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.
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.
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!
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.
