Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Enneagram Triads

Head

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin 1968 to 1975

The Head triad is one of three groupings of three personality types each in the Enneagram of personality, a modern typology developed by the Bolivian teacher Oscar Ichazo in the 1960s and expanded by the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo in the 1970s, building on the older Enneagram symbol associated with the esoteric teacher George Gurdjieff earlier in the twentieth century. It groups types five, six and seven, said to share thinking centred processing built around fear and a concern with security and certainty. The system describes each triad as a distinct centre of intelligence, and the Head triad is presented as the most mentally oriented of the three, in contrast to the Body triad's instinct and the Heart triad's feeling. As with the rest of the Enneagram, its psychological claims come from this specific twentieth century lineage rather than from any ancient source, despite the antiquity sometimes claimed for the underlying nine pointed symbol.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1968 to 1975 1Tradition: Enneagram of personality (Ichazo and Naranjo)
Origin Period
The Head triad belongs to the modern psychological enneagram of personality, whose center based structure was set out between 1968 and 1975 in the teaching associated with Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo, building on the older esoteric symbol transmitted by G. I. Gurdjieff. 1
Origin of the Name
The English names of the triads, Body or Gut, Heart, Head, are a plain rendering of Gurdjieff's three centres, and the alternative labels in circulation (instinctive, feeling, thinking) render the same three. The names are descriptive and modern; no ancient scheme of three centres of this shape is claimed by the scholarship. 1Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Gurdjieff taught that a person is run by three centres, moving, emotional, intellectual, developing unevenly 1Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff)
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Ichazo mapped his nine fixations onto that older division 1Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff)
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The centres are Gurdjieff's; the nine types in them are not 1Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff)
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The three-centre division has a Gurdjieffian antecedent, and it is the only part of the personality system that does 1Tradition: The enneagram symbol (G. I. Gurdjieff)
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 2
Learn More
The Head or Thinking Triad

The head triad, also called the thinking or fear triad, comprises types Five, Six and Seven, and the emotion the system assigns to it is fear. The three are held to handle it differently: Five withdraws and accumulates knowledge as a defence, Seven runs ahead into options and possibilities, and Six at the centre engages the fear directly, either by seeking security or by attacking what frightens it. The triad's concern is with security and guidance, and its time orientation is the future. The three triads together are one of the system's more useful organising ideas, and they are also a good place to see its construction: the assignment of anger, shame and fear to three groups of three is a modern psychological scheme mapped onto a diagram Gurdjieff used for something else entirely, and it dates from the 1970s.

The same holds for the head triad under Riso and Hudson's second system, the Hornevian groups, set out in The Wisdom of the Enneagram (1999) and drawn from Karen Horney's three neurotic trends of moving toward, against and away from people: Five falls among the withdrawn types, Six among the compliant, and Seven among the assertive. That every emotional triad contains exactly one member of each Hornevian group is a structural feature of how Riso and Hudson built the second scheme, not a coincidence, and it is a useful check for a reader trying to keep the system's several overlapping groupings straight: the two triads answer different questions and are not the same grouping under different names.

Sources The Enneagram: G. I. Gurdjieff's Esoteric SymbolCarole M. Cusack with Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-DiscoveryDon Richard Riso and Russ Hudson

Where the Head Triad Came from, and How Recently

The head or thinking triad groups types five, six and seven. Like the other two, it belongs to a documented and recent lineage rather than to an inherited tradition, and stating that lineage accurately is the most useful thing a reference entry can do.

The nine-pointed figure was taught in the West by G. I. Gurdjieff in the first decades of the twentieth century as a diagram of process, without personality types. Oscar Ichazo mapped nine character types onto its points and taught them at his Arica school from the late nineteen sixties. Claudio Naranjo brought that material into psychotherapeutic settings in California in the early nineteen seventies, and the broad literature in circulation today, including the division into three centres of intelligence, descends from that period.

The head triad is the mental cluster, and the emotion the literature attaches to it is fear, presented in three modes: withdrawn and conserving at five, directly engaged with the question of safety at six, and outrun by anticipation and planning at seven. As with the other triads, the pattern of one emotion in three modes is a feature of the scheme rather than a finding about people.

Where the enneagram is used today it is used in coaching, in spiritual direction and in some clinical settings, and its empirical standing is contested. Anyone presenting it should say which lineage they are working in, since Ichazo and Naranjo and their respective successors do not agree on all of it, and the disagreements reach the triads.

Sources The Enneagram: G. I. Gurdjieff's Esoteric SymbolCarole M. Cusack with The Enneagram: A systematic review of the literature and directions for future researchJoshua N. Hook, Todd W. Hall, Don E. Davis, Daryl R. Van Tongeren and Mackenzie Conner

Cross-Tradition Connections

Disciplines That Use This

Enneagram, Disciplines

The three centres the nine types group into.

Source New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular ThoughtWouter J. Hanegraaff
Sources
1. The Enneagram: G. I. Gurdjieff's Esoteric Symbol
Carole M. Cusack, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 20, no. 1 (Brill), pp. 31-54, 2020on the structure of the nine-type schemeView the Source
2. The Enneagram: A systematic review of the literature and directions for future research
Joshua N. Hook, Todd W. Hall, Don E. Davis, Daryl R. Van Tongeren and Mackenzie Conner, Journal of Clinical Psychology, volume 77 number 4, 2021the review's findings on the structure of the nine-type schemeView the Source
Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View
Claudio Naranjo, Gateways/IDHHB, 1994the three centres and the thinking triad
Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, Houghton Mifflin, 1987the thinking triad
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.