Wednesday, April 24, 2024

The Death of the Public Intellectual

The Death of the Public Intellectual does not signal that we are all brain-dead


Ideas have power. Ideas can change minds or reinforce tightly held beliefs and prejudices. Ideas can capture the public’s imagination. I’m not talking about sound bites or the flagrant manipulation of sentiment by appealing to racism, fear, or hysteria of one brand or another. At the risk of sounding overblown or pretentious, I will put forward a few ideas that might have legs: democracy and fascism, climate responsibility, the ethical life, the role of imagination, and spirituality. These topics interest me, and I would hope that joining in an intellectual conversation, sharing and discussing our ideas in a civil way, might help us find a way forward.


Sadly, this kind of conversation is on life support in today's information environment. We are treated to speculation about the size of Trump's sexual organ, the length of his time in the saddle, Melania's absence, and his devastation that there are no crowds protesting his trial in lower Manhattan. I never thought that I would be cheering David Pecker for his ability to string together a few coherent, believable sentences. Instead of a real conversation, we are reduced to sloganeering and “bothsidesism” that includes vile insults as well as calls for execution. Will it be by firing squad, or maybe just shot with an AK 47 and unrecognizably mutilated?


Someone posted on my Twitter account a clip of an animated Marjorie Taylor Green ranting incoherently about fake meat Bill Gates grew in a "peach tree dish." Surely, it is a delicacy that will add to the wonders of Georgia. The woman is totally unhinged, yet she gets lots of coverage, and this is exactly what she wants, what the Right wants, and what her donors demand. This is the script: monopolize our attention, clog the airtime, and then move ahead with the other agenda, and we're not talking QAnon or some other nonsense. It doesn't matter whether MTG is an idiot or an Oxonian. She's just a pawn. Their Queen is about to checkmate our democracy.


If you did a survey—now at this moment, not yesterday before the Peach Tree idiocy—you’d find that more respondents believe Bill Gates is experimenting with synthetic meat and that it's finding its way to your neighborhood butcher without proper labeling. I’ll put money on it.


In the process, MTG has also heaped more distrust on the FDA and the entire expert class of technocrats who are ruining America. She’s also created an atmosphere where people who have done good work, gone to college, and gained some standing in their communities for careful thought, attention to science, and language are pilloried. Of course, you don’t have to know a damn thing about scientific experiments to know that we’re being poisoned by fake meat. Actually the less you know, the more credible you are. There's not much of an audience for a man or woman who actually knows something about the real poisons that can infect the food chain. They’re just boring.


Who qualifies as a public intellectual and what is their role? Narrowly defined, they would be an academic, philosopher, economist, or scientist who devotes some of their time to commenting on public issues and, I would venture, subjects that a large number of people find interesting. In science, both Neil deGrasse and Steven Hawkins fit the bill. For all his faults, the late Milton Friedman would have to be included as testimony that his or her opinions don’t have to be as solid as Euclidean geometry.


Who are the current crop of public intellectuals? Dan Rather comes to mind. With less reverence for academia in America, there are no philosophers such as Albert Camus or Bertrand Russell. Rachel Maddow gets high marks; she’s an Oxonian, yet Google calls her a television presenter. John Oliver and Steve Colbert are very bright and provide sharp commentary in their quirky way. Charlie Rose was in the running until he demonstrated that he'd disconnected his head from his penis. Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal are no longer with us. Thomas Friedman tries. No one today commands the respect of an Edward R. Murrow, but there must be people who could assume that role, yet as I survey the Op-Ed page across America, brilliant voices do not speak out clearly and strongly for fear of getting mowed down.


We've always had crazies, even in mighty positions. Sometimes, the powerful maniacs have kept a low profile, or maybe they just didn’t stop taking their meds. But now after Trump in this era of Fox News, the Marjorie Green’s of the airwaves flaunt their stupidity because the media will lap it up, and that’s key.


