Claudio Naranjo
1932–2019 · Chilean psychiatrist and writer, pioneer of transpersonal psychology
Claudio Naranjo (Valparaíso, 1932 – Berkeley, 2019) was a Chilean psychiatrist and writer who helped found transpersonal psychology, an approach that brings spiritual traditions into psychotherapy.
After training in medicine in Chile, he studied at Harvard under Gordon Allport, worked with Raymond Cattell in Illinois and later joined the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research in Berkeley. Following the death of his son in 1970, he withdrew to the desert near Arica, and that retreat led to a contemplative life and to the SAT Program, which he taught in Europe and Latin America.
His thinking combines Gestalt therapy, inherited from Fritz Perls, with the Enneagram of personality, meditation and music as a therapeutic tool. In books such as The Divine Child and the Hero and The End of Patriarchy he read culture through symbolic and social categories. In his later years he focused on education, convinced that social change begins with the personal growth of the educator. His influence persists in the spread of the Enneagram and in self-knowledge practices in therapy and teaching.
Key ideas
- Transpersonal psychology: the idea that therapy should include the spiritual dimension and the experience of going beyond the individual self.
- Gestalt therapy: work with present experience and awareness of body and emotions, inherited from Fritz Perls.
- The Enneagram of personality: a map of nine personality types that he applied to self-knowledge, literature and clinical work.
- Patriarchy and human nature: a reading of social problems as the devaluation of instinct and nature, whose solution lies in the harmonious development of the mind.
- Transformative education: the conviction that social change starts with the personal formation of the teacher.
Curiosities
Journey up the Amazon
Richard Evans Schultes made possible a special canoe journey up the Amazon River, where Naranjo studied yagé with South American Indigenous peoples. He brought back samples and published the first scientific description of the effects of its active alkaloids.
Honorary doctorate
In 2007 the University of Udine awarded him an honorary doctorate. That same year the Claudio Naranjo Foundation was officially presented in Barcelona.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.