Rocky times are a normal place to begin a spiritual journey, and a good place to begin to write about that search. It is not easy to look back and feel no regret when I realize that I let a pearl slip through my fingers. At 77 I no longer have the prospect of a long leisurely life, no time to indulge in speculation or convoluted arguments. In Zen retreats they beat a big drum at the end of the day, and caution us to be alert and not let the moment slip away in delusion. I know how little time there is to waste.
It was not entirely my bad luck that I met Bob Hoffman. What was seriously damaging is that I didn’t realize that I’d fallen hook line and sinker, and did not take steps to repair the damage caused by my own unresolved transference. Hoffman was a criminal. Period. He sexually abused me less than half a year after I completed the first group Psychic Therapy. He told me it was love. Sexual predators lie.
Something totally unexpected and liberating happened to me during those first few months in Berkeley, working with Claudio Naranjo, and his expertise with Fritz-Perls’ Gestalt therapy. I didn’t fully grasp the experience, and I tried to hold onto the power of that gift. The context of Claudio’s working with Bob Hoffman to create a group process set the stage for my transference.
When nearly 50 years later I began to recognize the truth about my relationship with Hoffman, something equally liberating took place.
Why do intelligent people believe nonsense?
The current proponents of the Hoffman Process cast Hoffman as a kindly grandfatherly “intuitive” to market their Process, a kind of Jewish Cosmo Topper or a psychological Colonel Sanders. When I stopped laughing at that ridiculous folly and recognized my own story, I began to experience some relief.
Hoffman was a crafty fraud. Is it possible to watch a Woody Allen movie with a clear eye after the revelation of substantial accusations of sexual relationships with very young girls? It’s certainly difficult. I asked myself why I cannot put Hoffman's abuse in the past and even honor the work that has been beneficial to many people. That answer is simple. Because it would be a lie.
In 1973 I was a 28 year old highly educated and bright Jesuit who’d completed almost 8 years of rigorous religious training on top of an Ivy league education. I had invested a lot in getting to that point in my life, both in terms of building a tough defense system as well as constructing what I thought was a pretty well reasoned personal sense of my world and purpose. But I was also miserably unhappy, and desperately looking for a way out.
I wrote about the early days of the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy in The Ontological Odd Couple. I tried to be objective and state facts: the actual words spoken in a particular time, to a specific group of individuals, with a defined purpose; to identify as clearly and honestly as possible the real people, actual living humans, who were involved, with their own prejudices, training, and background. Specific circumstances help us set aside personal reactions that prejudice our interpretation, but also help someone else who might be trying to sort through their own experience.
That’s the high road, clear-headed and noble. Everyone has their say. It lends authority and even a hint of blessing to the enterprise. Plus in matters of the soul and the inner workings of the psyche, it’s better to err on the side of righteousness rather than condemnation.
But my early attempt to write about the origins of the Process was just window dressing, softening the blow. It was as bad as I'm going to describe or probably worse. What I had to ask myself is why I was such an idiot, or to soften the harshness of that question, I’ll pose it in a different way: why do intelligent people believe nonsense?
Meeting Hoffman for the first time
About 8:30 on a cold Tuesday night in the early fall of 1973, I sat on the floor of a ramshackle old fraternity house near the UC Berkeley campus. Rosalyn Schaffer, acting as Claudio Naranjo’s representative, introduced Hoffman as a person who had a unique insight into our parental conditioning. Claudio had offered to help Hoffman shape the work he’d been doing with individuals into a group process. We were to be the avant garde of psychic therapy.
To this day I remember most of the details of the bizarre introduction clearly. He wore an expensive sport coat and garish tie while we were mostly in jeans and tee shirts. He appeared extremely uncomfortable standing behind Rosalyn, but when he began to speak, his voice was angry; his presentation was gruff and aggressive. It was obvious that he was not educated in any psychological discipline, but he dominated the room, alternately talking then yelling in a kind of dumbed-down jargon.
I felt trapped. I had just moved all the way from New York and had nowhere else to turn. I looked down and took notes as an uneducated tailor from Oakland told the 20-25 eager, inquisitive, mostly young people present that no one in the room really loved themselves, that like actors in a bad play with an unhappy ending, we only gave love to get love, that we’d learned everything we knew and understood about love from our perverse relationships with our parents who didn’t know the first thing about love.
