The route by which this material reached the English-speaking world runs through Claudio Naranjo (1932-2019), a Chilean psychiatrist who went to Arica in 1970 with a group of Americans, learned Ichazo's system, and then taught his own elaboration of it in Berkeley from the early 1970s in small groups known as SAT, drawing on Gestalt therapy, psychoanalytic character theory and his own clinical observation. Naranjo's protoanalysis connected the nine types to the character types of psychiatric literature, particularly the work of Karen Horney and Wilhelm Reich, and it is his version rather than Ichazo's that most later authors developed. Naranjo asked his students not to publish; several did, and the resulting dispute, including litigation between Ichazo's institute and later authors, is part of the system's documented history.
Naranjo asked those he trained not to publish his teaching, but the request did not hold. Helen Palmer, one of his Berkeley students, published The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life in 1988, the book that carried the system to a mass audience and prompted Ichazo's Arica Institute to sue her and her publisher, Harper and Row, for copyright infringement. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed judgment against Arica in 1992, in Arica Institute, Inc. v. Palmer, holding that Palmer's book did not unlawfully copy protected expression from Ichazo's own materials, only ideas that copyright does not protect; the case remains the clearest documented dispute the system's move into print provoked.