The Enneagram of Personality, or simply the Enneagram (from the Greek words ἐννέα [ennéa, meaning nine] and γράμμα [grámma, meaning something written or drawn]), is a description of the human psyche which is principally understood and taught as a typology of nine interconnected personality types.
Although the origins and history of many of the ideas associated with the Enneagram of Personality are a matter of dispute, contemporary approaches are principally derived from the teachings of the Bolivian psycho-spiritual teacher Oscar Ichazo from the 1950s and the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo from the 1970s. Naranjos theories were also influenced by some earlier teachings about personality by George Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way tradition.
As a typology, the Enneagram defines nine personality types (sometimes called enneatypes), which are represented by the points of a geometric figure called an enneagram, which indicate connections between the types. There are some different schools of thought among Enneagram teachers and their understandings are not always in agreement.The Enneagram of Personality has been widely promoted in both business management and spirituality contexts through seminars, conferences, books, magazines, and DVDs. In business contexts it is promoted as a means to gain insights into workplace interpersonal dynamics; in spirituality it is more commonly presented as a path to higher states of enlightenment. Both contexts say it can aid in self-awareness, self-understanding, and self-development.There has been limited formal psychometric analysis of the Enneagram and the peer-reviewed research that has been done has not been widely accepted within the relevant academic communities. Though the Enneagram integrates concepts generally accepted in a theory of personality, it has been dismissed by personality assessment experts as pseudoscience.
