Saturday, July 15, 2023

Bob Hoffman's Dirty Secrets

New Age Miracle or Fraud


Bob Hoffman and his famous Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, Hoffman Quadrinity Process, Quadrinity Process


By Kenneth Ireland



Part 1

Contents

Bamboozled

The Seekers After Truth meets the Hoffman Process

No Better than a Ouija Board

A Second of Authentic Experience

The Long Ride Home


© Kenneth Ireland

12/8/2022

Mcleod Ganj 

Himachal Pradesh, India


Bamboozled

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark


I heard Bob Hoffman tell his otherworldly story many times. 


In the middle of the night in 1968 in Oakland California, Hoffman was awakened from a deep sleep by the discontented ghost of a family friend, the renowned German psychiatrist Siegfried Fisher who had recently died. Dr. Fisher, as Hoffman always called him, stood at the end of his bed and revealed a key piece of psychological insight that had eluded his mentor, Sigmund Freud and the entire Viennese School: we human beings are blindly tied to repeating the mistakes and negative behaviors of our parents because we are starved for authentic love “Everyone is guilty and no one to blame.” Thus was born the concept of Negative Love and the "world famous" Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy; both have the dubious markings of revealed Truth, and Hoffman, an awakened Teacher.


Fisher then took Hoffman through a process freeing him from the negative conditioning from his parents, and erased the karmic link. Fischer disappeared with the promise to return and assist Hoffman to complete some of his own unfinished work, his karma, and that Hoffman could help him “move on.” Hoffman said he heard the phrase “doors will open” when he asked Fisher how he, a tailor, would enter the world of professional psychotherapy and present this insight as the missing piece, an antidote to the endless cycle of analysis.


The tale is as absurd as it was unlikely. Over time cracks inevitably started to appear in Hoffman’s narrative. The first crack was the obvious lie that Hoffman and Fischer had been friends or acquaintances introduced at synagogue by his wife’s family.

 

Hoffman presented a scenario of convivial after-dinner conversations with Fischer. They chatted and argued about the existence of the psychic realm, life after death, and questions about the efficacy of psychotherapy versus the Spiritualist Church’s doctrine: “truth” spoken by disembodied spirits to spirits inhabiting human bodies, satisfying karmic obligations. Fischer was the scientific materialist and would have none of it. Hoffman’s telling had the feel of an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil, psychotherapy vs. a psychic tailor, and in the end, the psychic declaring victory after death.


After hearing this part of Hoffman’s story, with slight variations, innumerable times, I also began to feel that Hoffman had an ax to grind with the enterprise of psycho-analysis, that he had probably had a failed experience in therapy. I asked Hoffman if he had been Fischer’s patient and, finally after many years, he admitted that he had been, although he claimed that he and his wife had seen Fischer for family therapy with their son Michael. I have confirmed through reliable sources that the story was another lie. Hoffman himself had been Fisher’s long term patient. I began to suspect that he had quit while still in transference. 


Who was Siegfried Fischer? Hoffman claimed that Fischer was an acquaintance, a friend of his wife’s family, a German psychiatrist who managed to escape the country in 1936, making his way to San Francisco. I confirmed from the public record that Siegfried Fischer did emigrate in the 40’s and practiced psychotherapy at Langley Porter. Fischer’s son David contacted me after reading some of my online writing. He maintained that his father was never a close personal friend of Hoffman or Hoffman’s wife. David filed a lawsuit against Hoffman to cease using his father’s name, “Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy.” Hoffman did not contest David’s claim, and changed the name of the FHPT to the Quadrinity Process. However, Hoffman still claimed, both in private conversation and group presentations, a personal friendship with Fischer and that Fischer was his spirit guide. 

To complicate the investigation, as if it were not already cloudy enough, Hoffman was a sexual predator. I had first hand experience, and the effects of his abuse lingered for decades. At 78 I thought that I had to be resigned that the trauma caused by his selfish and unethical behavior would last for the rest of my life. If the criteria for resolution is that I can forgive and forget, it was not satisfied. It made no difference that he was a closeted homophobic queer, and that it had been a severe impediment to his happiness. Yes, everyone is guilty but I continued to blame him. I also gave up trying to see some “wounded healer” motivation as a factor in his psychic therapy.  What’s the word? Bunk, as in complete nonsense.


