Claudio Naranjo
Encyclopedia
Claudio Naranjo is a Chilean psychiatrist who is considered a pioneer in integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions. He is one of the three successors named by Fritz Perls
Fritz Perls
Friedrich Salomon Perls , better known as Fritz Perls, was a noted German-born psychiatrist and psychotherapist of Jewish descent....

 (founder of Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt therapy
Gestalt therapy is an existential/experiential form of psychotherapy that emphasizes personal responsibility, and that focuses upon the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist-client relationship, the environmental and social contexts of a person's life, and the self-regulating...

), and a developer of the Enneagram of Personality
Enneagram of Personality
The Enneagram of Personality is a model of human personality which is principally used as a typology. Principally developed by Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo, it is also partly based on earlier teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff...

 and founder of the Seekers After Truth Institute. He is also an elder statesman of the U.S. and global Human Potential Movement and the spiritual renaissance of the late 20th century. He is the author of various books.

Background and education

Naranjo was born in Valparaiso. He grew up in a musical environment and after an early start at the piano he studied musical composition. Shortly after entrance to medical school, he stopped composing as he became more involved in philosophical interests. Important influences from this time were the Chilean visionary poet and sculptor Tótila Albert, the poet David Rosenmann-Taub
David Rosenmann-Taub
David Rosenmann-Taub is a Chilean poet, musician, and artist. His precocious talent in both literature and music was recognized and encouraged by his father, a polyglot, and his mother, a virtuoso pianist. She began teaching him the instrument when he was two; by nine, he himself was giving...

, and the Polish philosopher Bogumil Jasinowski.

Career

After being graduated as a medical doctor in 1959, he was hired by the University of Chile medical school to form part of a pioneering studies center in medical anthropology (CEAM) founded by Franz Hoffman. At the same time, he served his psychiatry residency at the University Psychiatry Clinic under the direction of Ignacio Matte Blanco
Ignacio Matte Blanco
Ignacio Matte Blanco was a Chilean psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who developed a rule-based structure for the unconscious which allows us to make sense of the non-logical aspects of thought...

.

Involved in research on the effects of the dehumanization of traditional medical education, he travelled briefly to the United States during a mission assigned by the University of Chile to explore the field of perceptual learning
Perceptual learning
The term perceptual learning refers to the process of long lasting improvement in performing perceptual tasks as a function of experienceand practice . According to Eleanor Gibson , it refers to the experience-induced changes in the way information is extracted following sensory experience...

. It is at that time that he became acquainted with the work of Samuel Renshaw
Samuel Renshaw
Samuel Renshaw was an American psychologist whose work became famous for a short period of time during World War II when he taught soldiers to identify enemy aircraft in a split second, using tachistoscopic training. He generally worked with fast-reading and enhancing the latent ability of the mind...

 and Hoyt Sherman
Hoyt Sherman
Major Hoyt Sherman , a member of the prominent Sherman family, was an American banker.-Biography:Hoyt Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio, the son of Charles R. Sherman, Judge of the Ohio Supreme Court...

 at the Ohio State University.

In 1962 he was at Harvard as a visiting Fulbright scholar, at the Center for Studies of Personality and Emerson Hall, where he was a participant in Gordon Allport
Gordon Allport
Gordon Willard Allport was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology...

's Social Psychology Seminar and a student of Tillich. He became Raymond Cattell
Raymond Cattell
Raymond Bernard Cattell was a British and American psychologist, known for his exploration of many areas in psychology...

's associate at the Institute of Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT) in 1963.

After a brief return to his native country, he was invited to Berkeley, California for a year and a half to participate in the activities of the Center for Personality Assessment Research (IPAR).

After another period at the University of Chile Medical School's Center of Medical Anthropology Studies and at the Instituto de Psicología Aplicada, Naranjo returned once again to Berkeley and to IPAR, where he continued his activities as Research Associate. It is during this period of time that he became an apprentice of Fritz Perls and part of the early Gestalt Therapy community, where he began conducting workshops at Esalen Institute, as a visiting associate. He eventually became one of Fritz Perls' three successors along with Jack Downing and Robert Hall
Robert Hall
The Rev. Robert Hall was an English Baptist minister.He was born at Arnesby near Leicester, where his father, Robert Hall was pastor of a Baptist congregation. Robert was the youngest of a family of fourteen...

