Overview of the CTE Project

The Enneagram centers typology has been modeled in starkly different ways over the centuries. This is not surprising because each generation of Enneagram theorists has sought to understand and work with the Enneagram in the context of the scientific and spiritual paradigms of their own era.

The purpose of this project is to review seven major models of the Enneagram centers with the aim of creating a better theory of what the centers represent in terms of human development across the lifespan.

Seven Models of the Enneagram Centers

In my review I will be thinking about these typologies in terms of the theory of human development that each author drew on, either explicitly or implicitly, in their conceptualization of the centers.

I begin with the work of Evagrius, who modeled human development in terms of interactions between an interior tripartite soul made up of thumos, epithumos and nous and eight (or possibly nine) exterior logisimoi (disordered, troublesome thoughts).

After Evagrius comes Gurdjieff, who modeled human development in terms of three different kinds of humans. Next is Ichazo, who modeled human development in terms of dualistic structure comprised of essence and ego.

Claudio Naranjo learned about the Enneagram from Ichazo and taught his version to students, including Helen Palmer, in Berkeley, Californian in the early 1970s. Naranjo’s model made a major contribution to the contemporary Enneagram by conceptualizing the nine types in terms of personality disorders. Naranjo, who was a psychiatrist, saw that each type resembled a particular personality disorder as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - III (the most current version of the DSM available at the time).

Helen Palmer’s model is unique in that it conceptualizes the types in terms of differences in attention structures. Palmer describes the types as each having a unique habit of attention which develops in childhood and gives rise to both the vices and virtues of the types.

Jack Killen’s model of the Enneagram, published in 2009, is a neurobiological model in which the centers, and by extension the types, are hypothesized as evolving from three different mammalian behavioral systems.

Finally, the PDP Group, which Killen is part of, recently published an Interpersonal Neurobiological model that extends and expands on Killen’s neurobiological model.

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Footnotes

Killen, J. (2009). “Toward the neurobiology of the Enneagram”. The Enneagram Journal, Volume II, issue 1, pp 40 - 61.

Siegel, D., Baker, L.A., Daniels, D.N., Daniels, D., and Killen, J. (2024). Personality and wholeness in therapy: Integrating 9 patterns of developmental pathways in clinical practice. W.W. Norton & Company.