I am amazed that no one, not one single person other than me, actually undertook a real investigation of Hoffman’s claims. Everyone, teachers, licensees, therapists, clients, simply believed Hoffman’s disembodied spirit at the foot of the bed story. Still, facts in my face, I fell under his thrall.


So how was I bamboozled? In October of 1973 over several months of psychological investigation in Naranjo’s group, I had an awakening. I saw that I was totally responsible for my life, exactly as it was. The insight would completely change my life, and I am grateful to Naranjo for providing the platform for the experience. It was my bad luck that Hoffman was also in the room. That was 50 years ago. I gave a charlatan power over me.


When I read Henry Miller’s account of his experience just looking at a photograph of Madame Blavatsky, I understood him completely. Miller writes: “Now I don’t know if that had anything to do with what happened next, but I had a flash, I came to the realization that I was responsible for my whole life, whatever had happened. I used to blame my family, society, my wife . . . and that day I saw so clearly that I had nobody to blame but myself. I put everything on my own shoulders and I felt so relieved: Now I’m free, no one else is responsible. And that was a kind of awakening, in a way.”


The Seekers After Truth meet the Hoffman Process  

Seduced by the promise of an easy path, countless others have jumped for what appeared to be a lifeboat when they were floundering and in pain. And if we’ve managed to save a few bucks, there are always scoundrels with a life jacket for sale. I ask myself why I was such an idiot, but to soften the harshness, I pose the question in a different way: why do intelligent people believe nonsense? My friend Stan Stefancic tried to guide me, “Remember that there's a lot of Naranjo in the Process,” I thought long and hard to determine if Naranjo’s input was enough of a justification to accept Hoffman’s preposterous story. I tried to understand why Naranjo took Hoffman to be some kind of modern day shaman, and supported his work. 


Naranjo did support Hoffman and tried to plant some professional practices in the Process, but I couldn't really find a good answer nor in any way understand Naranjo's infatuation with Hoffman. Naranjo was a psychotherapist of ability and insight. After his experience in Arica, he was always on the lookout for tools that might enhance his work, and Hoffman needed Naranjo’s imprimatur. It was a relationship fraught with jealousy on Hoffman’s part as well as a good deal of passive aggressive behavior.


Naranjo had met Hoffman and did his rudimentary Process of Psychic Therapy in the basement of Hoffman’s tailor shop on 15th Street in Oakland. It was emotional and exotic enough to capture Naranjo’s interest. And it allegedly came from an “other worldly” source which always caught his attention. He says that after the experience, he felt he should help Hoffman shape a group process, and become his John the Baptist. Yes, Naranjo really used this messianic analogy. Both men painted their collaboration as destined by heaven. I do not claim to have any secret knowledge about their relationship, but I do know that it was as codependent as the analogy is preposterous. Members of Naranjo’s SAT were the guinea pigs in their initial experiment. 


In Naranjo’s book, End of Patriarchy: And the Dawning of a Tri-Une Society, there is a chapter about this first group, Naranjo claims that he, Naranjo, directed, and that his indications were delivered by Rosalyn Schaffer with Hoffman a silent witness. This is simply not true. Hoffman was far from silent. It was a rocky road. Naranjo’s collaboration ended before the Process was complete. Although both men tried to paint their rupture in the best possible light, it did not end well. I will try to be as honest as I can about what I observed. I was present at every session through to the point where Hoffman and Naranjo ended their experiment. When I speculate and say something not substantiated by the record, I will alert you.

___________


About 8:30 on a cold Tuesday night in the early fall, I sat on the floor of a ramshackle old fraternity house near the UC Berkeley campus with the new students in Naranjo’s SAT 2. Naranjo Introduced Bob Hoffman as a person who had a unique insight into our parental conditioning. Naranjo said that he’d 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. Then after these few short words, he turned the meeting over to the mild mannered and soft-spoken Schaffer, and left the room. She delivered a few “indications” about the way the process would proceed, and yielded the floor to Hoffman. He was hardly silent. 


To this day I remember many details of that bizarre evening quite clearly. Hoffman wore an expensive sport coat and garish tie while we were mostly in jeans and tee shirts. He appeared extremely uncomfortable standing behind Schaffer, and when he began to speak, it was obvious that he was not educated in any psychological discipline. His presentation was gruff and aggressive. He dominated the room, alternately talking then yelling in a kind of dumbed-down jargon, the teaching style that would later be recognized as a kind of trademark.