When I lived in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, an older woman installed herself daily on one of the benches set on Broadway's median divide and screamed at the traffic. None of it made much sense, a 70’s version of Fake Meat and Peach Tree Dishes. But, my point—no one paid her any attention. If MTG were shouting her nonsense from the same bench, they'd have to close Broadway to make room for the TV crews.


The woman I used to see at 102nd Street has now been replaced by a silent public monument. She didn’t make the cut. Dan Rather has 2.5 million followers on Twitter, and MTG has almost 900,000. She's still behind, but her brand of insanity is getting exposure. Lauren Boebert has 1.3 million! Watch out, Dan. They’re coming after you.


If you can't shut her up, stop paying attention to her or giving her undue attention—just stop it.






*Daniel Drezne made these nominations:


1) Ta-Nehisi Coates: Any book or long-form essay of his becomes the topic of conversation among elites. That’s influence.


2) Masha Gessen: I have found her thoughts about the Age of Trump and the Age of Hysteria surrounding Trump to be invaluable. She might even be right about Trump acting more like a teenager than a toddler.


3) Francis Fukuyama: Many people would have a hard time repeating something like “The End of History,” which holds up better than you think. However, Fukuyama’s latest work on political decay has proven to be both prescient and vital.


4) Ron Chernow: I suspect some might not think of Chernow as an intellectual, to which I would respond by noting that Chernow’s biographies lead to reinterpretations of American history. If nothing else, reading Grant will cause multiple generations to rethink what we were taught about Grant — and Robert E. Lee — when we were kids. Since the Civil War still plays a role in current political life, that is no mean achievement.


5) David Autor: The hardest-working labor economist in the profession and probably the least well-known name on this list, Autor's research into the effects of technological change and globalization on the American worker guides much of the current conversation on these topics.


Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Bob Hoffman's Dirty Secrets, Part 2

The Dirty Secrets of the Hoffman Process, Part 2
New Age Miracle or Fraud

eBook about Bob Hoffman and his famous Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, Hoffman Quadrinity Process.

By Kenneth Ireland

Contents

Metatron, Interlude with an Archangel
Debunking The Big Lie
The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman
The Final Act
#GayMeToo
Moving towards a Conclusion
Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

© Kenneth Ireland
12/8/2022
Mcleod Ganj
Himachal Pradesh, India

Metatron, Interlude with an Archangel 

A friend who is a cult expert working in Australia says that most people who get involved in cults have a significant spiritual opening that cements their allegiance. That was certainly true in my case, but I also needed some buttressing and emotional support. I am not alone. The initial experience fades, or its unfolding takes more time than expected. The whole process requires a difficult-to-maintain level of self-care.

When I took my leave of absence from the Jesuits, I was broke. The question became how do I make a living? In this regard, Hoffman was true to his word and recommended me to Dr. Ernie Pecci, who was taking over Hoffman’s work. I began training at Pecci’s Center for Psycho-Spiritual Integration. I was to be a leader for the gay group and take individuals through the Process under Ernie’s supervision. The pay was $1000 a month. I needed an income, and in the 1970s, PSI paid a good middle-class salary for what, in the real world, might be described as an internship, though it lacked any professional training that normally proceeded with it.

Our professional training amounted to little more than going through the process of psychic therapy and experiencing some change, though it was impossible to measure. Working under professional supervision would be further training. Ernie was a fully trained and licensed psychotherapist with an M.D. after his name, but he had to classify us as spiritual teachers or guides. Our official titles skirted his legal liability for offering psychological treatment with our ragtag group of untrained psychic therapists.

Pecci tried to establish a professional environment. We worked a week of training, client meetings, group sessions, and meetings with Pecci to review our client’s progress. Most of our training was designed to hone our presentations to create the emotional response necessary to achieve a “loving divorce.” We were presenting Hoffman’s Process. 

