Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley

I asked AI: Did Helen Palmer attend a series of panels on the Enneagram of Fixations with Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley?

Yes, Helen Palmer, a renowned Enneagram teacher and author, was a student of Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley and part of his circle. Palmer is known for developing the "panel method," also known as the Narrative Tradition, where individuals share their experiences related to their Enneagram type. While the results don't explicitly mention panels specifically focusing on "fixations" with Naranjo, they do highlight the close relationship between Palmer and Naranjo in the development and dissemination of the Enneagram in Berkeley during the 1970s.

AI is “garbage in/garbage out.” This information is factually 100% wrong. Somebody’s lying or just doesn’t know. But it suggests that this story has been repeated frequently enough to poison AI’s search engine. 

Palmer was never a member of Naranjo’s circle. They were civil, I suppose, if they did talk. She was never a student in one of Naranjo’s SAT groups; she attended several semi-public lectures and presentations; she might have asked him a few questions. Most of Naranjo’s students viewed Palmer as an interloper who pilfered and distorted the Enneagram for her enrichment. Naranjo did not correct our opinion. She knew several of Naranjo’s early students quite well: Kathy Speeth, Father Bob Ochs, and CD. She also knew several other people in SAT; she did her famous and expensive psychic readings on many of us. I paid about $100 in 1973 dollars for about 50 minutes, with no clergy discount. 

In the Fall of 1973, Kathy Speeth organized a series of presentations about the Nine Types at the home of Gay Luce on the Arlington Circle, on the Berkeley-Arlington border. They were organized at Speeth’s initiative, and Naranjo agreed that it was time to introduce the system to professionals in the mental health field. Palmer paid the fee and attended all the sessions. 

The format was a presentation of panels for each of the Fixations. I participated in a Panel for Ego-Plan. There were nine presentations and perhaps a tenth; I can’t recall if there was an introductory session. Ochs asked me to participate. He warned that the presentation would be quite different from the way we usually did in SAT. Almost all of our work in the first SAT years was “ego-grinding”: when the memory of a painful incident came to the surface, you were directed to dig deeper. The conversation was soon littered with unfulfilled dreams. During these panels, however, after Naranjo described a few key structures of a Fixation’s psychology in clinical language, we were asked to share our experiences. He said, for example, that for Ego-Plan, the idealization of the future was not based on experience, and that tasks were often left undone. However, the compensatory defense was that “life would turn out,” and it would be “all OK.” Naranjo at one point said to me, “See, you can even hear it in Ken’s voice, the confidence that everything will be OK.”

I was in the room where it happened; this sounds a lot like what I’ve heard about the “Narrative Tradition.” Imagine, at 28, I was part of founding a “Tradition!” I suspect there is minimal confrontation in Palmer’s groups. She aimed to present a gentler and milder version of the Enneagram. The name changes of the Fixations align with this teaching style. More students are attracted by honey.

Naranjo had issues with some of her interpretations of various points, but, more importantly, he also asserted that Palmer stole his material. She attended all the presentations, kept the handouts, and took notes. With an outline in hand, she further detailed each Fixation with other confidential information. Ochs told me that he had also spoken with her, and despite his own agreement not to disclose what he had learned. He said, "She has all the information about the points anyway; let’s at least try to make it more complete, accurate, and useful." 

I know the woman was the registrar very well. I asked her about the confidentiality agreement. She said, “Yes, Palmer violated her confidentiality agreement. I don’t have a copy of it, but I’m sure it said the same thing we were all asked to agree to, which is not to discuss these things outside of the group. I have been furious with her ever since then and have completely lost respect for her. She seems to have been able to justify it to herself, but I know she promised not to do this, and she did.”

Palmer also states publicly and in court documents that she never saw nor used Ichazo’s confidential and, I presume, copyrighted notes. This is almost Jesuitical. Of course, she saw them. The only possibility for her equivocation was that the authorship of the texts might have been unclear, although knowing a few quirky terms that Ichazo would have used should have been a good clue.

