The non-fiction book about the integrations between psychology and the Enneagram and Claudio Naranjo is one of the best books I've ever read. It relates each Enneagram type to a specific mental disorder and Naranjo's descriptions of the 'character' of each type is uncanny.
Claudio Naranjo, M.D
- Claudio Naranjo - integrative typologist from Chile who wrote Character and Neurosis
- He was big in the sixties when there was a lot of awakening conscious movements and spent time at Berkley, California
- No affiliation to any particular group
- Combines the enneagram and neurotic types
- It's a simple and symmetrical theory containing assymetrical complexity
- Learned from the Sufi master in Arica (Gurdjieff)
- He brings together character study, psychoanalysis, and spiritual traditions
Theory behind Character and Neurosis
- Object relational view of development
- Social learning theory
- We cannot truly separate traits from motives
- Each behavioural trait is linked to a cognitive trait and a motive
- Spiritual darkness is equated with loss of being
- Personality disturbance relates to an illusion of fulfilment
- William Sheldon and the three dimensions of human temperament relating to the three biological layers of the embryo
- Ectoderm, endoderm, and mesoderm
- Gurdjieff founded the institute for the harmonious development of man and spoke of the Law of Three
- Hans Eysenk
- Factor Analysis as the measurement of the human mind
- Oscar Ichazo and Protoanalysis
- Naranjo says neurosis is characterological
- It's a mixture of unconsciousness, aversion, and craving
- A person is motivated by lack rather than abundance
- Freud maintained that frustration of libidinal processes but modern psychoanalysts revise this theory as a lack of love and adequate parenting
The personality and the character
- Personality is the false self and the conditioning of our experience
- We developed a personality to survive but this isn't really who we are
- The individual becomes fixed in their response and they are mentally "asleep"
- They don't respond to situations as they are but according to patterns they learned early in life
- Your character is either an identification with one of your parents or a reaction against one of them
- Either way, it means abandoning your true nature called your "essence"
- I notice many links with Pete Walker
- Essence is a process of free functioning
- There is a psychodynamics of the enneagram
- The forces that motivate the formation of character in childhood are not the same forces that keep it there in adulthood
The passion of each type
- The passion is kept in place by a cognitive distortion that prevents us from acting freely
- Each point on the enneagram is related to the others but some have a stronger relationship than others
- Type four is like a failed three that responds to an ability to live up to the idealised image with a sense of lack
- Being ruled by your passion means because motivated by a sense of lack instead of seeking abundance
- Character disorder results from a corruption of the and lack of self
The Enneagram and spirituality
- Cognitive distortions are an inability to apprehend reality and find fulfilment
- The path to spiritual fulfilment lies in moving away from what we think provides us with a sense of self and "journeying through emptiness"
- The Enneagram is ultimately a spiritual tool based in ancient Christian traditions
Final remarks
Ultimately, this is a spiritual book that teaches the reader how to use the Enneagram to find spiritual fulfilment. It combines many of the 'humanistic' disciplines to form a cohesive view of how one should live their live. Liberally doses of philosophy also inform Naranjo's book and I'd recommend this book to any serious student of the Enneagram.
