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    Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View
    Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View
    Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View
    Ebook444 pages8 hours

    Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View

    By Claudio Naranjo

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Compares the enneagram of personality types with other psychological character typing systems and discusses of the origins of each type.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGateways Books Tapes
    Release dateSep 1, 1994
    ISBN9780895565112
    Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View
    Author

    Claudio Naranjo

    Dr. Claudio Naranjo (1932 - 2019) was a Chilean-born psychotherapist, medical doctor, author, educator, Buddhist practitioner, and pioneer in the areas of psychology, psychedelic therapies, and human development. Naranjo was an early practitioner of the  “Enneagram of Personality” which he enriched with his deep understanding of psychology and more esoteric aspects of work with the psyche. He ultimately created SAT (Seekers After Truth) integrating Gestalt therapy, the Enneagram, contemplative practices, music and art therapy, and other practices designed to provide deep personal insights. In his later years, he expanded his work to explore education and its role in promoting patriarchal worldviews that contribute to our deepening global crisis. Naranjo is the author of several books including The Healing Journey: Pioneering Approaches to Psychedelic Therapy (2nd edition), (MAPS 2013), The Revolution We Expected: Cultivating a New Politics of Consciousness (Synergetic Press, 2020), and the forthcoming Dionysian Buddhism: Guided Interpersonal Meditations in the Three Yanas (Synergetic Press, 2022).

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      Book preview

      Character and Neurosis - Claudio Naranjo

      1989).

      BY WAY OF

      INTRODUCTION:

      A THEORETICAL

      PANORAMA

      Like any field of scientific study, personality psychology needs a descriptive model or taxonomy of its subject matter … a taxonomy would permit researchers to study specified domains of personality characteristics … Moreover, a generally accepted taxonomy would greatly facilitate the accumulation and communication of empirical findings by offering a standard vocabulary or nomenclature… . Most every researcher in the field hopes, at one level or another, to be the one who devises the structure that will transform the present Babel into a community that speaks a common language.

      Oliver P. John

      (Institute of Personality Assessment and Research,

      University of California)

      1. A VIEW OF NEUROSIS,

      ENDARKENMENT, AND

      CHARACTER

      I will speak here about personality in general and also about the process of what we may call the degradation of consciousness—what is technically called the theory of neurosis—and which finds symbolic echo in the spiritual traditions in the mythical stories of the fall from paradise. I will not make a distinction between the spiritual fall of consciousness and the psychological process of aberrated development.

      Let me just point out, as a beginning, that this degradation of consciousness is such that in the end the affected individual does not know the difference, i.e., does not know that there has been such a thing as a loss, a limitation, or a failure to develop his full potential. The fall is such that awareness comes to be blind in regard to its own blindness, and limited to the point of believing itself free. It is in view of this that Oriental traditions frequently use, in connection with the ordinary condition of humankind, the analogy of a person who is asleep—an analogy that invites us to conceive that the difference between our potential condition and our present state is as great as the condition between ordinary wakefulness and dreaming.

      To speak of a degradation of consciousness, of course, implies the idea that the process of the fall is one of becoming less aware or relatively unconscious; yet the fall is not only a fall in consciousness proper; it is also, concomitantly, a degradation in the emotional life, a degradation in the quality of our motivation. We may say that our psychological energy flows differently in the healthy/enlightened condition and in the condition that we call normal. We may say, echoing Maslow, that the fully functioning human being is motivated out of abundance, while in a sub-optimal condition, motivations have the quality of deficiency: a quality which may be described as a desire to fill up a lack rather than as an over-flowing out of a basic satisfaction.

      We may say that the distinction between the higher and the lower conditions is not only one of abundant love vs. deficient desiring. Still a more complete formulation is that which we find in Buddhism as an explanation of human fallenness in terms of what is called the three poisons. In the triangular diagram below we may see depicted an interdependence of an active unconsciousness on one hand (commonly called ignorance in Buddhist terminology) and on the other a pair of opposites that constitute alternative forms of deficiency motivation: unconsciousness, aversion, and craving.

      FIGURE 1

      We are all acquainted with the Freudian view that neurosis consists basically in an interference with instinctual life. It was Freud’s contention that this basic frustration of the infant in relation to his parents was a libidinal frustration, i.e., an interference with early manifestations of a sexual desire, mainly toward the parent of the opposite sex. Today few are willing to endorse this original view of psychoanalysis, and the so-called libido theory has fallen into question, to say the least. Modern psychoanalysts, such as Fairbairn and Winnicot, agree that the origin of neurosis is to be found in an imperfect mothering and, more generally speaking, in problems of parenting. More importance is given today to the lack of love than to the idea ofinstinctual frustration or, at least we may say, more importance is given to the frustration of a contact and relationship need than to pre-genital or genital manifestations of sexuality. However it may be, Freud had the great merit of realizing that neurosis was a nearly universal thing, and that it is transmitted generation after generation through the process of parenting. It took a heroic attitude to assert it in his time, yet now it is a platitude to say that the world, as a whole, is crazy, since it has become so obvious.

      In the view of some spiritual documents such as the Gospel of Saint John, we find the view that truth is, so to speak, upside down in the world: The light was in the world, but darkness did not comprehend it. In the Sufi tradition there is a widespread recognition of how a true man is also as if upside down, so that he seems to ordinary people an idiot. Yet we may say that not only in the case of heroic beings is truth crucified: it is also in the case of each one of us.

      It is not difficult to conceive of the notion that we have all been hurt and, perhaps unconsciously, martyred by the world in the process of our childhood, and in this way we have become a link in the trasmission of what Wilhelm Reich used to call an emotional plague infecting society as a whole. This is not only a modern psychoanalytic vision: a curse visiting generation after generation is something that has been known since antiquity. The notion of a sick society is the essence of the old Indian and Greek conceptions of our time as that of a dark age, a Kaliyuga—an age of great fallenness from our original spiritual condition.

      I am not saying that mothering is everything; fathering is important too, and later events may have influenced our future development such as is evident in the traumatic war neuroses. Also early events, such as the extent of birth trauma, can have debilitating effects on the individual. Certainly the way in which children are brought into the world in hospitals constitutes an unnecessary shock, and we may conjecture that one born in the twilight and not slapped on the back to stimulate breathing may be better prepared to resist later traumatic conditions in life—just as a child who has been adequately mothered at the beginning of life may be better prepared to take on the traumatic situation of poor

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