Oscar Ichazo

Oscar Ichazo (born 1931) is the Bolivian-born founder of the Arica School which he established in 1968. 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.

Ichazo asserts that, in 1954, he received a clear and direct insight into how certain mechanistic and repetitive thought and behavior patterns can be understood in connection with the Enneagram figure, classical philosophy and with what he calls 'Trialectic' logic, a logic grounded in three laws of process.

According to Ichazo 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 behaviour 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.

In Ichazo's teachings, a person's fixation derives from childhood subjective experience (self-perception) of psychological trauma when expectations are not met in each of the Instincts. Given that young children are considered to be self-centered in their expectations, they experience disappointment in their expectations due to 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 — one can reduce or even transcend suffering and the fixations' hold on the mind.

Almost all later interpretations of the Enneagram of Personality are viewed by Ichazo as unfounded and, therefore, misguided or psychologically and spiritually harmful. Ichazo also considers that the Enneagram teachings of others, in most cases, actually promote or strengthen the basis of personality disorders.

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

Further reading

• Ichazo, Oscar (1982). Interviews with Oscar Ichazo. Arica Press. ISBN 0916554023.
• Palmer, Helen (1996). The Enneagram in Love and Work: Understanding your Intimate and Business Relationships. HarperOne. ISBN 0-06-250721-4.

See also

• John C. Lilly (American scientist and psychedelic research pioneer involved with the Arica school)
• The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky's film partly inspired by Arica spiritual practices)
• Tritype (An offshoot theory of the Enneagram of Personality grounded in Ichazo's 'Trialectic' logic)