The definition of Negative Love was “It is illogical logic, nonsensical sense, and insane sanity, yet masochistically true or we wouldn’t behave in such a fashion.” If we didn’t understand, we were just playing the game of playing dumb; if we thought he thought he was dumb, it was negative transference, and proof that we didn’t love ourselves. If we thought he was dressed in bad taste, we were mired in self-hatred. I thought he was overdressed for the Trifecta so my transference had already begun.
There was zero invitation to observe our reactions. Hoffman's teaching method was to set himself up for the transference for all the negative emotions we’d inherited from our parents, and were the main reason that we were miserable. No one knew anything—nobody except him. He had received a saving, other-worldly message, in a revelatory middle-of-the-night visitation when Dr. Siegfried Fisher, who had recently died, appeared and cured Hoffman of negative love, then enlisted Hoffman’s help to allow him to “move on” by teaching us how to love ourselves and get a loving divorce from mom and dad.
We were then told to close our eyes and imagine many steps that were detailed as we built a kind of hermetically and psychically sealed vault, our Sanctuary, where we could work and be worked on in safety. Once settled into that space, we were instructed to look for a human figure, no angels, who would appear and become our spirit guide. We were told to pay attention, and listen for messages. Hoffman told us that he’d “opened us psychically,” and we would receive solutions to our problems just as he had from his spirit guide, the Viennese psychiatrist and family friend, Dr. Siegfried Fisher. These were real spirits and real messages, not some imaginary construct, and if we didn’t believe him, it was negative transference.
When my guide appeared to be my great aunt Mary, my grandfather’s younger sister, the first female graduate of Harvard College, and an extraordinary woman, he dismissed the authenticity of my vision because in my "mind-trip" she wore her signature tailored navy blue suit. Any real spirit guide had to be dressed in white, like Fisher in his Langley Porter uniform although the truth about Aunt Mary was more real than Hoffman’s story about Dr. Fisher. Colors and white light played an outsized role in the otherworld.
Once we were “psychically open”—and vulnerable—Hoffman asked us to imagine that we held a lovely tasty fruit, an orange I think, but it might have been a strawberry. Then he told us to taste it, savor it, feel it drip down our throat, When we opened our eyes he told us that of course there was no succulent fruit in our hands, that we’d created the whole thing in our minds, but didn’t it feel real? He asserted categorically that our emotions were just like this, both negative or positive, simply the projection of our mind that dictated the way we behaved, acted, felt and most importantly, how we learned to love.
As the evening session was drawing to a close, Hoffman assured us that whatever we created could be uncreated, or replaced, by placing our attention on our inattention, and what it could be replaced with would be shown to us by our spirit guides through "mind trips." We were instructed to pinpoint of a negative trait, and then, after we’d imagined it written out in words, our guide incinerated it with beams of light shooting out of his or her hands, and threw the ashes on the ground of our sanctuary where they became seeds for flowers that grew and spelled out a word that would be the positive side of the negativity that we’d pictured. Then we were instructed to make a list of all the negative characteristics of our mother, and bring it to the next session.
He ended the evening with a smile on his face, very pleased with himself. We'd also been hypnotized. I just had a spirit visitation along with a ouija board session served up in a few long hours. Yes, it was really that bad.
Hoffman’s Primitive Understanding of Psychology
The Prosecution of Mother and the creation of the “Bitch Session."As the weeks progressed our course of Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy got worse. We launched into what Hoffman called “The Prosecution of Mother.” I calculate that the exercise lasted at least five weeks.
The differences between Claudio and Hoffman were also becoming apparent, and the strain between the men started to show. Claudio was interested in exploring some of the possibilities of professional therapy and applying it to the Process. Bob was not interested in this endeavor at all. Claudio was interested in using the techniques of Perls to explore our anger, but Hoffman was only interested in its emotional expression. In Hoffman’s individual work, lists of negative traits and admonitions were the key to the Prosecution of Mother. There didn’t seem to be any real logic or purpose or order in the lists or making the lists. It was just anything that we found unsetting, or anything he saw that he judged to be negative. The one criteria for the lists was length. A short list was proof of denial.
