The Helper

Type Two, the Helper or Giver, is placed in the heart or feeling triad with Three and Four, and its core emotional material is therefore shame. The system gives it a basic desire to be loved and wanted, and a basic fear of being unwanted or unworthy of love. Its passion is pride, understood in the specific sense the system gives it, an inflation of one's own indispensability to others and an inability to acknowledge one's own needs, and its virtue is humility. Its wings are One and Three. Under stress the system places Two at Eight, becoming demanding and openly aggressive when the giving is not reciprocated; in growth it moves to Four, becoming able to recognise and own its own feelings and needs rather than living through other people's.

In the Hornevian groups, Riso and Hudson's second classification drawn from Karen Horney's three neurotic trends, Two falls among the compliant types that move toward others, alongside One and Six, since the giving the type is known for is itself a strategy for securing love and approval. This grouping tracks interpersonal strategy rather than the core emotion the heart triad tracks, and the two schemes are not the same classification under different names.

The route by which this material reached the English-speaking world runs through Claudio Naranjo (1932-2019), a Chilean psychiatrist who went to Arica in 1970 with a group of Americans, learned Ichazo's system, and then taught his own elaboration of it in Berkeley from the early 1970s in small groups known as SAT, drawing on Gestalt therapy, psychoanalytic character theory and his own clinical observation. Naranjo's protoanalysis connected the nine types to the character types of psychiatric literature, particularly the work of Karen Horney and Wilhelm Reich, and it is his version rather than Ichazo's that most later authors developed. Naranjo asked his students not to publish; several did, and the resulting dispute, including litigation between Ichazo's institute and later authors, is part of the system's documented history.

Naranjo asked those he trained not to publish his teaching, but the request did not hold. Helen Palmer, one of his Berkeley students, published The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life in 1988, the book that carried the system to a mass audience and prompted Ichazo's Arica Institute to sue her and her publisher, Harper and Row, for copyright infringement. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed judgment against Arica in 1992, in Arica Institute, Inc. v. Palmer, holding that Palmer's book did not unlawfully copy protected expression from Ichazo's own materials, only ideas that copyright does not protect; the case remains the clearest documented dispute the system's move into print provoked.