The Enneagram and the Return from Oz
Most of us spend years chasing something just out of reach: wholeness, love, belonging, a sense that we are finally enough. Like Dorothy, we follow yellow brick roads of our own making, certain that what we seek lies somewhere over the rainbow. The Enneagram suggests otherwise.
The Enneagram is a map of how we fall asleep to ourselves and build personalities to cope. Just as Genesis depicts humanity’s exile from Eden, the Enneagram maps our fall from wholeness into personality, where we begin to feel that something essential is missing.
Thankfully, the map does not leave us stranded in personality. It also points toward a return to our deeper nature and our connection with the Divine.
The Wizard of Oz, the film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s turn of the 20th Century literary series. vividly mirrors this Enneagram journey through personality and back toward wholeness.
Oz represents life lived through personality. Dorothy’s journey through it mirrors the way we all rely on false selves before eventually discovering their limits.
The Wizard’s failure becomes necessary. Only disappointment can expose the illusion and awaken us for the journey home.
Each of us follows our own yellow brick road into an Oz of our personalities.
Falling Asleep: The Move into Personality
The Enneagram and the Wizard of Oz highlight that we all begin in oneness, a state of psychological and spiritual belonging, but gradually experience ourselves as separate from love, security, and connection.
Claudio Naranjo taught that the soul first falls asleep to its original wholeness at Point Nine, then moves into anxiety and distrust at Point Six, before constructing an image-driven false self at Point Three.
When we lose contact with our deeper nature, we begin constructing protective strategies to make ourselves feel secure. Adam and Eve highlight this spiritual exile. After eating the fruit, they are afraid and hide what God called good beneath clothes manufactured from fig leaves.
No longer in Eden where we had everything we needed, we rely upon our personalities’ distorted perspectives, akin to the shadows on the cave in Plato’s allegory in The Republic.
But we mistake them for ourselves.
We believe our personalities can recover what we feel we lack, but like a Chinese finger trap, the harder we strive through them, the more entrapped we become. Only failure can help us loosen our grip on personality and reveal the qualities we have been seeking all along.
Oz as Personality Structure
Dorothy enters Oz through sleep, a dreamlike descent into unconscious striving. She falls asleep to herself, becomes distrustful, and flees in search of somewhere over the rainbow, believing relief lies elsewhere rather than in confronting what is directly before her.
Dorothy’s time in Oz mirrors Kansas, with repeated opportunities to face what she has been avoiding. Soon after she arrives in Oz, she is confronted by Miss Gulch’s Oz counterpart, the Wicked Witch of the West, who threatens her.
Fearfully distrusting the Wicked Witch at Point Six, she turns to Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, the only one with true knowledge to help. Glinda tells Dorothy that the only person who may know how to get her home is the wonderful Wizard of Oz, and instructs her to follow the yellow brick road to get there.
She already possesses the ruby slippers that can carry her home, but she remains fixated on what she believes she lacks, the love of those on the farm, and is moved toward the wizard. From her fixation and impassioned motivation, she has fallen asleep to her true self and is caught in the trap of her personality.
The Wizard as the False Promise of the Personality
Our personalities promise that something outside us can restore what feels missing, but these promise are fraudulent. A personality cannot heal the wound that created it. It only keeps us from acknowledging the reality that exists.
Without the perspective of her true nature, Dorothy overcompensates for her sense of loss and actively goes on a quest to get back home. But she does not do the one action that can bring her what she seeks, and she instead seeks what feels lost by trying to access it from the false promise of a Wizard.
Dorothy’s arc mirrors the movement from the unconsciousness of Point Nine, into the fear of Point Six, and finally into the striving of Point Three.
Dorothy’s Companions as Lost Essential Qualities
The companions Dorothy meets along the way similarly depict the limitations of their personality structures and feel the respective deficiencies of a brain, a heart, and courage. Their Kansas counterparts return in Oz as caricatures of deficiency: a brainless scarecrow, a heartless tin man, and a cowardly lion.
