Don Richard Riso

The nine type Enneagram of personality that Oscar Ichazo taught and Claudio Naranjo brought to the United States arrived without the layer that most defines how the system is taught today: a scale of psychological health running within each type from an integrated, healthy expression down through an average, more defended one to a genuinely unhealthy, pathological extreme. Don Richard Riso, working first alone and then with Russ Hudson, built that scale, the levels of development, into the core of the framework in Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self Discovery, first published in 1987 and substantially revised with Hudson as full co-author in 1996. Where the earlier oral teaching described each type by a fixed set of traits, Riso and Hudson's levels let the same basic type describe a wide range of actual behavior, from admirable to destructive, depending on how defended or open a person is at a given time.

They added a second classificatory axis alongside the traditional body, heart and head triads: the Hornevian groups, drawn from psychoanalyst Karen Horney's three neurotic trends toward, against and away from other people, and set out fully in their 1999 book The Wisdom of the Enneagram. Compliant types orient toward an internalized standard; assertive types orient toward self expression and control; withdrawn types orient toward inner retreat. The two groupings, triad and Hornevian group, describe different things and do not coincide, giving a reader two independent lenses on the same nine types rather than one.

Where Oscar Ichazo taught the Enneagram within his own Arica School and Claudio Naranjo transmitted it informally to a circle of students in Berkeley in the early 1970s, Riso and Hudson built an organization around it. They founded the Enneagram Institute to teach, certify and publish within the framework they had developed, formalizing what had previously passed through oral teaching and small groups into a structured training and certification program, workshops, and a body of published reference material anchored by their two major books.

Alongside the written framework, Riso and Hudson developed the Riso Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator, a self report questionnaire designed to help a reader identify their own type from a standardized set of questions rather than through a teacher's individual assessment or lengthy self study alone. The instrument extended the system's reach well past the settings where it had previously circulated, into workplace training, coaching and popular psychology more broadly, a shift in audience and format that tracks the same move from oral lineage to published, institutionalized system evident in their levels of development and Hornevian group additions. Whatever else separates Riso and Hudson's version of the Enneagram from Ichazo's original teaching, the two books, the Institute and the assessment together account for most of how the system is actually encountered by newcomers today.