If Hoffman’s psychic understanding of our emotional life was primitive, his behavior in the group setting was also becoming problematic. He claimed he had to break us down so that we could build ourselves up, but he was just giving himself blanket permission to be a confrontational bully, at times verging on the psychotic. List of Mother’s Negative Traits and emotional autobiography in hand, playing the tough-love, or alternatively the bad cop role, Hoffman would scrutinize gestures, mannerisms, speech patterns, slips of the tongue, ways of dressing, and pick a fight. He lectured, cajoled, confronted, and intimidated. He was extremely good at reading a person’s weakness, imitating it, exaggerating it. He would shout, insult, mock, humiliate, bully and belittle, accusing us of playing games. He was unrelenting. And then he went in for the kill.
Because Hoffman’s behaviors went unchallenged and were tolerated, they became his go-to teaching technique throughout his career. It was so far outside the norms of ethical conduct for a therapist or spiritual guide that it usually left everyone speechless, but few left. Those who did were ridiculed as not having the inner strength to do real Work. Hoffman justified himself by insisting that we couldn’t even see that we were just negative children. His job was to point out all the ways we acted out of negative love and that our resistance and denial were so strong it required a very strong hand. He used the “iron fist covered in the velvet glove of love.” And he let us know in no uncertain terms his job was thankless with very little reward. (My Lord, he reflected almost mirror sentiments as my Mother). Most independent observers would see these behaviors as pointing to some very deep level of psychosis.
Not only was his practice outrageous, his arrogance in the face of sound psychotherapy was astounding. There was no understanding of basic genetic ordering and impulses, no grasp of a complex set of emotional responses conditioned over time. There was only the economy of “buying love.” Every human action was only a calculated transaction to obtain the genuine affection, love and acceptance that you craved from infancy but were denied. That was it. He’d point to any behavior he thought was negative, self-defeating, counterproductive and echo in a whiny voice, “See mommy, now will you love me?”
It was long before the wounded child syndrome hit therapeutic TV, but Hoffman’s concept wasn’t even that sophisticated. He envisioned a pristine emotional harmony that had somehow been usurped by the vagaries of our parental conditioning perpetuated through generations. Hoffman repeated over and over, “everyone is guilty and no one to blame.” We were just the sum of sins of our fathers and mothers. The mechanism was simply learning to imitate your parents’ negative traits and internalize their negative admonitions. We acted in the exact same way to get the love we thought, no, knew we deserved or rebelled against it.
A quick anecdote about a scientific hoax demonstrates part of my thesis that Hoffman’s psychology was pure quackery. In 1972, National Geographic published an article about the “discovery” of a Stone Age tribe in the Philippines called the “Tasaday.” Hoffman, with the enthusiasm of a latter day Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was convinced that he had found the noble savage, and demonstrated the truth of Negative Love, that humankind’s natural state was the free exchange of emotional feelings without the blockage of parental conditioning.
There was, however, not one shred of evidence that this group was “pre-clothing, pre-fire-making, pre-anything cave-dwelling family unchanged since prehistoric times, who had no words for War or Anger, never fought among themselves & burst into tears if you brought up the subject of death.” It was an elaborate hoax created at the end of the Marcos regime. Their cave was only 8 miles from the nearest village, an easy trek for a steady stream of celebrities eager to connect with their pristine roots, and a quick trip home for tele-melodramas after a hard day’s work sitting around naked and speaking gibberish.
Of course the supporters of the Process will point out that Hoffman was not alone in falling for Marco’s wild fabrication. But I think it is extremely revealing of his naive psychological understanding, falling for the myth of a primitive people with no word for war, as if all psychological exploration of anger was misplaced.
Hoffman painted all negative behaviors passed from parent to child with this crude, broad brush. Sloganeering is a blunt instrument for self-analysis or understanding. In his crude psychological model, Negative Love refers to what might be understood as intergenerational guilt, and Hoffman grabbed anything to support his simple thesis: Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China to lay the groundwork for the Nixon visit and beginning of the end of détente was running all over the world to get approval from his father he’d never had in real life, but that something good might come from it. The absurdity of this reductionist analysis points to the messianic overlay of Hoffman’s thinking: if the world just got some understanding of negative love, if it were taught in the schools, if there were departments of psychology in major universities devoted to its study. . . .
The trauma passed from parent to child involves a complex psychological mechanism; it’s a psychological disorder, and there are several recommended therapies for treatment. But for Hoffman, treatable psychological disorders, stage fright or anorexia, for example, were lumped together with severe depression, and the solution is always the same: after experientially touching the repressed anger through a bitch session, or “bashing” as the PR professionals now call it, the client traces the origins of the negative influence back to his or her parental figures. Then some staged catharsis facilitates an emotional release.