Feeling disconnected from their essential qualities, the group relies on their fixations and strives with impassioned pleas to remedy their plights.
Unbeknownst to them, they are already demonstrating the qualities they seek. The Scarecrow is smartly warning against Dorothy sleeping in the poppies, the Tin Man emotes with tears at her sleep, and the Cowardly Lion remains on the journey despite his ever-present fear.
When they get to the wizard he does not give them what they seek and instead sends them to the Wicked Witch.
Facing Our Fears in the Haunted Forest
The Wizard’s command to fetch the wicked witch’s broom brings about the encounter Dorothy and her companions need to have with the parts of themselves that they have felt lacking. It is a frustrated opportunity to leave Point Three and the Wizard, an invitation to return to Point Six and face the fear and distrust they have of themselves. .
Despite their reluctance, they must enter the Haunted Forest and press through their anxieties.
They muster their inner strength, and during their journey to the Witch the Scarecrow repeatedly demonstrates cunning to evade the guard and strategizes a way to enter the castle, the lion demonstrates courage to help Dorothy despite his immense fear, and the Tin Man’s compassion highlights his heart.
It is only when they leave the fraudulence of the wizard and tap into their courage, brains, and heart to confront and outmaneuver the Wicked Witch that they can begin to see their inner security and potential for wholeness at Point Nine.
Oz and the Yellow Brick Road as Necessary (But Not Sufficient) for Development
After they capture the broom, the Wizard is exposed as “a humbug.” Yet by then the companions have already demonstrated the very qualities they believed were missing. The Wizard can only validate what their journey revealed.
But it is not until we can see the falsity of the man behind the curtain that we can let go of our attempts through our egoic personalities.
Personality promises what it cannot deliver, an external solution to an internal problem. Like hamster wheels, our patterned efforts keep us moving and fixated from seeing reality.
The Wizard cannot save Dorothy and her companions. The repeated failure of the striving at Point Three (which interestingly is what Type Threes fear most and most need) must occur to start disidentifying with the false self.
The personality must frustratedly exhaust itself of its attempts to manufacture what feels missing.
The return home is the undoing of the journey to Oz. They are separated from the Wizard at Point Three and go back to Point Six to deal with the fear intentionally, which empowers them to accept the love and oneness that already exists at Point Nine.
Working with the Enneagram can help us learn how our false selves are trying to find a wizard.
By turning to the difficult journey inward, we begin to discover that our deficiency was never absolute, only believed.
The Return Home
When our personalities fail to deliver, we are invited into a new encounter with ourselves. The Enneagram and the Wizard of Oz invite us to surrender our attempts to find what feels lost, reclaim what we have neglected, and loosen our identification with personality.
It is at the end of the film that Glinda returns and reveals the truth. She tells Dorothy, “You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.”
The scarecrow asks why she didn’t tell Dorothy that before. Glinda says, “Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.”
Tin man: What have you learned Dorothy?
Dorothy: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any farther than my own back yard, because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that right?”
Glinda: “That’s all it is.”
The Growth Path
Growth rarely unfolds in a straight line. We return again and again to old patterns in Oz before recognizing their limits. Yet with honesty, community, and sustained inner work, we gradually loosen our identification with personality and awaken to a deeper belonging that was never truly lost.
The Enneagram and the Wizard of Oz reveal the many yellow brick roads we travel in search of what we believe we have lost. Yet like Dorothy, we eventually discover that the journey was never about acquiring a missing self, but awakening to the reality that we were never truly separated from home.
We can’t simply strive for somewhere over the rainbow. To grow we must suffer the anxiety and face the Miss Gulches, the cyclones, the wicked witches, the wizards, and the shadows we encounter.
Acknowledgements: I’m grateful for the wisdom, writing, and teaching of Beatrice Chestnut, Uranio Paes, Richard Rohr, Russ Hudson, Sandra Maitri, Claudio Naranjo, Oscar Ichazo, and my friends on the path.
