Enneagram Conference

The Enneagram Movie & Video Guide, by Thomas Condon $14.95 Trade paperback ISBN. 1-884305-85-7, The Changeworks

The Enneagram - Waking From Trances, by Thomas Condon $16.95 2 90-irunute cassettes, no ISBN listed, The Changeworks

The Enneagram Cats of Muir Beach, by Margaret Frings Keyes $9.95 Trade paper ISBN: 1-882042-01-8, Molysdatur Publications

The Enneagram in Psychodrama (VIDEO), by Margaret Frings Keyes $34.95 60 mm. VHS ISBN: 1-882042-12-3 Molysdaiur Publications

Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View, by Claudjo Naranjo, M.D. $21.95 Trade paper, JSBN: 0-89556-066-6, Gateways Books & Tapes

The DSM III in the light of the Enneagram (VIDEO), by Claudlo Naranjo, M.D. $39.95 50 riin. VHS no ISBN assigned, Gateways Books & Tapes

Enneatypes in Psychotherapy, by Claudjo Naranjo, M.D. $14.95 Trade paper, ISBN: 0-934252d7-5, HOHM Press

In August, 1994, your intrepid editor became an adjunct book-seller and roving reporter on the occasion of the gathering of the enneagram tribes for a week-end at Stanford University. Stanford was beautiful, offering deja vu Medieval porticos, on-campus residence and meals for guests from afar, enneagram parking and enneagram buses, an evening of theatre at "The Enneagram Song and Dance Cafe"- in short, all the amenities for a weekend with 150 enneagram presenters (!) and 1,200 attendees.

For their list of recordings of approximately 100 Conference sessions, contact Conference Recording Service (see below-they ask $700.00 for the entire set, query re: wholesale discounts). For ongoing information on enneagram authors. books, research, and training, subscribe or stock The Enneagram Educator newsletter from The National Catholic Reporter (see below for contact), best journal out there until the Enneagram Association and professional journal are created.

The Conference made it clear that the enneagram has arrived in the mainstream, with sponsorship from both the Psychiatry Department and the Graduate Business School at Stanford. The final plenary session featured a dramatic reconciliation of East Coast (Don Richard Riso, Ross Hudson) and West Coast (Helen Palmer, Dr. David Daniels, and others) teaching and training groups. Presenters included most of the prominent enneagram authors from the Catholic spiritual path, whose books I couldn't fit in here for review: Richard Rohr, Patrick O'Leary, Mafia Beesing, Suzanne Zuercher, and others. Laleh Bakhtiar, a be-scarfed and highly articulate Islamic scholar and long-time author, gave the only presentation on the truly esoteric origins and sacred geometry of the enneagram (well described in the Fall, 1994, Gnosis Magazine), and several of her books will he a good addition to religion and spirituality' shelves. While Stanford business professor Michael Ray and others spoke on ethics and moderation in using this tool, only Kathleen Riordan Speeth, author of The Gurdjieff Work, delivered a dissenting talk, disclaiming as a therapist the value of the typology and criticizing it as an obstacle to authentic communication between people. Otherwise, the presentations were uniformly enthusiastic and optimistic regarding the value of disseminating a psychological tool of such power and subtlety.

At the Stanford Bookstore, a hotbed of coffee and conference conversation for three days, Manager Roy Moyer compiled a display of over 125 related book-tape-visual aid items, on prominent sales tables. After the dust had cleared from what Roy describes as "a feeding frenzy," the store had grossed $60 K in sales that weekend, astounding even for a campus used to academic symposia! Roy subsequently created a "personality types" tag to gather all these psychology, spirituality, and business communication tides into a single section for browsing.

Flagship titles will be those of prominent authors Helen Palmer, Don Richard Riso, and Claudio Naranjo. I made sure the Stanford list included Bennett's classic book of essays that give the metaphysical context of the "enneagram of personality." Weiser has done their usual service of keeping this book in print, along with related titles by Irmis Popoff, another Gurdjieff student. Other recommendations of mine include Margaret Keyes's cat parable on the nine cat life-types, which I happen to prefer to her professional study, Emotions and the Enneagram, because I am a reader/writer, not a therapist/counselor. Keyes also unveiled a very good video edited, with voice-over commentary and some visual graphics, from group therapy sessions highlighting the personality-type in the healing processes of several (real-life) clients. Hopefully, she will continue with videos documenting all of the types.

I attended especially to present Naranjo's books from Gateways, with remorse in my heart over getting Character and Neurosis to press but not back in time for the sales coup! I brought to the bookstore two other new titles by Naranjo, Enneatypes in Psychotherapy from HOHM Press, fascinating presentations translated from a profesional symposium a year earlier in Spain, and The End of Patriarchy and the Dawning of a Triune Society from Amber Lotus. Naranjo could not attend the conference, and instead sent video presentations, one of which reminded a large plenary-session audience of the teaching context-a profound and highly individualized transformational process-in which Oscar Ichazo first conveyed the typology system. In spite of caveats, he also expressed optimism regarding the benefits of disseminating the system, particularly in professional schools of educa tion. The video being marketed by Gateways is a more technical talk by Naranjo, drawing on his clinical experience in therapy, critiquing the set of categories most widely used by the medical profession. This video is an excellent companion piece to Character and Neurosis (see review below).