.

In the years that lead up to his becoming a key figure at Esalen, Naranjo also received additional training and supervision from Jim Simkin
Jim Simkin
James Solomon Jim Simkin was an early seminal figure in the history of Gestalt Therapy.Simkin received his doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, and practiced in New Jersey. He also was Chief Psychologist at a large VA hospital. Like most psychotherapists of his...

 in Los Angeles and attended sensory awareness workshops with Charlotte Selver
Charlotte Selver
Charlotte Selver was a German music educationalist.The central point of Charlotte Selver's work was "experience through the senses"...

. He became Carlos Castaneda
Carlos Castaneda
Carlos Castaneda was a Peruvian-born American anthropologist and author....

's close friend and became part of Leo Zeff
Leo Zeff
Dr. Leo Zeff was an American psychologist and psychotherapist in Oakland, California who pioneered the use of ecstasy and other psychoactive drugs in psychotherapy in the 1970s....

's pioneering psychedelic therapy group (1965–66). These meetings resulted in Naranjo’s contribution of the use of harmaline
Harmaline
Harmaline is a fluorescent psychoactive indole alkaloid from the group of harmala alkaloids and beta-carbolines. It is the reduced hydrogenated form of harmine.-Occurrence in nature:...

, MDMA, and ibogaine
Ibogaine
Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in a number of plants, principally in a member of the Apocynaceae family known as Iboga . A hallucinogen with both psychedelic and dissociative properties, the substance is banned in some countries; in other countries it is being used...

.

In 1969 he was sought out as a consultant for the Education Policy Research Center, created by Willis Harman
Willis Harman
Willis Harman was an American engineer, social scientist, academic, futurist, writer, and visionary. He is best remembered for his work with SRI International, for being president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, and for his work in raising consciousness within the...

 at SRI. His report as to what in the domain of psychological and spiritual techniques in vogue was applicable to education later became his first book, The One Quest. During this same period, he co-authored a book with Robert Ornstein
Robert Ornstein
Dr. Robert Evan Ornstein is a psychologist, researcher and writer.He has taught at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, based at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, and been professor at Stanford University and chairman of the Institute for the Study of Human...

 on meditation. Also, an invitation from Ravenna Helson to examine the qualitative differences between books representative of the "Matriarchal" and "Patriarchal" factors lead to his writing The Divine Child and the Hero, which would be published at a much later time.

The accidental death of his only son in 1970 marked a turning-point in his life. Naranjo set off on a six month pilgrimage under the guidance of Oscar Ichazo
Oscar Ichazo
Oscar Ichazo is the Bolivian-born founder of the Arica School, which he established in 1968.Ichazo's Enneagram of Personality theories are part of a larger body of teaching that he terms Protoanalysis...

 and a spiritual retreat in the desert near Arica, Chile, which he considers the true beginning of his spiritual experience, contemplative life and inner guidance.

After leaving Arica, he began teaching a group that included his mother, Gestalt trainees and friends. This Chilean group, which began as an improvisation, took shape as a program and originated a non-profit corporation called the SAT Institute. These early years of the SAT Institute were implemented by a series of guest teachers, including Zalman Schachter, Dhiravamsa, Ch'u Fang Chu, Sri Harish Johari, and Bob Hoffman
Hoffman Institute
The Hoffman Institute Foundation is a non-profit organization headquartered in the United States and is affiliated with Hoffman Institute International. As of 2008, Hoffman Institute International has Centers in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Spain,...

.

In 1976 Naranjo was a visiting professor at the Santa Cruz Campus of the University of California for two semesters and later intermittently at the California Institute of Asian Studies. He also began to offer workshops in Europe, refining aspects of the mosaic of approaches in the SAT program.

