Oscar Ichazo

Oscar Ichazo (July 24, 1931 – March 26, 2020) was a Bolivian philosopher and an advocate of integral philosophy.

In a 1954 interview, Ichazo said that he had achieved insight into mechanistic and repetitive thought and behavior patterns.

These processes can be understood in connection with the enneagram figure, classical philosophy, and what he called "Trialectical Logic" which analyzes reality on the basis of cycles.

The entire theory is referred to as based on the idea of the innate structure of the mind.

That is, the questions come from the instincts and the instincts are a result of a pre-existing structure that is the foundation of mind itself.

It is a concept considered logical because there must be a pre-existing order if all minds share essential similarities.

Ichazo refined the ancient concept that a human soul has components by approaching the issue through three instinctual questions that he considered basic to human existence: "How am I?", "Who am I with?", "What am I doing?"

Ichazo labeled these conservation, relations, and syntony (later modified to adaptation).

Recognizing interactions among the three, he developed a 3 x 3 = 9 component system, which he correlated with several schemas that have long existed in diverse fields: spectrum of light, chakras, physiological systems, and the enneagram.

For self-observation of habitual patterns, Ichazo employed the enneagram, among other tools.

Transformative practices sometimes involved linking a specific mudra and/or bija with each of the nine points of the enneagram.

The Arica School's origins began in 1956 when groups of people formed in major cities in South America to study the theory and method that Ichazo was proposing.

For fourteen years these different groups studied his teachings.

Following his early life in Bolivia, Ichazo was later principally based in Chile, where he founded the Arica School in 1968.

He lived his last decades in Hawaii, where he died.

In 1968, Ichazo presented lectures on his theories of Protoanalysis and the ego-fixations at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile.

Ichazo's theories are based upon traditional metaphysical questions such as: "What is humankind?"; "What is the supreme good of humanity?"; and "What is the truth that gives meaning and value to human life?"

Ichazo developed the philosophical and psychological tools used in the Arica School studies, which are based on his "Protoanalytical Theory, System and Method", more commonly called "Protoanalysis".

An American headquarters, the Arica Institute, was established in New York in 1971.

Ichazo's Arica School can be considered, as Ramparts magazine described it in 1973, "A body of techniques for cosmic consciousness-raising and an ideology to relate to the world in an awakened way."

Before 1980, the term "Protoanalysis" was misunderstood to be narrower in scope, used specifically as the name for Ichazo's theory of ego-fixations from which the Enneagram of Personality was developed.

In Protoanalysis, Ichazo described nine ways in which a person's ego becomes fixated within the psyche at an early stage of life.

For each person, one of these "ego fixations" then becomes the core of a self-image around which their psychological personality develops.

Each fixation is also supported at the emotional level by a particular passion.

Ichazo described these passions as emotional energy in disarray, much like a sickness.

The principal psychological connections between the nine ego fixations can be mapped using the points, lines, and circle of the enneagram figure.

Ichazo's teachings are designed to help people transcend their identification with — and the suffering caused by — their own mechanistic thought and behavior patterns.

His theories about the fixations are founded on the premise that all life seeks to continue and perpetuate itself and that the human psyche must follow universal laws of reality.

The study of the fixations does not produce a typology.

Rather, it analyzes the characteristics of the human ego based on the three instincts known as conservation, relation, and adaptation, and the two poles of our psychic life: our sexuality or sense of life continuation, and our spirituality, or sense of internal unity.

Ichazo understood the fixations as instinctual points that have been hurt.

The primary difference between modern psychology and his theories is that he proposed a model of the psyche where the instincts, when affected, injured or handicapped, can be liberated to accomplish Unity, whereas modern psychology has preferred to focus on observed behavior.

According to Ichazo, a person's fixation derives from childhood subjective experience (self-perception) of psychological trauma when expectations are not met in each of the instincts.

Young children are self-centered and thus experience disappointment in their expectations because of one of three fundamental attitudes: attracted, unattracted, disinterested.

From such experiences, mechanistic thought and behavior patterns arise as an attempted defense against the recurrence of the trauma.

By understanding the fixations — and practicing self-observation — it is believed that a person can reduce or even transcend suffering and the fixations' hold on the mind.

According to Ichazo, integral philosophy is an ancient philosophical tradition that represents all things in the universe as interconnected.

Ichazo's version presents an analysis of the human condition from the lowest levels of the human process to the highest states of enlightenment (theosis).

This body of teaching includes the analysis that Ichazo originally termed Protoanalysis, and Ichazo's Enneagram of Personality.

In his teachings the enneagram figure was initially called an enneagon.