Origins of The Enneagram Personality System: Interview with Katherine Fauvre

In this interview, a first amongst more expert interviews to be hosted on the Vital Mind Psychology channel, clinical psychologist and transformational coach, Abdul Saad, interviews personality expert and world authority on the Enneagram system, Katherine Fauvre.

FORMAL INTERVIEW INTRODUCTION

This interview of Katherine Fauvre, conducted by Abdul Saad, is on the Origins of the Ichazo-Naranjo Enneagram Types and Subtypes and Tritypes®, according to Katherine’s personal experience studying with Ichazo and Naranjo as well as learning from those who witnessed what she did not.

Find your Type, Tritype® and Instinctual Type here: https://enneagramtritypetest.com/ • More on Katherine's Tritype®, Instinctual Types, and Subtypes here: https://www.katherinefauvre.com

Katherine Fauvre is a world authority on the Enneagram, having studied the system since 1985 and having the unique distinction of being the only Enneagram teacher to be triple certified in the system. Katherine has made original and groundbreaking contributions to our collective knowledge of the Enneagram through a series of studies examining various facets of the system, including Enneagram type and language/lexicon usage, the instincts (self-preservation, social and intimate), and Enneagram subtypes. She has undertaken tens of thousands of typing interviews and coaching sessions.

Katherine also studied with the creator of the Enneagram Subtypes System as a model of human personality, the late Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean Psychiatrist who was taught the system from a Bolivian mystic, the late Oscar Ichazo.

In today’s interview, our primary focus is not on describing the nine Enneagram types, but instead to discuss and record, for posterity and to correct the record, the history of the Enneagram of personality as a system which is only 52 years old (although the Enneagram symbol itself is an ancient symbol having its origins in antiquity and being part of the tradition of sacred geometry). We will discuss the origins of the Enneagram of personality as the Ichazo-Naranjo Enneagram – the two men, both from South America (also the continent of my birth – I was born in Venezuela), who through creative genius and one could argue, Divine Providence, brought this profound model into the modern era. A model which when correctly studied and appropriately appreciated, provides an objective map of human consciousness and its evolution.

The Enneagram is inexhaustible, and no one person can fully capture all of the profundity the model has to offer – for as AH Almaas notes, because the Enneagram as an archetypal model of human consciousness, ego development, and spiritual evolution, is founded on objective knowledge of reality (the Absolute), it is independent of human minds and subjectivities – the Enneagram simply is – in the same way that algebra of calculus just is – an objective map of reality.

Without an appropriate understanding of the history of the system, a history which provides essential context for correctly utilizing and understanding the content the system gives us, the Enneagram as a model of human consciousness loses much of its power. It can and has succumbed to a commercialization of sorts – often reduced to a hodgepodge of non-unified ideas about 9 separate types akin to stereotyped generalizations in a newspaper. This commercialization and loss of purity of what the original model of the Ichazo-Naranjo Enneagram was intended to communicate – places the Enneagram in its entirety at risk of being lost to future generations.

My intention in interviewing Katherine today is to recapture and remind ourselves what the Enneagram is primarily about – the evolution of our human consciousness and how we can bring into sharper focus this primary purpose of the system by understanding its origins – beginning with the Armenian mystic Gurdjieff, Oscar Ichazo’s contact with the system and the body of knowledge he contributed to it and finally the brief period in which Naranjo studied with Ichazo in 1970 with Naranjo then bringing the Enneagram to the United States in 1971. We will also touch on later developments such as Tritype® and Instinctual Stacking that have taken place within the Enneagram community, including controversies and errors in dissemination. We will also survey the lay of the land within the current Enneagram community and get Katherine’s thoughts on what she sees for the future of the system for the decades to come.