But both Naranjo and Icnazo’s “holier-than-thou” shtick gets a bit heavy. He made a big deal in the “Jesuit Transmission” interviews that his notes and Ichazo’s Arica file had escaped without his permission, and their use was unethical, even immoral, because we had all pledged not to use any material without explicit permission. When I say that Naranjo permitted me to use the material as I saw fit, that was a significant gesture. He delivered the statement of release or commission in a very formal, flat tone. He was incensed that Palmer had access to his more detailed notes and those of Oscar. He blamed Ochs.

I will now address the thorny issue of the written materials available to the first SAT groups, including the missing folder that Ichazo did not retrieve upon completion of the 10-month Arica training. 

The Three Levels of Documentation

It is a myth that the Enneagram was an oral teaching and that SAT, the Jesuits in Ochs’s classes, and Helen Palmer’s groups marked the point at which it was written down. That is false. What I am about to write is based on my memories of the early SAT groups, my recollection of the controversy, which was discussed during the court cases, and reports from Ochs’s other Jesuit students who were never asked to sign confidentiality agreements. 

During the Berkeley rollout, there were three Levels of written documentation about the Enneagram.

1. A single page for each Fixation was the first written documentation. 

For each fixation, there was a rough mimeograph on cheap 8.5 by 11-inch paper with the name of the fixation at the top. Plan, Venge, Flat, Go, etc.; some general information; a few pointers for self-examination, maybe the virtue, the trap, even the color; plus some quick psychological notes from Naranjo. They were like cheat sheets for personal use as you began the typing process. A senior student, in my case Ochs, said, “Take a look at Ego-Plan and see if it makes sense to you. Take a look at your dreams and fantasy life.”

This is close to the Enneagram being an oral tradition. We all kept notes; we shared and compared them with each other. Detailed notes with complete sentences were highly regarded, and there were several meticulous recorders. But these pages had two sources.

2. Naranjo’s Complete Binder

Naranjo's more detailed notes for each of the nine fixations, including the subtypes, were written, edited, and printed using a word processing program, but were only available to a few people in Group 1’s inner circle. They were usually kept in Naranjo’s study house in the backyard on Allston Way. It was a rickety shack overhanging the creek that ran down the backside of the property, complete with raccoons!

3. The Arica Enneagon Workbook

In addition to Naranjo’s presentations, people also circulated Ichazo’s proto-analysis from people who’d traveled to Arica.

Ichazo’s notes on the Enneagon were in a thick binder, which had been distributed to everyone in Arica. It was somewhat akin to Q in New Testament studies and very closely guarded. Ichazo states in a deposition that he distributed 73 copies to the group in Arica and then collected 72. I may have the exact numbers wrong, but I’m in the ballpark; Naranjo left Arica after about five months. I am almost certain he kept his. Initially, few students saw it, much less used it.

Another copy or duplicates of some of Ichazo’s Arica pages existed. CD claims that this copy was from another participant in Arica and, therefore, not the material she had promised to keep secret. Palmer claimed in a deposition related to the lawsuit with Ichazo that she had never seen Ichazo’s Arica materials. I do not know what she knew about the papers she saw, or even if CD’s description is entirely accurate. 

SAT was a quirky group. There was a hierarchy with levels. Naranjo and later Kathy Speeth determined where you were in the pecking order. Naranjo’s inner circle, including Ochs, CT, MM, HA, and AD, were eventually granted access to the Ichazo/Arica binder (although I believe it was initially granted under supervision). I’m not quite sure how this worked out. I never asked to see it as I was much more involved in the process of self-observation than “Proto-typing,” and remain so to this day.

We also promised not to speak about the Enneagram outside the group because, we were told, confidentiality was integral to self-discovery. We promised not to use specific ‘teachings’ until we’d received permission from Naranjo. This was mainly intended  for work that we would do with others, although, in some instances, that promise included our private conversations with group members. The initial intent was not to protect materials and income as intellectual property, but it did set the stage for later lawsuits.