A tailor with no psychological training told 30-35 eager, inquisitive, mostly young, highly educated 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 negative, almost perverse relationships with our parents who didn’t know the first thing about love. 


The definition of Negative Love was “illogical logic and nonsensical sense but masochistically true or why would we do it.” No questions. 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. Hoffman set himself up to be the point of transference for all the negative emotions we’d inherited from our parents. They were the main reason that we were miserable. There was no invitation to observe our reactions. No one knew anything—nobody except him. He had received an other-worldly message in a revelatory middle-of-the-night visitation when his spirit guide, Dr. Siegfried Fisher, taught us how to get a loving divorce from mommy and daddy.


We were then told to close our eyes and imagine many steps that were detailed as we built a 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 from our spirit guide. These were real spirits and real messages, not some imaginary construct, and if we didn’t believe him, it was negative transference.


Once we were “psychically open,” Hoffman asked us to imagine holding a lovely 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 of course there was no succulent fruit in our hands, 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.


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 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. I knew it was ridiculous, but 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, resolved to stay and do the work.

___________


Naranjo told us that even just a second of authentic experience could change our world.


We launched into what Hoffman called “The Prosecution of Mother.” I calculate that the exercise lasted more than a month. For Hoffman lists of negative traits and admonitions were key to the Prosecution of Mother, but 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 Hoffman saw that he judged to be negative. The one criteria for the lists was length. A short list was proof of denial. Then there was what he called the emotional autobiography with mother. Again there was no real analysis. It just had to be emotional.


Under Naranjo’s direction, we worked several times a week in small groups of three people. We were instructed to touch the core of any latent anger we harbored towards our mothers through role play, questioning and feedback. The aim was to understand in the most complete way possible its level and depth.


It took weeks for me to allow myself to express any anger. When I was in the hot seat, I tried to express anger, but no one in the group believed me. So I tried again. Again just surface complaints about a trivial matter. This went on for more than a week. But then one evening something inside me opened. I could use the word snapped. My anguish and anger exploded. The pitch of my voice broke a glass that was sitting beside a woman friend in my support cohort. 


The experience was for me one of the major breakthroughs of my entire adult life. It was as if a huge veil had been lifted. 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, ones 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. 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. 


My life story began unraveling. The trajectory of my life changed, and I began a long and difficult journey. I recognized on a very deep level that I harbored a well of repressed anger towards my parents, my rearing, and the Jesuits. I didn't realize it at the time, but I turned my back on 10 years of rigorous religious training and had to start afresh. 


Hoffman’s contribution in this equation is that he was the loudest voice in the room when my emotional defenses began to crumble. But given the vagaries of our psychological make-up, 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 sexual predator. Because it was on the level of peer counseling, no one could provide the kind of professional feedback that the situation demanded. Naranjo for all his insight and professionalism was negligent.


I was left floundering. My guide was no better than a ouija board.

___________


At about the same time, it became clear that Hoffman was frustrated with the pace of the process and the depth of Naranjo’s exploration. The strain between the men started to show. Hoffman felt that a person just had to “open” to the emotions that he or she had either denied or repressed. Naranjo’s work with Fritz Perls and his own psychological training, I think, opened the emotional world for exploration, but Hoffman was not interested in anything more than the psychic and emotional motivation for adopting the negative behaviors of parent or parent surrogate. He’d worked with people in his one-on-one process in a matter of 4 or 5 weeks. 


Hoffman’s professional behavior was also problematic. He claimed he had to break us down so that we could build ourselves up which gave him 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 tough-love, or alternatively good cop-bad cop, 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, and 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.


I was appalled. This unprofessional behavior went unchallenged. He justified it as “breaking down to build up.” Any therapist in the group was singled out for harsh attention. My guess is that Hoffman, the psychic tailor playing in a world of highly trained mental health professionals, needed to be a bully. He continued it throughout his career. He had a very low level of self-esteem, and needed the endorsement of a man of Naranjo’s stature. This further complicated their relationship, making honesty impossible.


Hoffman’s behaviors went unchallenged. They were 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.


Hoffman’s arrogance in the face of sound psychotherapy went unchallenged. He had no understanding of basic genetic ordering and impulses, no grasp of a complex set of emotional responses conditioned over time. The only economy was “buying love.” Every human action was a calculated transaction to obtain the genuine affection, love and acceptance that you craved from infancy but were denied. He’d point to any behavior he thought was negative, self-defeating, counterproductive and taunt in a whiny voice, “See mommy, now will you love me?” Hoffman repeated his maxim over and over, “everyone is guilty and no one’s 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.


