Oscar Ichazo

Work

Ichazo's Enneagram of Personality theories are part of a larger body of teaching that he terms Protoanalysis. In Ichazo's teachings the enneagram figure has usually been called an enneagon.

In an interview, Ichazo said that in 1954 he achieved insight into mechanistic and repetitive thought and behavior patterns. These processes can be understood in connection with the enneagram figure, classical philosophy and what he calls "Trialectic" logic grounded in three laws of process.

Ichazo says that he identified the nine ways in which a person's ego becomes fixated within the psyche at an early stage of life. For each person one of these "ego fixations" then becomes the core of a self-image around which their psychological personality develops. Each fixation is also supported at the emotional level by a particular "passion" or "vice". The principal psychological connections between the nine ego fixations can be "mapped" using the points, lines, and circle of the enneagram figure.

Ichazo's teachings are designed to help people transcend their identification with — and the suffering caused by — their own mechanistic thought and behavior patterns (see Fourth Way). 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. Using Trialectic logic, Ichazo indicated the three basic human instincts for survival: "conservation" (the digestive system); "relation" (the circulatory system) and "adaptation" (the central nervous system); and two poles of attraction to self-perpetuation: "sexual" (the sexual organs) and "spiritual" (the spinal column).

Ichazo understands the fixations as aberrations from an essential state of unity. The primary difference between modern psychology and his theories is that he has proposed a model of the components of the human psyche, but modern psychology has preferred to focus on observed behavior instead of an essential model from which aberrations develop.

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. From such experiences, mechanistic thought and behavior patterns arise as an attempted defense against recurrence of the trauma. By understanding the fixations — and practicing self-observation — it is believed that a person can reduce or even transcend suffering and the fixations' hold on the mind.

Although some modern Enneagram of Personality writers have believed that Ichazo's teaching are derived, in part, from those of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way work, Ichazo denied this in his "Letter to the Transpersonal Community". In 1992 intellectual copyright for the Enneagram of Personality was denied to Ichazo on the basis that he had published statements that his theories were factual and factual ideas cannot be copyrighted.