It would be another 10 years before Enneagram literature started flooding the market.

 

Now that both Naranjo and Ochs have died, and so much material is already public, I feel no obligation to remain silent.

“The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram.”

Very few Enneagram teachers today would have a job or income without Father Bob Ochs, S.J.. Few would have a single student if it were not for Ochs. The only exception might be Hameed Ali’s Diamond Diamond approach, or any Teachers from the Arica community. Still, I would argue that Ali and Sandra Maitri as well as Ichazo’s disciples, rode the wave of the Enneagram enthusiasm that Ochs created at considerable personal cost. It was enormous.

In about 1990, on a whim, I asked Claudio Naranjo to allow me to interview him about a possible article I tentatively titled “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram.” He spoke with me for several hours a day over a week. I prepared a transcribed version of our taped conversations, and he gave me permission to use the material as I saw fit. Unfortunately, it was lost in a computer crash, and the actual tapes vanished during an attic clean-out. I have to rely on my memory and intuitive sense to recreate Naranjo’s reflections. 

They were far from positive. Naranjo was emphatic. There was no Jesuit transmission because “they (the Jesuits plus Palmer et al) made too many mistakes.” Palmer said something like “In our work, we see far more Eights coming into the 'Work' than Naranjo did. When I quoted her, he might have even used the word 'bullshit,' though he rarely used gutter talk. I remember well that throughout all the interviews, there was almost no humor, a few nervous chuckles, and no jokes. Naranjo was deadly serious.

Naranjo asserted that he had authorized Ochs to convey his “indications” to the Jesuit groups, the Jesuit School of Theology (JSTB), and Loyola University Chicago. There was to be no personal spin or interpretation. As an example, he cited the “now infamous” meeting where everyone, priests, nuns, men, and women, took off all their clothes as a sign of fearless self-inquiry and surrender. He said that Ochs would not have dared give that direction on his own. AD tells me that it was she who flew to Chicago that night and asked everyone to disrobe.  Everyone did. Naranjo told me that the idea came to him on a sudden “whim.” That was one of the few chuckles that entire week.

Naranjo controlled the conversation. There was a clear, definite subtext: he was deeply upset (I’ll use a gutter expression, “pissed off”) about the significant number of Enneagram titles available. I didn’t press the question. Market share was not the primary source of the upset. That he considered many of the interpretations to be misdirected, if not entirely flawed, was. 

Naranjo didn’t read many (if any) of the books; instead, he heard reports about the typing and might have cross-checked here and there, but my impression was that he’d lost control and regretted it. He always spoke of Ichazo in a guarded, slightly disapproving way, but it was always couched in his belief that Ichazo was the link between the Enneagram and Gurdjieff’s teachings. That link to me felt a bit weird, esoteric, almost mystical, but I recognized it. Ochs had no authorization to pass on that imprimatur or seal of approval because Naranjo imagined Ochs had bungled the job, which was unforgivable.

Let’s pick up the timeline. The interviews took place after the serious and hurtful blaming had begun and was taking its toll. Ochs had stopped teaching at the JSTB, or anywhere. He moved out of the small faculty residence that I found on Hillegass Avenue at the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Perhaps he had been asked to leave. He was evasive. He told me that he’d rented a tiny, dark in-law apartment in a converted garage, in a very Asian neighborhood up the hill in El Cerrito. The Jesuits had granted him a leave of absence, a sabbatical, and a small stipend. I was not clear about his canonical status, but his connection to the Jesuits seemed tenuous. He told me that he told his superiors he was working on a book, and they were (how shall I say this?) eager to see results, which would never materialize. I surmised that they didn’t know what to do with him. 