After about a month it was clear to me that Naranjo lost control of the process, and Hoffman was increasingly unhappy when Naranjo tried to regain control, particularly in insisting on the pace of the work. Their much heralded collaboration lasted 9 weeks on the outside. After weeks working on “Mother Bitch session” (now called “bashing”), Hoffman had enough of the careful exploration of repressed anger, and suddenly announced that he and Naranjo had reached a friendly agreement to end their experiment, and Naranjo’s participation, after the “Defense of Mother.” 


Hoffman did get something from the SAT Group that has become a hallmark of the Process. The Wiffle bat and overstuffed pillow have become synonymous with releasing repressed anger, something that he had tried unsuccessfully in his psychic readings by having his patients write “an anger letter” to his or her parents after they’d written an emotional autobiography. He had little use for Naranjo’s therapeutic exploration, and certainly not the methodology of Fritz Perls, or the Enneagram for that matter. It took too long, and actually went to the root of anger. Hoffman only cared about tapping a deep emotional reservoir. The process of expressing anger, followed by the fabricated understanding that came from his psychic readings, would reappear again and again in the development of the current Process. Hoffman loved an emotional jolt. He was a junkie and a one-trick pony.

___________


With appropriate fanfare, Hoffman announced that he would be leading his own 13 week Process beginning that January. He made a point of taking me aside and strongly encouraging me to join his pilot Process at Tolman Hall. He told me that I would go on to lead groups, and that I should definitely train under Dr. Ernie Pecci whose PSI Institute would be taking over the Process. I was one of only a handful of SAT members who did. In retrospect, Hoffman was just following the predator’s script, grooming me for sexual conquest. His unethical and criminal behavior would play out over the next year.


In late January of ‘73, 50 or so people gathered for Hoffman’s first 13 week group Process of Psychic therapy in a nondescript rented classroom in UC Berkeley’s Tolman Hall, the home of its psychology department. Hoffman believed that location could bestow a measure of legitimacy.. We met every Monday night, and an assignment was due by Wednesday. It was more of a forced march than psychological inquiry. The main elements of the current Process were there, a rigid set of exercises, the requirement to complete the assignments with as much emotional expression as possible, and to be on time. Keeping up meant in Hoffman’s estimation that you were willing to break down your defenses and see yourself clearly.


We were told that imaginary conversations had the same function as Hoffman using his psychic power to look into our parents' history. We would discover actual events and circumstances of their programming, and could tap into the same deep unconscious emotional knowledge which contained the truth about our parents’ rearing. There’s a proper term to describe this well established psychological principle. Nonsense. Total nonsense.



The Long Ride Home

Shortly after 5 on a hot Wednesday afternoon, I hand delivered my “Emotional Autobiography with Father'' to Hoffman’s office on the second floor of a building in downtown Oakland. His secretary had already left. Hoffman was recording his feedback for another patient on a cheap cassette player. He’d thrown his feet up on the desk. I stood awkwardly in the half open doorway. There was no chair, no invitation to engage in a conversation.


He told me to hand him my work. Right on the spot he’d read a paragraph, comment on the emotional tone, and then make a simplistic, predictable connection between the specific circumstances I’d described and a negative pattern or character trait that he asserted I’d adopted from my father in an attempt to bargain for love.

 

Hoffman read through to an incident about my father resetting the stone wall at the back of our lot. As Dad was lifting stones into a wheelbarrow, he uncovered the nest of a woodchuck who’d built her nest in a cranny between the rocks. As she ferociously defended her cubs, my father killed her and her cubs with his shovel. As I remembered it, he began to beat her viciously. Her screams were chilling. 

 

Hoffman complimented the emotional tone of my writing, but then he began to raise his voice. Obviously my Dad was a homosexual he said, and then, “You’re gay too, aren’t you?” I countered how he could deduce that my dad was gay based on bludgeoning a woodchuck? His voice became louder and louder. He just repeated “You’re gay.” Now he was almost screaming—obviously my father was a sadist. What? Then he yelled, “You’re gay? Don’t play games with me. I know these things.” I said, of course I had gay feelings, but I was unsure if I was gay. “Don’t play games with me,” his voice was now very angry, his face red. I had watched Hoffman attack clients, but I could barely believe that I was now his victim. 

