Claudio Naranjo and the Third Wave

Let’s talk about Claudio Naranjo, who I see as the father of the modern Enneagram.

To me, he earns that distinction because he—uniquely among 20th-century Enneagram figures—is the one who combined modern psychology and the DSM with the Enneagram. He’s also super influential. Richard Rohr, Russ Hudson, Helen Palmer, Beatrice Chestnut—pretty much all the contemporary Enneagram teachers come from the Naranjo lineage.

Now, Naranjo himself was influenced by Ichazo. Ichazo was influenced by Gurdjieff. So you can go further back than Naranjo, but it’s Naranjo who really got interested in the Enneagram of personality and the Enneagram as a diagnostic tool.

Freud and the First Wave: Instinct Frustrated by Society

To really understand the contribution that the Enneagram makes to psychodynamics—modern psychodynamics—we’ll do a quick backtrack to Freud.

Freud made the incredible contribution of normalizing psychopathology. Rather than treating things like psychosis, neurosis, or hysteria as conditions that affected only “other” people while the rest of us were quote-unquote normal, he unified humanity by pointing out that our personality—our ego—is a response to, and a mediation of, instinct. Libido. Animal instinct. It stands between that and society—culture, the shoulds of civilization, the superego.

And while we've departed from Freud in a lot of ways, we still live in a Freudian psychodynamic framework: that personality is this compromise structure, this mediation. So we can see neurotic conditions as failures to negotiate that compromise in a way that's pro-social—acceptable to society.

So that's the beginning. The Freudian model is almost one in which we're all kind of caged animals. And our condition is fundamentally unnatural. Some of us are successful caged animals who learn to negotiate that compromise effectively. And some of us go crazy.

Frustration—frustration of instinct—is core to the Freudian model.

The Second Wave: Attachment Theory and Early Relationships

Then we move past Freud. The figures who loom large here in my mind are people like Winnicott and Melanie Klein, who start to get really interested in childhood—and correctly notice how important early childhood relationships are for shaping the personality and psychodynamics of the individual later in life.

This is pretty much the model that most of Western psychology still operates in. This is attachment theory: the idea that our personality is a response to the relationships we form in childhood. The strategies we develop to secure love and connection become our lifelong strategies.

The caregiver—in particular, the mother—is of utmost importance here.

So a lot of psychodynamic work becomes excavation of the material there, of understanding the childhood relationships. And that's the next step up from Freud, because it correctly brings focus onto those relationships. If you look at someone like Winnicott, or if you think about object relations theory, there's a more structural way to look at those early relationships—almost like physics. The relationships are viewed as structured, whereas others in the same tradition have a more narrative-driven focus. I don't know how important that distinction is, but I notice it.

Limitations of the Attachment Paradigm

But that model also seems to fall short. We live in a society that's starting to show the cracks in that model. It just doesn't hold water to say that we go around trying to get mama to love us. That's a factor, for sure. Our childhood strategies certainly shape our adult strategies. But our adult strategies are more than just an ossification or calcification of our childhood ones.

Someone critical of the mental health industry might say there's a lot of helplessness in our culture. A lot of blaming the parent. The West is sort of obsessed with childhood wounding: "What didn't I get from my mom? What didn't I get from my dad?" It's all centered on childhood lacks and wounds. It's highly individual.

Because of the primacy of that first relationship, our thinking gets narrowly focused on what I got and didn't get, rather than on the society we live in. There's a kind of infantilization—where we lean on diagnoses: "Well, I'm this way because my parents made me this way." No good therapist would say that outright, but culturally, there's a bit of helplessness that creeps in.

Those are some of the qualities I think are a direct consequence of this second wave—the attachment theory wave, the focus on childhood relationships.

The Third Wave: Naranjo's View of Adult Personality

Naranjo is presenting a third wave. He's not the only one—Gestalt therapy has a role, and he credits many thinkers. I'm referring mostly to his book Character and Neurosis here. But his project is to present a third wave of psychodynamic explanation that incorporates the previous two.

So he incorporates the idea of frustrated instinct from Freud. He incorporates childhood relationships from Winnicott and Klein. But then he goes further.

And I'll just quote him—because we'll spend the rest of the session unpacking this quote. He says:

"It may be said that there is an original psychodynamics at the time of the genesis of the character in childhood and a sustaining psychodynamics in the adult, and I am proposing that these two are not identical. While the original psychodynamics constitute a response to the crucial issue of being loved or not—or more specifically a response to interpersonal frustration—we may say that it is not principally a love frustration that sustains deficiency motivation in the adult, but an experience of lack that is based upon a self-perpetuated ontic vacuum and the corresponding existential self-interference."