Naranjo had stopped returning Ochs’s phone calls, which upset him so much he couldn’t talk about it. The Tantric Master Yogi Chen had passed away. His only visitor was SD, a lovely woman from either my group or the one directly after mine. I knew SD and knew that she and Ochs had a romantic connection. SD has also died. Ochs would not be the first heterosexual Jesuit to develop a strong, romantic relationship with a woman that at some point included sex. Theilard had a lover, and I knew the woman who filled that role for Avery Dulles, though I am sure Avery and JC never had sex.

I called Ochs at regular intervals for more than a decade. Sometimes it would take him a week or more to respond. We would meet at a particular restaurant where he could eat, particularly a Peruvian one on Mission in San Francisco. He complained that he had no energy; he found a homeopathic doctor, or dietician, who prescribed a matchbook-sized piece of protein to be eaten between 1 and 4 in the afternoon. It seemed crazy, but he was almost fanatical. 

Ochs told me that he was trying to write. At the time, I found hundreds of titles, which had increased to more than 300 the last time I surveyed them in 2019. https://enneagrambibliography.blogspot.com/2019/07/all-things-enneagram.html He mentioned that all these teachers were generating good incomes, and he was living on less than $2,000 a month. It didn’t feel like jealousy. I recognized the burden of the One Fixation’s way of comparing and contrasting his personal output very critically. It paralyzed him. He had been the source of so much good work, but every time he started to write, he would produce a few pages and then mercilessly throw them in the waste basket after a week. He felt obligated to make something unique, worthy of the guy who kicked the ball into play, and he couldn’t do it.

I asked Ochs what he wanted to say. He would respond vaguely that no one had ever looked at the major authors of the Western canon from an Enneagram perspective. However, somehow typing Tolstoy and launching into an analysis was not working out. I didn’t know how to respond. 

Ochs was obsessed with two writers, Camille Paglia and Doris Lessing. How he lumped them together, I don’t know. With Paglia, I sensed some camaradship that they’d been treated badly, even excluded for unjust reasons, and with Lessing, he was obsessed with uncovering another path to Gurdjieff. He told me that part of his practice was to write to Idries Shah — that letter writing was a revered Sufi practice. Shah might have sent a sentence or two back. When he died in 96, Ochs wrote letters to his son as he was sure that Tahir had inherited his dad’s mantle. When Tahir responded that he was not a Sufi teacher, Ochs continued to write his letters. He told me: “That’s what he’s supposed to say.” 

Looking back, I have to consider that Ochs, this truly important person in my life, had suffered a psychotic break. He lived in a cave and entertained bizarre obsessions. His superiors might have been helpless. Ochs was a solemnly professed member of a religious order with a track record of involvement in a significant spiritual movement. That counted for something with the Jesuits; it was a credential that had no value in the world of academia and job applications. Thank God they did not cut him off. He would have been helpless. He told me that SD had a profitable therapy practice and helped him out. (She also probably watched out for his mental state.) I was not in any position to help. I was also on a marginal income. Part of me wondered where all the people were that he’d helped. Why didn’t he receive invitations to speak or contribute articles? Of course, by the time we had our Peruvian dessert, I realized that it would have been impossible to work with him. He gave us the Enneagram, and when it ate his life, we had to stand by helplessly.

Eventually, Ochs stopped responding, and my calls became far less frequent. My own life was a mess. After going to meetings and quitting crystal meth, I did a year of intense traditional psychotherapy at Langley Porter. I had tried to trick myself into believing that the Enneagram, or Zen, could do the work of healing, something that neither is designed to do. In some ways, it made things worse, or maybe just brought my own pain into plain sight, and I could no longer leave corrective actions for another time.

During the COVID-19 lockdown in India, I started to write about Ochs and discovered that he had died on May 4th, 2018, at the Claude de la Colombiere Center in Clarkston, Michigan. He was 88 years old.

I hope that a few of his students were able to put love into action and provided some comfort in his last years. He used to talk light-heartedly about “The Cosmic Coincidental Control Center.” I hope it didn’t run amok.