 

My Dad was not gay. The idea of having a same sex relationship never crossed his mind in his entire life. Hoffman’s readings were projections and his own pathology. What he asserted was so off base that it isn’t worthy of even the weirdest pop psychology. But because there was one note of truth in analysis–that I was in denial about my own homosexuality–the whole thing became plausible and I destroyed any possibility of a real relationship with my father for the next 30 years. In exchange I got the debilitating transference to Hoffman. 


I don’t remember much about finishing the Process. It really had become a kind of forced march. I do remember that the price of that first group Process was about $300. The real cost was devastating. Instead of dealing with coming out in care of a professional, compassionate therapist, I had the bad luck to land a closeted gay predator as my guide. When I described this incident to my therapist, his immediate response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And he did.

___________


My parents arrived in Berkeley just after the semester ended. The plan was to drive back to Connecticut together, spend some time with them, do my annual Jesuit retreat and then return to California. 


There was a kind of ritual for completing your emotional divorce from your parents—after you’d gotten your parents full attention, you just said “I love you,” and kissed them. My parents thought it very strange, but I always followed instructions as closely as possible. No matter how awkward it felt, you had to do it, Hoffman said. It was extremely awkward, but I dutifully followed all Bob’s directions, disregarding my doubts. I even rehearsed the process several times, fearing that there was some piece that I’d miss.


My parents and I drove to southern California and I took my mother to Disneyland which she loved. Then we drove to the Grand Canyon which my dad loved, and continued down through the Southwest. I had planned to spend one night at Brophy Prep, the Jesuit high school in Phoenix, and visit some younger Jesuits whom I’d met and liked very much. I met my friends and disappeared into the Jesuit residence while my parents went to their hotel.


During that whole year, I’d kept a journal detailing my dreams, my work with the Enneagram, all the Fisher-Hoffman work including lengthy lists of what I thought were my parents’ negative traits, writing assignments about early life, with lots of emphasis on the negative memories, imaginary conversations with myself as a child and with my parents as children. It also detailed my coming out, falling in love with a guy named Danny, and my first sexual experiences. None of Hoffman’s psychic therapy made any sense out of context, and it was very personal so much of it made no sense anyway.


When they picked me up in the morning, neither said a word. My mother was driving. She just looked straight ahead, and got on the highway. She was driving very fast. Finally, after a lot of upset and questions, my mother announced that we were going straight home. She’d found the diary that I’d kept during the past year in Berkeley, and read it from beginning to end. She always felt that she had complete authority in my life, so of course she was entitled to access my private life though she said she thought that she’d be reading poetry.


She said that I was sick. She told me that she and my father had decided to send me to a psychiatrist for electric shock therapy, that she called my Jesuit superiors and asked for me to be thrown out. I was stunned. No matter how complete or thorough my personal work, I could never change my parents. 

 

The drive across country was almost unbearable, the interaction with my parents varying from loud anger with my mother, to complete disgust with my father’s silence. We arrived at their home, and I left to see my superiors in Boston. They supported me—I was a 30 year old man, and had not hidden anything from them. But my already strained relationship with my parents entered what would become the new normal for the next 20 years—alternating icy communication interspersed with attempts to restore some civility. It would not change much until each of them approached death.


The life that I’d know for nearly a decade was beginning to fall apart.

___________


When I returned to the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley that fall, my superiors and I together decided that I would reconsider ordination. I was not thrown out of the Jesuits, but I stopped any academic work at the seminary, and took a leave of absence. Technically this is called exclaustration, a person with religious vows is allowed to live outside the cloister, or formal religious life. Thus began an extremely difficult period of my life. I loved being a Jesuit. If it weren’t for the obligation of celibacy, I might have been able to carve out a happy and successful career as a priest. 


Another man in Naranjo’s SAT, Hal Slate, and I rented a small apartment on the Berkeley/Oakland border. It was just a short walk from the White Horse, a college-town gay bar which became the place where I was introduced to gay life.


Towards the end of September, Hoffman started to show up at the bar every night around 9 o’clock, leaning awkwardly against the elbow bar, pretending to look off into some distant corner of the universe. I said hello. He tried small talk, claiming that he normally stopped by on his way home. Another lie! He later admitted that he never went to gay bars because being recognized might negatively affect his important work. In reality he was tracking my movements, and making himself known. This is stalking–exactly out of the predator’s playbook.


