Name Don Riso | Education Stanford University | |
 | ||
Died August 30, 2012, Stone Ridge, Marbletown, New York, United States Books The Wisdom of the Enne, Personality Types: Using the, La Sabiduria del Enea, Discovering your personalit, Enneagram Transformations | ||
Don Richard Riso (17 January 1946 – August 30, 2012) was an American teacher of the Enneagram of Personality; his books have been translated into several languages. Riso considered himself to be Enneagram type Four with a Three wing.
Contents
Early life and education
Riso grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. He studied English and philosophy and received a M.A. from Stanford University. Around 1962, he joined the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) of the New Orleans Province, but later left the order without being ordained.
Enneagram work
In the early 1970s, some members of the Jesuit order came in contact with the Enneagram material and it began to be taught in Jesuit and other Roman Catholic institutions in North American. In 1974, as a Jesuit seminarian in Toronto, Canada, Riso first learned of the Jesuit teaching on the Enneagram which, he has said, "consisted of nine one-page impressionistic sketches of the personality types" and fascinated him. In the following year, 1975, he left the order and began developing the brief type sketches to more detailed descriptions.
Riso developed a number of original ideas regarding understanding the Enneagram, such as nine "levels of development" from "redeemed" or "healthy" to "totally unhealthy" and the "harmonic groups".
In 1987, Riso published his 12 years of Enneagram thinking in his first book, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery. Three years later he published Understanding the Enneagram.
In 1991, Russ Hudson joined Riso, originally to create a questionnaire for indicating people's Enneagram types. The result was the Riso–Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (RHETI). Several versions have since been developed, the present complete version consisting of 144 pairs of forced-choice statements.
In 1995, Riso and Hudson founded the Enneagram Institute in New York City. The institute has since moved to Stone Ridge, New York, where it offers workshops and trainings as well as publishing materials pertaining to the Enneagram. It is represented by the Enneagram Institute Network in more than 15 countries. Hudson participated in revising the book Personality Types for the second edition, which came out in 1996.
Death
Riso died on August 30, 2012 from metastasized pancreatic cancer.