Under Pecci’s supervision, there were some extremely dangerous incidents among the people I worked with. Irving was a high-level, successful financial advisor from Marin. I would characterize his engagement in the process as slightly more than he would give to a spreadsheet. Pecci encouraged me to push him a bit during the Mother bitch session with its high level of physical, verbal, and emotional expression. I called him the following day. He did not pick up the phone. The next day, or it might have been a few days later, I finally got through to either his wife or one of his children. Irving had had a near-fateful heart attack the day after the “Bitch session.” I visited him in the hospital. He recovered but never finished the Process. However, he thanked me for pushing him. He’d never even suspected that he had a heart condition. Within six months, he divorced his wife and moved his girlfriend into this beach cottage. We kept in touch for several years. He did finally die of another heart attack during a movie. I attended his funeral in Stinson Beach. Irving was the immediate cause of the liability waiver, which all Process students must now sign.

Another of my clients, J, a highly bright gay man, was trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse. He just didn’t show up for one session. He had been hospitalized for a psychiatric breakdown. J never finished the Process and remained extremely angry that he’d been pushed over the edge and that we’d allowed this event to occur. With J, I realized that I might be in over my head, that the Process did dig deeply into a person’s psychological makeup, and that I was not adequately equipped to handle what might come up.

Pecci asked me to work with one of his longtime psychiatric patients, Antonio, a gay man from Mexico who, in Pecci’s evaluation, was a borderline schizophrenic. Antonio was on a maintenance level of medication to help him cope with hallucinations. Of course, it would have been impossible for Antonio to do any group work. Still, Pecci thought that I could take Antonio through the steps of the Process one-on-one, with particular emphasis on the ritual and visualization aspects, and see if he could begin to function without antipsychotic drugs. I should note that this was entirely counter to then-accepted psychiatric guidelines, but in the psycho-spiritual world, miracles were not a matter of scientific evidence or evaluation. They were the expected norm.

I worked with Antonio for about six months, talking with him four to six hours every week. I found him a part-time job as a janitor in a gay bar near his apartment. When he began to live without medication, he felt so energized and was so much more present that we were encouraged. We continued to do the steps and exercises of the Process slowly. Then he began to report hearing voices, and most disturbing that there were evil and demonic people on the other side of the mirrors in the bar spying on him while he worked. He was headed towards a significant psychotic episode. Still, I was counseled to continue talking with Antonio, even sitting with him in the bar and talking with him about the figures' personalities behind the mirrors. Eventually, the owners of the bar had to fire Antonio. He had a significant breakdown, was hospitalized, and involuntarily returned to Mexico. 

Aside from these cases of medical emergencies and psychotic breakdowns, the majority of people who did Hoffman’s Process did experience some degree of personal freedom. There was relief from what Hoffman called Negative Love or “patterns,” which became shorthand for any debilitating behavior that caused personal or interpersonal problems. However, I began to feel that there were no lasting results, or perhaps, in the best-case scenario, the immediate results took longer to solidify.

There are only anecdotal stories--people dazzled by what, in retrospect, was an induced emotional experience. It usually occurs without drugs, but not in all cases. But by and large, people quickly returned to familiar behaviors, or worse, more entrenched and justified patterns. This encouraged cult-like recriminations and accusations of not measuring up and falling away. But there was at least that memory of freedom and a desire to regain and maintain it

The popular culture of the ’70s considered psychiatry establishment and rebellion was hip; we adopted the mantra “Fake it Till you Make It,” which was adopted by the self-help movement after a con man, Glenn W. Turner, used it to popularize his get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme in the ’70s. Reinforced by the like-minded Napoleon Hill, our “fake it” belief system remained intact even after Turner was arrested in 1972 on 86 counts of securities fraud. If Hoffman’s New Age miracle results weren’t immediately available,” just hang in there.” The fact that a man was a criminal didn’t negate the validity of insight, or that is what I wanted to believe.