I recall one conversation in particular which helps me accurately date Hoffman’s obsessive pursuit; it also should have alerted me that he knew exactly what he was doing. Almost in passing, and perhaps as a way of excusing or justifying his behavior, he mentioned that although the usual period for a therapist seeing a patient was 6 months after the professional relationship had ended, he thought that I had so completely and lovingly divorced myself from my parents, perhaps the usual 6 months could be compressed. Misinformation, or perhaps he considered himself above the law. In California, “Therapy Never Includes Sexual Behavior. . . . Sexual contact of any kind between a therapist and a client is unethical and illegal in the State of California. Additionally, with regard to former clients, sexual contact within two years after termination of therapy is also illegal and unethical.”*  Less than 4 months after finishing my work with him, he nervously gave me his “private” phone number, and asked if he could call me.


Finally, I agreed to go out to dinner with him. He imagined it was a date. I really thought it was dinner. I can’t in any way recreate the events or the conversation that ended with him returning to my apartment, but as with many sexual predators, Hoffman’s ability to read his victim, what he would describe as his “psychic powers,” lent themselves to manipulation. He’s been my therapist for almost a year, so he had a real window into my psychology that was far more accurate than his psychic reading. After an extremely awkward series of interactions, a lot of “why don’t we try this?” and “do you like that?” I found myself on the living room floor of my shared apartment with a man I found sexually repulsive, naked, on my stomach, being brutally raped. After Hoffman had his orgasm, my anus was bleeding. 


Then the situation became surreal—I listened to apologies which were actually blame shifting—Hoffman told me that pain was normal when a man first had anal sex and that in time I’d learn to enjoy it—that anal sex was an important part of spiritual development. It mirrored the mother-father god, both active and passive. I remember this statement after all these years because of the horror and lunacy of justifying rape in the name of some intrasex deity. 


I didn’t throw him out as I should have. Everytime I think about this, I ask myself why didn’t I say, “This isn’t working. Why don’t you put on your clothes and leave?” But I just kept my mouth shut and endured him trying to apologize for physically hurting me. When he asked if we could have another date, I did say no. However, in true co-dependent fashion, I left the door open to further contact as friends. I realize now that I had to—I was in transference with him. In fact we maintained a strained acquaintance until he died.


All this happened only 13 months after that cold Tuesday evening when Naranjo introduced Hoffman to our SAT group. I had hoped to avoid a painful and lewd description of the sexual encounter, but I’ve decided to write about it openly, including its repercussions. Including my own missteps is the only possible path I see to freeing myself. If my writing really leads to liberation, “the function of freedom," in the words of Toni Morrison, "is to free someone else.” 


I came out as a gay man in the Hoffman’s Process, but it wasn’t coming to terms with a part of myself that I’d kept hidden, festering under parental and societal disapproval. It wasn’t part of a program of careful analysis. I wasn’t led by a professional to uncover layers of self-deception. Rather I stood uncomfortably in the doorway to Hoffman’s office, while he, red in the face, screamed that I was gay, told me not to play games and that I couldn’t love myself. I sensed the same angry, defensive stance in the way he dealt with his own homosexuality and he certainly displayed its brutality when he forced anal intercourse.


Within a year of our encounter, I’d left the Jesuits, moved to San Francisco with Hal Slate and began experiencing the burgeoning Castro gay scene of the ‘70’s. I became promiscuous, but, at the same time, I was very unhappy and frustrated with sex itself. I could not achieve orgasm. I cannot claim that Hoffman’s brutal abuse was the direct cause of my sexual dysfunction but I am certain that it played some part. But my solution to the problem became more of a problem. As in my college days, alcohol became an antiseptic for the wounds. But now pot, cocaine and eventually methamphetamines, became part of my life. I began to display the classic side effects of sexual abuse.


1 comment:

Doug McFerran said...

Ken, it takes both courage and incredible humility to open your story to the world. I am glad that you did. I am now somewhat grateful that at the time I was going through a severe period of depression professional help was not offered me (just Father Healy saying my reluctance to take first vows was a temptation against my vocation that I should resist). What if I had been unlucky enough to get caught up, as you were, in a malignant situation. I would not have known better and, most likely, I would have left the Society and been all the worse off.

As it was, it would take five years and Don Maloney's recommendation to read up on psychotherapy that I began to get a handle on just what was happening with me. The final breakthrough would be years later with my exposure to non-Western techniques.

Doug, a California Jesuit from 1952-62