Enneagram of Personality
Contemporary approaches are principally derived from the teachings of the Bolivian psycho-spiritual teacher Oscar Ichazo from the 1950s and the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo from the 1970s.
[2] Naranjo's theories were also influenced by earlier teachings about personality by George Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way tradition in the first half of the 20th century.
[3] The Enneagram of Personality is promoted in both business management and spirituality contexts through seminars, conferences, books, magazines, and DVDs.
[4][5] In business contexts, it is often promoted as a means to gain insights into workplace interpersonal dynamics; in spirituality it is commonly presented as a path to states of enlightenment and essence.
[4] There has been limited formal psychometric analysis of the Enneagram, and the peer-reviewed research that has been done is not accepted within the relevant academic communities.
Similar ideas to the Enneagram of Personality are found in the work of Evagrius Ponticus, a Christian mystic who lived in 4th-century Alexandria in Egypt.
Two of his students were Jesuit priests who later adapted the Enneagram for use in Christian spirituality within programs at Loyola University in Chicago.
[14] Additionally, social media accounts and podcasts about the Enneagram have increased, indicating a growing popularity among millennials.
This table expands upon Oscar Ichazo's ego fixations, holy ideas, passions, and virtues[18] primarily using material from Understanding the Enneagram: The Practical Guide to Personality Types (revised edition) by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson as well as Charles Tart's Transpersonal Psychologies.
[25] Related to, but not the same, as the wing concept is Ichazo's viewpoint involving the active, attractive, and function forces.
[26] For some Enneagram theorists the lines connecting the points add further meaning to the information provided by the descriptions of the types.
[27][28] The earlier teachings about the connecting lines are now rejected or modified by Enneagram teachers, including Claudio Naranjo who developed them.
On the instinctual level, people may internally stress and externally express the need to protect themselves (self-preservation), to connect with important others or partners (sexual), or to get along or succeed in groups (social).
[38] While Enneagram teachings have attained a degree of popularity, they have been categorized by many professionals as a pseudoscience due to their subjectivity and inability to be tested scientifically, and described as "an assessment method of no demonstrated reliability or validity".
[40] A 2020 review of Enneagram empirical work found mixed results for the model's reliability and validity.
[41] The study noted that the ipsative version of the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (scores on one dimension decrease scores on another dimension) had troubles with validity, whereas the non-ipsative version of the test has been found to have better internal consistency and test-retest reliability.
The report identified aspects of the intersection between the Enneagram and Roman Catholicism which, in their opinion, warranted scrutiny with potential areas of concern, stating, "While the enneagram system shares little with traditional Christian doctrine or spirituality, it also shares little with the methods and criteria of modern science ...
"[43] Partly in response to Jesuits and members of other religious orders teaching a Christian understanding of the Enneagram of Personality, a 2003 Vatican document called Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life.
