Claudio Naranjo was born in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1932, trained in medicine and psychiatry, and moved through an unusually wide scientific and countercultural world: research fellowships at Harvard and at Berkeley's Institute of Personality Assessment and Research, early studies of psychedelics in psychotherapy, and apprenticeship in Gestalt therapy under Fritz Perls at Esalen, where he became one of the institute's central teachers after Perls's departure. By 1970 he was an established bridge figure between clinical psychology and the human potential movement, which is what made his next journey so consequential.
That year he joined the group of Americans who traveled to Arica in northern Chile to study under Oscar Ichazo, whose Protoanalysis taught a map of nine ego fixations arranged on the enneagram figure. Naranjo left the Arica school after months rather than years, on terms that stayed contested between the two men for the rest of their lives, but he took the seed of the nine fixations with him. Back in Berkeley he began teaching a version filtered through his own clinical formation to a small group he called Seekers After Truth, after Gurdjieff's phrase. From those Berkeley groups, through students including Jesuits who carried it into retreat work, descend nearly all the modern Enneagram lineages, a transmission history the atlas records on the Enneagram entry itself.