I stayed and did the work. I had nowhere else to go, but I also trusted Claudio Naranjo. He had vouched for Hoffman, and urged him to develop a group process. Naranjo, as well as Dr. Ernie Pecci and other psychologists tried to tie whatever value they saw in Hoffman’s Process to the professional practice of psychotherapy. The basic structure of the analysis might have been original to Hoffman, but I am skeptical—he wasn’t that bright. Everything else was an adjustment by professional psychotherapists.
Claudio may have tried to justify and rationalize the framework of Hoffman's psychological insight, but I don’t think it was a very serious attempt. What was more serious was Claudio’s attempt to use the professional tools he’d learned, especially from Fritz Perls, to allow us to explore our anger towards our parents. We worked through the “Prosecution of Mother” which for Hoffman was just the lists of negative traits, silent and overt admonitions, writing an emotional autobiography and finally writing an angry letter.
A Huge Personal Breakthrough
Claudio said that even just a second of authentic experience would change our world. Under his direction, we worked several times a week in small groups of three people, and through role play, questioning and feedback, tried to understand in the most complete way possible the level and depth of adopting our parent’s negative attitudes and behaviors.
It took weeks for me to allow myself to express my own anger, but when I finally did touch the depth of my rage at my mother, it completely altered the course of my life. With the group members observing the person on the “hot seat” and providing feedback, we were instructed to touch the core of any latent anger we harbored towards our mothers.
So I was in the hot seat, and I tried to express my anger. No one in the group believed me. So I tried again. Again just surface complaints about a trivial matter. But then something inside me opened. I could use the word snapped. And my anguish and anger exploded. The pitch of my voice broke a glass that was sitting beside Sundari, a cherished friend in my support cohort.
This experience was for me one of the major breakthroughs of my entire adult life. It was as if a huge veil had been lifted, and I had to admit that I was an angry person. I could no longer pretend that I was somehow spared the anguish of a domineering parent. And with that realization, the intricate spiritual world of a young Jesuit seeker that I’d constructed as defense began to look like a sham, and 10 years of rigorous disciplined religious life began to crumble. I recognized a range of feelings that I’d struggled to avoid all my life, that I’d actually constructed my life to avoid feeling. And in that moment I became solidly engaged in the exploration to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom. It would be a very difficult, long process.
What is important for me to note here is that the breakthrough happened under Claudio’s guidance, carefully using the technique he’s learned from Perls. It was also, and perhaps this is just my bad luck, part of Claudio’s efforts to help Hoffman create the Group Process, and I conflated the psychological events which only reinforced my transference towards Hoffman. Hand in hand with an immense sense of freedom came the crippling burden of decades of dealing with transference to a narcissist who was also a sexual predator.
The “Bitch Session” was born
This is the actual story of how “bitch session” replaced the “anger letter” in Naranjo's SAT group. In the Hoffman Process it is an experiential expression of anger, directed at a parent, using explicit language, physical motion, beating pillows, and screaming. The invention of the “bitch session” was important because it was Hoffman's first experience of a person experiencing the level of emotional release that he had been unable to achieve with his “anger letter.” It also pointed to a rapid way to induce the level of feeling and emotion that is the hallmark of the current version of the Process.
When Hoffman used the Bitch Session in his 13 week Process, he stripped out the subtlety of Gestalt Therapy which he considered useless and didn't understand it anyway. All that remained were the Wiffle bats, pillows and fellow participants to egg you on. This also set the stage for the inevitable heart attacks and psychological breaks that became part of the cost of doing Process business.
But this also marked the end of Naranjo’s and Hoffman's collaboration. Hoffman announced that the “Defense of Mother” would be an “OK” place to finish, and that he would begin his own Process starting in January in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. I will take up the description of Hoffman’s first group in another post.
Hoffman came up to me privately and strongly suggested that I join his Tolman Hall Process. Looking back it was the beginning of his predatory sexual grooming. He was a very sick man.
If you want to read the sequel to this post, click on "Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process."
Here is a link to my other writing about the Process.
© Kenneth Ireland, 2021
Here is a link to my other writing about the Process.
© Kenneth Ireland, 2021