For a more in-depth recounting of Ochs’s first Enneagram teachings at JSTB, please go to my post also called “the Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram” on my blog, Buddha SJ, https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-jesuit-transmission-of-enneagram.html

Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

“There is nothing of value apart from the truth.” 

Half a century ago, I joined a cult. I talk about it, sometimes very publicly and too much, but I never call it a cult. I struggle to admit that’s what it was. I am too proud and too embarrassed to admit that I was part of a closed group that controls what you think, how you interact with the world, and how you spend your money, all with vague promises of being enlightened, or perhaps just living consciously, provided we were deferential to mentors who even dictated whom you slept with; there were no limits or boundaries to what was fair game. That pretty much checks all the boxes under “cult.”

Me? I’m an intelligent Ivy League-educated man who’d undergone almost ten years of rigorous training as a Jesuit. How could I possibly abandon all my basic critical skills? Perhaps 'abandon' is too mild — I slavishly devoted them to the leader's system of self-investigation, which he learned from a Bolivian occultist who was protected by a Sufi entity known as the Green Qutb and guided by the Archangel Metatron who speaks directly to God. The Source of this school was rumored to be a Sufi sect half a world away, and allegedly the training ground for the esoteric teaching of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Sufis guard their secrets ferociously, thus all the guessing and obscurity.

Metatron’s alleged seal of approval should have been a red flag, pointing to arrogance rather than wisdom. The occultist was Oscar Ichazo, and although I never met him, from reports I’ve heard and read, he was brilliant, odd, and arrogant. He claimed, “Our work is exceptional in that I am trained and entitled to do much work for others.” His main student, at least in that student’s spiritual narrative, Dr. Claudio Naranjo, describes several profound, self-confirming experiences that led him to believe he had been initiated into the Sufi school that was the source of Gurdjieff’s teaching. My direct connection was with a bright, personable, and well-trained Jesuit, Father Bob Ochs, whom Naranjo had authorized to teach the basics of the Enneagram, also known as the Enneagon, the key to Ichazo’s system of “self-remembering.” Ochs mentioned, almost off handedly, that the esoteric school where the Enneagram had been hiding was the same school that trained Jesus before his ministry.

Naranjo, at least as far as I can determine from his public CV, was not an occultist before meeting Ichazo. He was a highly trained and well-regarded medical doctor and psychotherapist who worked primarily in his native Chile. He certainly had more than a passing interest in entactogens and psychedelic drugs, which were not illegal in his native country, or certainly they were far less regulated than in the US. In 1962, he was invited to Harvard for one academic year as a Fulbright scholar. There, he worked in the Center for the Study of Personality under the direction of David McClelland. He then came to Berkeley, California, and became a regular at the Esalen Center in Big Sur. It was at Esalen that he recruited between 54 and 70 people, reports vary, to accompany him in April 1970 to Arica, a beach town bordering the Atacama Desert at the northernmost point of Chile, to study with Ichazo. They became the first students to participate in what would become the Arica Training. When Naranjo returned to Berkeley, he began gathering 50 or so students to study the Enneagram/Enneagon. I was in the second wave of that group.

Naranjo billed his Seekers After Truth (SAT) group as sampling from the smorgasbord of psychological and spiritual offerings fortuitously appearing in California. We had a Tai Chi Master from Taiwan, a Buddhist Yogi from Tibet, a Thai Vipassana meditation teacher, plus the Gestalt work of Fritz Perls, who was one of Naranjo’s mentors. But other teachers had far less conventional—and far more troublesome — backgrounds. He delegated the psychological exploration of early childhood to a bespoke tailor in Oakland, Bob Hoffman, who didn’t finish high school but was guided by his former therapist, a disembodied (deceased in real language) German-Jewish Freudian psychiatrist who fled the rise of Hitler and landed at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital in San Francisco. 

