Where the Heart Triad Came from, and How Recently

The heart or feeling triad groups types two, three and four, and its history runs through two named twentieth century teachers rather than through any older tradition. The nine-pointed diagram reached the West through G. I. Gurdjieff, who used it to teach a doctrine of process and law and attached no personality types to it. Oscar Ichazo assigned the types to the points and taught them at Arica from the late nineteen sixties. Claudio Naranjo carried that material into psychological work in California in the early nineteen seventies, and most of the enneagram literature now in print descends from that transmission.

The triad rests on the three-centres idea: an instinctive centre, a feeling centre and a thinking centre, with three types clustered around each. The feeling centre is associated in the literature with shame or with an unsettled sense of identity, expressed differently at each of its three points, and with an orientation towards image and towards how one is received. The three-modes-of-one-emotion pattern applies across all three triads and is a structural feature of the modern scheme.

Attributions in this field need care. Claims that the enneagram of personality descends from Sufi teaching, from the desert fathers, or from Pythagorean number doctrine circulate widely and none of them has documentary support for the personality system specifically. What can be documented is the diagram in Gurdjieff, the types in Ichazo, and the psychological elaboration in Naranjo and those who followed him.