Sundays with the Enneagram
The “Three Centres” Myth – Part 2:
Neat Triads on a Messy Map
Even if someone generously grants the idea of three “centres” as a poetic way to talk about thinking, feeling, and instinct, the standard Enneagram mapping: 8‑9‑1 as “gut,” 2‑3‑4 as “heart,” 5‑6‑7 as “head”, is basically a historical convenience, not a discovered law of human nature.
It looks tidy on the symbol, but the choice of which types go into which group is arbitrary, and most explanations are back‑filled after the fact to make it sound inevitable.
Good grouping has rules: everything in the group should strongly fit the defining feature, and things outside the group should clearly not fit it. If the category is “countries with red in the flag,” the United States and Canada qualify—but so do hundreds of others—and if you insist the set is “US, Canada, and Sweden,” you are clearly forcing the pattern to match a pre‑chosen trio rather than honestly following the data.
That is what happens with the centres: the triads are chosen first, and then the language is bent until each type “sort of” fits, instead of letting real, observable traits lead.
Historically, this clustering traces back to Oscar Ichazo’s early triads (e.g. Conservation, Relation, Adaptation/Practical Intelligence), which Claudio Naranjo reworked in a more psychological key and which Riso & Hudson later popularised for the mainstream as the now‑familiar “gut, heart, and head centres of intelligence.”
What began as one interpretive layer on the diagram has since been repeated so often that it gets treated as if it were carved on stone tablets, rarely questioned, almost never tested against experience, and routinely used as starting dogma rather than a hypothesis.
Next week: a look at modern attempts to "scientifically prove" the centres, starting with the recent book Personality and Wholeness in Therapy by Daniel Siegel, and why those efforts still don’t land.
The “Three Centres” Myth – Part 2:
Neat Triads on a Messy Map
Even if someone generously grants the idea of three “centres” as a poetic way to talk about thinking, feeling, and instinct, the standard Enneagram mapping: 8‑9‑1 as “gut,” 2‑3‑4 as “heart,” 5‑6‑7 as “head”, is basically a historical convenience, not a discovered law of human nature.
It looks tidy on the symbol, but the choice of which types go into which group is arbitrary, and most explanations are back‑filled after the fact to make it sound inevitable.
Good grouping has rules: everything in the group should strongly fit the defining feature, and things outside the group should clearly not fit it. If the category is “countries with red in the flag,” the United States and Canada qualify—but so do hundreds of others—and if you insist the set is “US, Canada, and Sweden,” you are clearly forcing the pattern to match a pre‑chosen trio rather than honestly following the data.
That is what happens with the centres: the triads are chosen first, and then the language is bent until each type “sort of” fits, instead of letting real, observable traits lead.
Historically, this clustering traces back to Oscar Ichazo’s early triads (e.g. Conservation, Relation, Adaptation/Practical Intelligence), which Claudio Naranjo reworked in a more psychological key and which Riso & Hudson later popularised for the mainstream as the now‑familiar “gut, heart, and head centres of intelligence.”
What began as one interpretive layer on the diagram has since been repeated so often that it gets treated as if it were carved on stone tablets, rarely questioned, almost never tested against experience, and routinely used as starting dogma rather than a hypothesis.
Next week: a look at modern attempts to "scientifically prove" the centres, starting with the recent book Personality and Wholeness in Therapy by Daniel Siegel, and why those efforts still don’t land.
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