Understanding the Ontic Vacuum

If that doesn't land or make much sense, that's totally fine. We're going to unpack it, because it's central to Naranjo and to this course.

The first part is pretty clear: the original psychodynamics are not the same as the adult ones. Both share a feeling of "deficiency motivation"—of being driven by lack. I think we can all relate to that. We're driven by a feeling of not-enoughness, of wanting more, needing more. "What do I need? My needs need to be met." We swim in an ocean of lack.

But it's not accurate to say that this lack can be described simply as the need for love. That might be true for children, but it's not true for us as adults.

So what is this deficiency motivation in adulthood?

Naranjo says it's an "experience of lack that is based upon a self-perpetuated ontic vacuum."

Let's pause there. "Ontic vacuum" is a dense phrase. "Ontic" means really existing—it refers to things in the most basic, concrete sense. This cup, this wallet, these keys—those are ontic concerns. Brown table, blue sky—traits, things.

So an "ontic vacuum" is a real, felt not-there-ness. An absence that has weight. Not a Buddhist emptiness, but ordinary emptiness: "I feel empty." Hollow. Not whole.

There's a hollowness that we all experience. That's the ontic vacuum. And it's self-perpetuated. There's some kind of machinery sustaining it.

The Machinery of the Self and the Role of the Enneagram

Understanding the nature of that machinery is the focus of this entire course—and, for Naranjo, it's why the Enneagram exists: to help us understand the self-perpetuating machinery that maintains the experience of lack.

This machinery takes different shapes across the nine types. There's always that felt experience of something missing, of not being here, not being whole—and a compensatory motivation to get filled. A passion. A thirst.

That thirst is always frustrated, which reinforces the view that I'm not getting what I need. That I don't quite exist. I'm not fully alive. My being is in question.

So the view of a lack of being spurs a motivation to recover being. That motivation—what Naranjo might call a passion—is doomed. And in its failure, it strengthens the very view that drives it. This self-reinforcing loop is what the Enneagram describes. The Enneagram maps nine shapes of this machinery.

We all have one home-base shape. And we'll go even deeper—into 27 shapes, via the subtypes. We'll give language to those in this course.

So back to the quote: the sense of lack is ongoing. It's our adult concern. We're always trying—and failing—to recover being.

And that whole project is our personality. Our ego. Our character structure. Our personality is existential self-interference.

You can throw in Freud's instinct theory here, but Naranjo reframes instinct not as libido or animal drive, but more like organismic self-regulation, borrowing from Gestalt. Not just "I'm hungry so I eat," but "My heart is heavy so I care for it." A natural, embodied responsiveness. That's his idea of instinct.

It's not just individual—it's communal, relational, environmental. It's the self-regulation of the organism within the whole system.

But the project of recovering being interferes with this natural self-regulation. And that interference causes more issues.

So it's quite a complete definition. Our adult psychodynamics consist of a self-perpetuated ontic vacuum, plus the ways we interfere with our natural instincts. The Enneagram's project is to make that visible—and point the way toward recovering a natural way of being in the world.

The Nasruddin Parable and the Confusion of the Search

Who would we be if we weren't always trying? Trying to get whole. To be made whole. To fill the hole.

But that hole—it's not enough to say we're trying to get love. Love is part of it, of course. But Naranjo starts to dovetail here with the Buddhist project: a lot of this is confusion.

The confusion is the belief that there's some being—I am X—that we're missing. That it's out there to be recovered. And when our attempts to recover it fail, we don't question the search. We double down. "I knew it—I really am empty." So the project becomes even more important.

Naranjo calls this the Nasruddin theory of neurosis. He tells the story of Mullah Nasruddin on all fours looking for the key to his house in a well-lit alley. A friend joins him and asks, "Are you sure you lost it here?" Nasruddin says, "No, I lost it at home." The friend asks, "Then why are you looking here?" And Nasruddin replies, "Because there's more light here."

So the idea is: we are looking for the key in the wrong place.

The search for being is conducted in entirely the wrong way. And the ways we get it wrong—that's the Enneagram of personality.

If we were building this course around Ichazo, we might be talking about the Enneagram of holy ideas or virtues. And we'll touch on those at the end of the course. But here, the Enneagram is primarily a diagnostic tool for how our self-perpetuated ontic vacuum machinery works. That's our focus.

And I think it's also a beautiful vision for the future of psychodynamics and psychology. As a society, we're still mostly in the second wave—focused on childhood wounds. And that can play an important role in healing. But with Naranjo, I believe we need a different framework—one that addresses the deeper confusion: that we're looking for the key under the streetlamp, when we know we lost it at home.