In 1987, he began the reborn SAT Institute in Spain for personal and professional development, with its program that includes Gestalt therapy and its supervision, applications of the Enneagram of Personality
Enneagram of Personality
The Enneagram of Personality is a model of human personality which is principally used as a typology. Principally developed by Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo, it is also partly based on earlier teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff...

, interpersonal meditation, music as a therapeutic resource and as an extension of meditation, guided self-insight and communication processes. Since then, the SAT program has extended to Italy, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina and more recently to France and Germany.

Since the late 1980s, Naranjo has divided each year's agenda between his activities abroad and his writing at home in Berkeley. Among his many publications, he has revised an early book on Gestalt therapy and published two new ones. He has published three books on the Enneagram if Personality, as well as The End of Patriarchy, which is his interpretation of social problems as the expression of a devaluation of the nurturance and human instinct and their solution in the harmonious development of our "three brained" potential. He has also published a book on meditation; The Way of Silence and the Talking Cure; and Songs of Enlightenment on the interpretation of the great books of the West as expressions of "the inner journey" and variations on the "tale of the hero".

Since the late 1990s he has attended many education conferences and sought to influence the transformation of the educational system in various countries. It is his conviction that “nothing is more hopeful in terms of social evolution than the collective furthering of individual wisdom, compassion and freedom”. His book Changing Education to Change the World published in Spanish in 2004, was meant to stimulate the efforts of teachers among SAT graduates who are beginning to be involved in a SAT-in- Education project, that offers the staff of schools and the students in schools of education a "supplementary curriculum" of self-knowledge, relationship-repair and spiritual culture.

In 2006 the Foundation Claudio Naranjo was founded to implement his proposals regarding the transformation of traditional education into an education that does not neglect the human development that he believes our social evolution depends on.

His most recent book (2010), Healing Civilization: Bringing Personal Transformation into the Societal Realm through Education and the Integration of the Intra-Psychic Family is both a continuation of, and a turning point in, Naranjo's lifelong work. For in this book, which has a foreword by Jean Houston
Jean Houston
Jean Houston is an American scholar, lecturer, author and philosopher who has helped pioneer and motivate the human potentials movement. As a teacher and visionary thinker, Houston holds conferences and seminars with social leaders, educational institutions and business organizations worldwide...

, Naranjo explores what he sees as the root cause of the destruction of human civilization (as evidenced in the first decade of the 21st century as war, violence, oppression of women, child abuse, environmental endangerment, etc.)—patriarchy—and brings both the problem and the solution home to an intra-psychic level. Patriarchy, he says, has taken root over millennia in the workings of our own conditioned minds. He also offers a remedy, which derives from the work of Tótila Albert regarding the "triune" being of our nature: the "Inner Father" (corresponding to the head), the "Inner Mother" (corresponding to the heart), and the "Inner Child" (corresponding to the instincts). As people learn to integrate these three "brains", Naranjo believes, they may bring about a functional, even divine, family within. And this, he believes, in addition to transforming education oriented to personal and collective evolution, could bring about the healing of civilization.

Writings

  • The Healing Journey: ISBN 0394488261
  • The One Quest: ISBN 0895561611
  • Enneatypes and Psychotherapy: ISBN 0934252475
  • Enneatype Structures: ISBN 0895560631
  • Character and Neurosis: ISBN 0895560666
  • The End of Patriarchy: ISBN 1569370656
  • The Enneagram of Society: ISBN 089556159X
  • The Divine Child and the Hero: ISBN 0895561093
  • The Way of Silence and the Talking Cure: ISBN 1577331400
  • Techniques of Gestalt Therapy: ISBN 0939266008
  • Gestalt Therapy: ISBN 1899836543
  • Consciousness and Creativity: ISBN 0894960091
  • Transformation Through Insight: ISBN 0-934252-76-9
  • How To Be
  • Changing Education to Change the World
  • Between Meditation and Psychotherapy
  • Healing Civilization: Bringing Personal Transformation into the Societal Realm through Education and the Integration of the Intra-Psychic Family: ISBN 978-0-89556-163-3

  • also published in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish

External links



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