Another book I consider a real find is Condon's Movie and Video Guide. Condon is a hypno-therapist and longtime enneagram workshop teacher, who offers in The Changeworks catalog a great deal of his own and others enneagram materials. The 2-tape set I listened to is from introductory lectures, in which he entertainingly introduces the idea of trances and post-hypnotic suggestion as character traits, hallmarks of the nine types, and distortions or neuroses of each type, as in Naranjo's approach. Though he seems somewhat breathless, rushing to cover all the material (while at the conference his stage style demonstrating a client interview was, if anything. laid back and friendly), it's probably a good sample for someone looking into this approach. Condon's movie guide provides not only a snappy introduction to the enneagram personality types, but write-ups of about 1,000 movies focusing on the main characters and their behaviours. Any movie guide is great by me, and Condon's provides concise capsules of the films and good viewing and study suggestions, i.e., Woody Allen's movies present like characters in like dilemmas over and over; most actors/actresses play characters the same or close to their real-life types. exceptions being the exceptional artists; a series of movies exhibiting one type will give a great sense of both the basic issues and their variations for that type. He also speculates on larger issues, such as why do some actors/actresses choose scripts that repeat similar dilemmas and why are all movie Native Americans (even in recent revisionist films) portrayed with only two main personality types in scripts almost exclusively by Anglo males....

The Enneagram in Love and Work: Understanding Your Intimate and Business Relationships, by Helen Palmer, Foreword by David N. Dianiels, M.D.

$22.00 Hardcover, ISBN: 0-06-250679-X (int'l paperback may go on sale in Canada & U.K.), HarperSanFrancisco - Available Jan. 1995

Growing legions of self-help readers, counselors, trainers, therapists, and other consumers of enneagram literature have waited since 1988 for Helen Palmer's sequel to her ground-breaking first effort, The Enneagram. The six-year wait was worthwhile, since this new (over 400-page) book scarcely duplicates the earlier material (as Palmer states in her Introduction) but rather provides a companion manual. The Introduction (which appeared early in shorter form as a chapter in Frager's Who Am I? anthology) is a deftly-written and effective summary of the types distinguished by "Focus of Attention," the hallmark of Palmer's analysis. The main text is a descriptive compendium of behaviors/tendencies of the various characters, particularly in interaction with 1) co-workers and 2) intimate partners, i.e., "One at Work" and "One in Love," and so on. While the descriptions are generalized by type, the derive from years of "oral tradition" panels of the nine types, from which Palmer has distilled with precision. She includes interesting discussions of sub-types and the character portraits are peppered throughout with actual quotes from individuals.

Palmer has taken her work in a different direction than Naranjo, whose Berkeley workshops inspired her beginning researches twenty years ago. Character and Neurosis summarizes Naranjo's therapeutic experience of the characters and his clinical research with extensive documentation of how enneagram typology parallels most of the other diagnostic systems in use-and how it refines them. Palmer's years of experiential workshops have lead her to elaborate and systematize the interpersonal patterns of conduct. The Enneagram in Love & Work will now become the book to cite in regard to the interactions of the nine types. We can only hope that Palmer's 150-page "Directory of Relationships" is used as she intends it, with common sense, tact, and open-mindedness, not like a Robert's Rules to bludgeon one's colleagues and intimates or a sun-sign astrology book to titillate them. Palmer promises in an Epilogue a theoretical book on healing strategies, written in collaboration with her co-teacher, Dr. David Daniels, and many enthusiastic professionals will look forward to that book, as well.

-Iven Lourie

Character and Neurosis, An integrative view, by Claudio Naranjo, M.D.

$21.95, Trade Paper, ISBN: 0-89556-066-6, Gateways Books & Tapes

In the forward to this book, Naranjo speaks of undergoing a deeply transforming experience, the awakening of the 'critical eye," while working with Sufi Master Oscar Ichazo. "I suddenly became able to see the structure of others' personalities as a good caricaturist sees the essential traits in a person's physical features."

Naranjo describes what part the enneagram played in this whole process as follows: "I could say that the enneagram of the Sarmoun acted as a magnet in my mind to bring together the pieces of psychological lore that, until then, were separate, an organizing catalytic factor causing the relative chaos of the information to come into a more precise pattern."

The book is remarkable for several reasons, but it is chiefly Naranjo's ability to integrate so many diverse schools of thought into one system which makes it a gold mine of information. Reading this book is like helping to put together a huge puzzle which doctors, psychiatrists, and other therapists have been unable to solve for a long time.

After a lucid introduction on the history and theoretical considerations of the enneagram, Naranjo provides one chapter on each of the enneatypes. He clearly describes each type, drawing upon his extensive clinical work, and his descriptions are vivid and insightful verbal caricatures, precisely highlighting essential features. At the same time he is also elegantly drawing together insights and observations from numerous perspectives, including homeopathy, psychiatry and the DSM III, Jungian psychology, the Fourth Way, and other metaphysical ideas. A very comprehensive picture emerges by the end of the book.

-Keith Whitten M.D.

Enneagram Educator, P.O. Box 419491, Kansas City, MO 64141-6491, (816)531-0538.

Conference Recording Service. 1308 Gilman St., Berkeley, CA 94706, (510) 527-3600. (Ask for Enneagram Conference. Aug. 5-7.1994).

For a xerox copy of the Stanford Bookstore enneagram bibliography. Send a SASE to me. Iven Lourie, at Inner Journeys/Gateways Books, P.O. Box 370, Nevada City, CA 95959.

To order enneagram books en masse, check your distributor catalogs including those of Atrium, Bookpeople. Moving Books, New Leaf, Samuel Weiser.

©1996 Gateways Books and Tapes