Ennea-type Structures

by Claudio Naranjo

A book review originally posted on Amazon from 2003 to about 2008

Going Beyond "Sun-Sign" Ennea-Typing

The use of the enneagram — that nine-faceted esoteric symbol — as a tool to map personality dynamics carries some interesting and surprisingly complicated cultural baggage. On the one hand, its extraordinary popularity shows the hunger many people have for some easily graspable method of self-understanding; indeed, not since the sun sign fad of the 1970s has there been such an iconic typology. On the other hand, the proliferation of popular books which, in their reliance on lists of adjectives and traits, seem to reduce — or encourage the reduction of — this characterology to superficial thumbnail sketches would appear to leave the seeker with very little essential sustenance indeed. After all, simply knowing that one is an ennea-type Seven or Four doesn't really carry any more depth of insight than knowing that one is an Aries or a Virgo.

The first virtue of this, Claudio Naranjo's seminal work on the ennea-types, is that he understands each type as a consellation of variable traits that have as their common axis a singular, perhaps archetypal trait and which, as an essential flaw in perception, transfers its skewed spin to the entire structure. Actually, in this he is not entirely alone among ennea-type authors. What makes Naranjo's book unique is that it isn't focused on the psychological level. The essential flaws aren't just neuroses or quirks of character but "ontic obscurations," fundamental and deeply entrenched misperceptions about the nature of one's being. The depth of this phenomenon is futher conveyed through Naranjo's aligning of the nine "fixations" with the seven deadly sins-adding fear and vanity. As Naranjo puts it:

"The central idea underlying this book....is that we are looking for the key....to our ultimate fulfillment in the wrong place, and that this cognitive error is at the source of our dissatisfactions.... Throughout these pages I have called this key 'being'.... We may say that we are, but we don't have the experience of being; we don't know that we are. On the contrary, the closer the scrutiny to which we subject our experience, the more we discover, at its core, a sense of lack, an emptiness, insubstantiality, a lack of selfness or being."

And from this perceived lack of being, Naranjo states, developes the entire structure which the book explores and elaborates on a type-by-type basis — never straying far from the fundamental connection of each type to "being loss."

Another reason to recommend this book is the sheer concision, clarity and depth of the analyses. Naranjo has a way of homing in on the essential, and evoking the "flavor" of the character under discussion, partly through his own style, and partly by the judicious use of the apt metaphor, allegory (drawing frequently from the body of teaching tales involving the Sufi "Holy Fool" Mullah Nasruddin) and allusions to literature.

That said, some may find his style to be alternately terse and clinical. In addition, nothing here is sugar-coated, as the earlier quote should help to convey. This is not a New Age exegesis of the higher aspects of our ennea-types; rather, this book explores the fixations at the root of our sufferings—and it isn't pretty. But it would be a mistake to confuse this approach with the excessive preoccupation with pathology prevalent in psychiatric circles: This work hits hard, but it needs to in order to penetrate our defenses—or rather, in order to prompt us to penetrate our own defenses.

One additional theme bears exploring here: the relationship of the ennea-typologies (yes, there is more than one discrete variety) to the venerable Gurdjieff lineage. In fact, this is one more example of the aforementioned cultural baggage, though of a far more subterranean nature. For the "enneagram of personality" is nothing if not the bête noire of the more conservative factions of the Gurdjieff movement, and although the typical ennea-reaction of these good folks to the mention of the typology is a polite but chilly smile (followed by equally chilly turned shoulder), one can so easily picture them cringing every time Gurdjieff's name is mentioned in the dozens of ennea-type books. Why is this, you may ask?

It is true that Gurdjieff did indeed introduce the symbol of the enneagram, speaking of it as a glyph through which great knowledge can be conveyed — an idea to which his sacred dances attest admirably; and furthermore that he spoke of both human "types" and of "personality." But he never countenanced a marraige of personality or types with the enneagram, and this fact alone seems to be the first obstacle to the acceptance of even the theory of ennea-types within the mainstream Gurdjieff Work. Another related obstacle is perhaps the sheer commercialism — the popular mass appeal — of the enneagram as a typology, which perhaps evokes in some tradition-minded people the sense of the relevance of the esoteric principle which holds that the quality or power of a teaching diminishes inversely the more it grows in quantity. Simply put, in their minds the typology is twice-damned: first, insofar as bears no connection to Gurdjieff, while millions of unwitting people are led by inference to believe it does; and second, insofar as it's a suspicious application, of unknown provenance, which seems to degrade an esoteric tool of great potential.

There are, quite possibly, even more ramifications of this rejection of a powerful tool for most practical ends, but this is not the place to explore it further. Suffice it to say that, 12 years after its release, ENNEA-TYPE STRUCTURES still stands as the preeminent book on the "enneagram of personality." It is the ideal ennea-type book for those abovementioned traditional folk who are wary of the legitimacy of the application of character study to the enneagram, or for anyone who has simply been put off by the apparent superficiality of so many of the enneagram books filling the marketplace. ENNEA-TYPE STRUCTURES stands in relation to most other enneatype books as, say, Reinhold Ebertin's THE COMBINATION OF STELLAR INFLUENCES stands in relation to the daily horoscope in the newspaper.