On Friday 9 and Saturday the 10 of September the Norwegian branch of IEA arranged an exciting workshop with Beatrice Chestnut about the 27 subtypes of the Enneagram. The workshop was both packed with information and offered new angles to well-known themes. The participants included both professional Enneagram experts and other enthusiasts who attended the workshop to become even more familiar with themselves than they were before.

And acquainted with ourselves we became! Some found out that they were another type than they had thought until now, and others got new information which made them shift from one subtype to another. Some were shocked by new revelations, and others cheered from joy over finally having found themselves. The detailed knowledge of the subtypes Beatrice communicated to us, made the Enneagram an even more accurately diagnostic tool than we had experienced until now.

The subtypes are among the hardest available topic in the Enneagram system. Even if it maybe simple to understand the three instincts as Michael Groser explained them to us when he visited us last winter, it is considerably more complicated when we connect them to the 9 types and there are 27 of them. And it doesn’t get any better when the information has been partly inadequate and misleading.

Beatrice Chestnut has taken on the task of bringing greater clarity around the theme, and in her book The Complete Enneagram, 27 Paths to Self-knowledge, she explains thoroughly their patterns and backgrounds, with in-depth descriptions, and examples from interviews with each of the types. She has oriented herself in Claudio Naranjo’s work for many years and has taken a lot of information about the subtypes from the extensive material he has collected, beside her own interviews and therapeutic work.

Beatrice is an enthusiastic and engaging lecturer. Despite large amounts of information, a packed program and lots of images and text on power point, and in addition film clip examples, she kept us awake and alert with her warm and self-preservation 2ish energy, charm and contagious humorous mood. All the workshop participants were both grateful and generous with their hugging when we had to say goodbye to her.

Translation and pictures by Christian Brym. Our thanks to him.