Content area
Full text
THE ENNEAGRAM OF SOCIETY: HEALING THE SOUL TO HEAL THE WORLD Claudio Naranjo, M.D. Nevada City, California: Gateways Books and Tapes, 2004, 178 pp.
(First published in Spain under the title: El Eneagrama de la Sociedad - Males del Mundo, Males del Alma, by Temas de Hoy, 1995. Translated from the Spanish by Paul Barnes.)
In the slim volume that is The Enneagram of Society, Claudio Naranjo accomplishes several profound and important tasks: he provides a concise, yet multi-faceted summation of the Enneagram's "passions," he reviews the circle of the nine basic characters associated with the passions, he provides a provocative account of the "disturbances of love" rendered by the nine personality patterns, and he highlights nine "ills of the world in the light of the Enneagram." This last piece constitutes Naranjo's "Enneagram of Society."
At the heart of this dense yet readable book, Naranjo's core purpose emerges as the promotion of the idea that if we can become aware of our individual sins or pathologies or unconscious habits, we can become more enlightened collectively about the corresponding ills of our larger society. And if we become more conscious of how our global society is essentially dysfunctional in ways we've gradually fallen asleep to, we can more actively improve the human institutions that form our world. Thus, Naranjo argues that the awakening of individual consciousness is a necessary first step toward the enhancement of the conscious collective, and provides a clear if complex map for discerning both the individual and collective blocks to greater awareness and transformation.
Widely regarded as the key figure in the dissemination of the Enneagram in the last forty years, Naranjo brings a unique resumé to the job of communicating the Enneagram that no other seminal Enneagram teacher alive today possesses. He learned the Enneagram as protoanalysis directly from Oscar Ichazo, he spent time as a member of a Gurdjieff group, and he has studied ancient Christian and other spiritual and esoteric sources of the Enneagram. As a psychiatrist and a pioneer in Gestalt therapy, he also brings a wealth of psychological expertise to his Enneagram interpretations, having worked as a therapist and studied a wide range of psychoanalytic thinkers, including Karen Horney, a leading theorist in the field of...