The birth of the “School for this Age” was marked by very mundane coincidences that defied common sense. Naranjo’s narrative included checking into the same cheap Miami hotel as Oscar, and by chance, picking up the phone at the exact moment that the person he was destined to meet dialed him. Sufi lore suggests that these coincidences put you on a new path to unraveling the mystery of the Universe. He missed the appointment because he took a nap and overslept. Given his infatuation with drugs, he might have been either high or coming down, but no matter.

This “School” had three legs: the Enneagram, sex, and drugs. All three were always present to varying degrees depending on Naranjo’s whim. Most of Naranjo’s students spent (in my view) far too many weekends experimenting with drugs. LSD, harmaline, MDA, MDMA, ibogaine, phenylisopropylamine, and Ayahuasca, a South American shamanic brew. Naranjo claimed to have studied its application to psychotherapy. 

It was illegal for a medical professional to advocate any of these mind-altering substances. Because Naranjo did not want to lose his license, he could not recommend any hallucinogens. But to qualify as a real experiment, either experimentally or therapeutically, there needed to be at least one objective, sober observer. No one assumed that role. Naranjo certainly did not. He was the first to swallow the pill. Looking back, it was probably the drugs that led to what he calls his Dark Night of the Soul. 

After talking with Ochs, I decided not to participate in the drug experimentation, and did not, aside from occasional marijuana use. There may have been some group work or conversations after the experiments, but I was never asked to participate. I was far too afraid. Afraid is too mild; I was petrified, witnessing the side effects. At least one student’s death might have been avoided. 

As far as the sex part of cult exploitation, it was just post the Haight Ashbury Summer of Love, and no one wanted to sit on the sidelines for that party. People seemed to assume they had permission to do whatever the hell they wanted, but that does not, in my view, absolve anyone. Indeed, “no” was a word rarely spoken and rarely heeded when it was. We called Naranjo’s house on Allston Way “the harem,” and I will leave it there. I was raped by Hoffman, a man whom Naranjo recommended, even championed. Entities that spoke “from the other side” encouraged Hoffman to flout the norms of professional conduct. He was a maniac who felt above the law. He defined freedom and grabbed as much power and permission from the invisible world as we were willing to hand over. Part of the game was surrender: if you were unwilling, you’d never get whatever it was your heart desired.

We were all guinea pigs in the experiment. I could not avoid harm. None of us could. The level of denial matched the depth of our participation. Naranjo, other teachers, and mentors in SAT had an obligation to protect us against the dangers of “ego reduction.” They failed. If drugs were to be tolerated, even encouraged, there was the obligation of full disclosure. Instead, there was a wall of silence and denial. I had the right not to be sexually exploited. I was. When I joined Naranjo’s SAT, I was a full-time student at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Four years later, I left the Jesuits, moved to San Francisco, and drove a cab. 

Better to admit you walked through the wrong door than to spend your life in the wrong room. The fact that I opened the door and walked through, however, remains. 

The next series of posts will detail how I came to this realization and what I’ve done about it.

Waiting for the Barbarians

 by C.P. Cavafy

The barbarians are to arrive today.

Why such inaction in the Senate?

Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.

What laws can the Senators pass anymore?

When the barbarians come they will make the laws.

Why did our emperor wake up so early,

and sits at the greatest gate of the city,

on the throne, solemn, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.

And the emperor waits to receive

their chief. Indeed he has prepared

to give him a scroll. Therein he inscribed

many titles and names of honor.

Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out

today in their red, embroidered togas;

why do they wear amethyst-studded bracelets,

and rings with brilliant, glittering emeralds;

why are they carrying costly canes today,

wonderfully carved with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today,

and such things dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't the worthy orators come as always

to make their speeches, to have their say?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today;

and they get bored with eloquence and orations.

Why all of a sudden this unrest

and confusion. (How solemn the faces have become).

Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,

and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.

And some people arrived from the borders,

and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?

Those people were some kind of solution.