I’d fallen for it. A significant problem was the Spiritualist Church and its reliance on messages from the other side. After a year and a half, I thought I could do it better or imagined I could. Together with Nancy “Janabai” Dannenberg and Glen Lewis, we set out to present the Process in San Francisco. We called our company Metatron Associates after the archangel whom Oscar Ichazo claimed was his spiritual guide. Glen had been among the 25 or so people from Esalen who, with Claudio Naranjo and John Lilly, had been in the first group that traveled to Arica, Chile, to work with Ichazo.

The trappings of the spiritualist church repulsed me, and I imagined I could rescue the insight out of that swamp. When Nancy, Glenn, and I prepared the script for our 13-week sessions, I advocated cutting as much as we could of the trappings of the spiritualist church. If not fraudulent, they were, at best, embarrassing and useless. We dropped Hoffman’s inflated claims that the Process was the only therapy that anyone needed, that it was Freud’s missing link. We toned down Hoffman’s fire and brimstone tale of emotional abuse and introduced conversations that allowed clients to explore how their early programming influenced their lives here and now. But it was not enough, and even, to some degree, my experience was that the Process didn’t work without these quasi-magical elements.

As I look back on how I intended to separate myself from the specter of Dr. Fischer by substituting the archangel who guided a Bolivian cult leader, it’s quite beyond me. The Kabbalah tells us that God permitted Metatron to view His countenance, an honor not granted to most heavenly hosts. Metatron also acted as the scribe who recorded the choices and decisions made by humans and the divine in the Book of Life. As a result, he knew and guarded all those secrets. Slightly inflated, but in the spiritual culture of those heady days, Werner Erhard had sold used cars; L. Ron Hubbard had written science fiction; Bob Hoffman was a tailor; Henry Korman was an architect; Oscar Ishzo had reportedly immersed himself in esoterica; Hameed Ali had been working towards an advanced degree at a prestigious university. Naranjo had at least been well-trained in psychiatry. Of course, there was room for three slightly lost post-hippies from Berkeley to join the surge and invoke Metatron.

The people I mentioned were not devoid of spiritual insight—quite the contrary. There had to be some insight or experience, but coupled with the need to make money, they devised a Ponzi scheme. Peer counselors with minimal training were tapping into their clients' psyches with virtually no psychological training, no accountability, and no professional supervision. After their clients had some experience of freedom, real or imagined, they were encouraged to go out and recruit their friends and family to undertake the Process. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There were Hoffman teachers with backgrounds in professional gambling, art history, music, disc jockeys, former sannyasins of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and the Unitarian ministry. To their credit, some of these teachers, including my former partner Nancy Dannenberg, have earned professional degrees in counseling or therapy. However, their roots are still in Hoffman’s otherworldly revelation.

Listening deeply to 40 individuals a year took a personal toll. I didn’t have the skill set to cope. When Pecci called and told me that Hoffman had withdrawn Pecci’s license to present psychic therapy and threatened a lawsuit against anyone doing his 13-week course, we closed Metatron. Our interlude with the archangel had ended. I certainly had no stomach or money to face off in court over what Hoffman called his intellectual property.

We usually think of arrogance as a sin or a volitional character defect. The perpetrator exerts his will over another human to gain power and control. I think it can just as easily fall under the rubric of “group think.” I tell myself that my good intentions excuse me and that I never would have knowingly taken steps to destroy the life of another human being, but I did. My actions profoundly sadden me.

Before I started to work with him, Antonio had a reasonably happy life; he was a gay Latino whom his conservative birth family had ostracized, but he’d carved out a life for himself; he lived in a modest subsidized apartment overlooking Castro Street; he had a circle of friends; he could laugh; he had competent social services to make sure that he had proper medication for his schizophrenia; he was able to take care of himself. After working with me, even under the direction of a licensed psychotherapist, social services returned him to Mexico City. Pecci told me that his family had subjected him to electroshock therapy, which left him more debilitated, almost from what we could learn in a kind of vegetative state. Then I lost track. I couldn’t bear to face the consequences of my actions.

