Oscar Ichazo

In 1992 intellectual copyright for the Enneagram of Personality was denied to Ichazo on the basis that he had published statements that his theories were factual, and facts cannot be copyrighted. The litigation, however, confirmed Oscar Ichazo as the source of the Enneagram of Personality and Fixations, its application, meaning, and related material.

Although some modern Enneagram of Personality writers have suggested that Ichazo's teachings are derived, in part, from those of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way work, Ichazo denied this in his "Letter to the Transpersonal Community." In July 1990, as part of a settlement with Dimension Books, each of the authors who were part of the lawsuit agreed in writing that "Oscar Ichazo is the sole originator of the theory of the ego fixations and the system of enneagons representing the different functions of the human Psyche."

The tools that the Arica School teaches are called the “Protoanalytical Theory, System and Method” or "Protoanalysis". Before 1980, the term "protoanalysis" was misunderstood to be narrower in scope, used specifically as the name for Ichazo's theory of types, from which the Enneagram of Personality was derived.

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

The Arica School, also known as the Arica Institute (which is its incorporated educational organization) or simply as Arica, is a Human Potential Movement group founded by Ichazo in 1968. The school is named after the city of Arica, Chile, where Ichazo once lived and where he led an intensive months-long training in 1970 and 1971 before settling in the United States where the Arica Institute (incorporated in 1971) has since been headquartered.

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

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.

Oscar Ichazo (July 24, 1931 in Bolivia – March 26, 2020 in Kihei, Hawaii, USA) was a Bolivian and American philosopher and the originator of Integral Philosophy. In 1968, Ichazo founded the Arica School in Chile. An American headquarters was later established in New York.