The title of Susan Rhodes’s book clearly announces both the focus and the scope of her project. The author is taking aim at what she perceives to be a pervasively negative approach to the Enneagram, and she promises to offer a new approach that will reclaim the Enneagram’s positive potential. She takes issue, in particular, with approaches that she believes “pathologize” our Enneagram types, treating them merely as neurotic distortions or fixations and overlooking their vast potential for healthy expression. In a brief overview of how she believes this negative view of the Enneagram came about, Rhodes traces a line of influence from Sigmund Freud to Oscar Ichazo to Claudio Naranjo, arguing that a Freudian zeitgeist preoccupied with personality fixations imbued Ichazo’s work with its prejudices, which were then passed on to Naranjo and, through him, to the rest of the field…

Dave Hall
Katy Taylor
Susan Rhodes

2010

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The Positive Enneagram: A New Approach to the Nine Personality Types (PDF)