Ichazo's Arica School can be considered, as Ramparts magazine described it in 1973, "A body of techniques for cosmic consciousness-raising and an ideology to relate to the world in an awakened way.

The Arica School's origins began in 1956 when groups of people formed in major cities in South America to study the theory and method that Ichazo was proposing.

In 1968, Ichazo presented lectures on his theories of Protoanalysis and the ego-fixations at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile.

"[3] Ichazo developed the philosophical and psychological tools used in the Arica School studies, which are based on his "Protoanalytical Theory, System and Method", more commonly called "Protoanalysis".

[4][5] The principal psychological connections between the nine ego fixations can be mapped using the points, lines, and circle of the enneagram figure.

[6] Ichazo's teachings are designed to help people transcend their identification with — and the suffering caused by — their own mechanistic thought and behavior patterns.

His theories about the fixations are founded on the premise that all life seeks to continue and perpetuate itself and that the human psyche must follow universal laws of reality.

According to Ichazo, a person's fixation derives from childhood subjective experience (self-perception) of psychological trauma when expectations are not met in each of the instincts.

Young children are self-centered and thus experience disappointment in their expectations because of one of three fundamental attitudes: attracted, unattracted, disinterested.

These processes can be understood in connection with the enneagram figure, classical philosophy, and what he called "Trialectical Logic" which analyzes reality on the basis of cycles.

The United States Court of Appeals[21] ruled that Ichazo is the original author of the application of the enneagram figure to a theory of ego fixations (which are the precursor to personality disorders).

Ichazo's goal with regard to the study of the enneagram was 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 taught, attempt to protect people from suffering but actually tend to perpetuate it).

The school is named after the city of Arica, Chile, where Ichazo once lived and where he led an intensive months-long training in 1970 and 1971 before settling in the United States.

The Arica School can be considered, as Ramparts magazine put it in 1973, "A body of techniques for cosmic consciousness-raising and an ideology to relate to the world in an awakened way.