enneagram figure to a theory of personality types. However, this ruling denied copyright injunction under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law. Because the enneagram symbol is a discovery (not an invention), the legal issue was not use of the symbol but rather the copyrightability of specific "enneagrams", meaning symbol plus descriptive words (or other information) associated with each point. Ichazo had earlier described the enneagrams as a set of immutable laws but he had also said that he "developed" the enneagrams.
Ichazo has applied the enneagram figure in connection with his theory of mechanical ego mechanisms which grow out of psychological traumas suffered at an early age in specific aspects of the human psyche. In his basic theory, these aspects of the human psyche include the sense of well-being (conservation instinct); the sense of relations with others (relation instinct); and the sense of adapting to our environment (adaptation instinct). Ichazo's goal with regard to the study of the enneagram is to facilitate the recognition of repetitive, mechanistic thinking and behavior in a person's psychological process and to eliminate the suffering rooted in the attachment to, and identification with, these mechanisms (which, Ichazo teaches, attempt to protect us from suffering but actually tend to perpetuate it).
The popular use of the Enneagram of Personality (as contrasted with the use of enneagrams within the Arica School) began principally with Claudio Naranjo who had studied with Ichazo in Chile. Ichazo considers Naranjo's understanding of the Enneagram to be limited and incomplete. Naranjo's major contribution to the Enneagram of Personality was his addition of defense mechanisms to the model developed by Ichazo: "His contribution to the Enneagram successfully joined the insight and methods of a mystical path of transformation with the intellectual power of a Western psychological model." Naranjo's Enneagram teachings, and those of other Enneagram teachers, have been more influential in popularizing the Enneagram figure than any works by Ichazo.
Read more about this topic: Arica School
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