I was arrogant, stupidly, blindly arrogant, but still culpable. Antonio, I am so very sorry. I know that you would like to forgive me. You wanted me, even loved me. You trusted me, and I betrayed you. I know that I caused you to suffer much more than you needed to. I will carry this burden for the rest of my life. The only way I can make amends for you is to be honest and tell your story, including my part.


Debunking The Big Lie

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. —Arthur Conan Doyle

For anyone with a taste for otherworldly drama, the tale of the revelation of Psychic Therapy has everything that Hollywood or Mme Blavatsky could provide—the late-night visitation of a disembodied spirit unlocking a thorny problem in the human psyche; it included a simple, down-to-earth maxim that a vulnerable person in pain could understand; it also came with the validation of a highly qualified psychiatrist, bona fides traced all the way to Vienna.

However, there was a lie at the center of the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy. Perhaps the psychic world requires suspension of rational thinking, but Hoffman’s relationship with Fischer contains a provable lie. I remain amazed that even when I uncovered the duplicity of his cover story, I still found ways to excuse it and absorb it into my flawed relationship with him.

A friend from SAT also heard Hoffman’s tale of the birth of the Process in the 1970s—his awakening in the middle of the night to a vision of Dr. Fischer. She always assumed that Hoffman’s spirit guide was a “Source” like “Seth” or “Lazarus” and channeled psychic wisdom. When I told her that Seigfried Fischer had been a natural person, a Jewish psychiatrist who’d fled Hitler’s Germany and whose son contacted me after he’d read one of my blog posts online, she was shocked. 

Fischer’s son and I had several long conversations. He wanted to correct some of what I’d said about his father. First, miscellaneous information: his father was German and not Viennese. He, his father’s son, not his wife, sued Hoffman to stop him from using his father’s name. 

Then, the son told me some facts, and Hoffman’s narrative unraveled. Hoffman had always claimed that he knew Fischer through his wife’s family, that they’d had friendly and animated arguments about the spirit world and spiritualist dogma over convivial dinners, and that after Fischer died unexpectedly, his spirit returned to confirm that Hoffman had been right.

Fischer’s son was almost sure his father had no connection to Hoffman’s wife’s family. Still, he admitted that his father didn’t maintain the strict separation between social and professional contact currently dictated by the ethics of psychoanalytic practice. Even though he was just a kid, he even remembered dinner at Hoffman’s house and Hoffman dining at their house. So this much is true: there were dinner conversations, but that’s where it ends.

I’d always suspected that Hoffman had been Fischer’s patient. At some point, perhaps over a convivial dinner, I pressed Hoffman to tell the truth; he admitted that he’d been a patient but insisted that he and his wife did family therapy when they were “having trouble with their son Michael.” I was right—Hoffman was a patient, but he still evaded truthfully describing their relationship. Fischer’s son told me that his father treated severe psychosis and that although most of his patients at the Langley Porter Institute were short-term, Hoffman had been his patient for years. Hoffman certainly couldn’t admit that he’d ever had severe psychological problems, so he deflected and blamed his son.

Lies cover up lies ad infinitum. In the shenanigans of a conman, truth is a strip tease. Fischer’s son told me that his father claimed he could cure homosexuality, so it’d be a good bet that Hoffman’s sexuality came up in therapy. But I’ll skip any speculation about those conversations. Use your own imagination.

Fischer’s son does not attribute any psychological or spiritual value to the Fischer-Hoffmann Process: “He was a tailor and not a spiritual man,” he still bears no animosity towards Hoffman. He just felt that he had to protect his father’s legacy. Our conversation loosened many knotted resentments I was still holding, and the pieces for a different possible narrative of the birth of the Hoffman Process began to fall into place. It’s based on my assumptions. I have no evidence other than reading what I learned of the factual history against Hoffman’s endless fabrication.

Who was Bob Hoffman? He was a tailor from Oakland, California, with minimal formal education and no psychological training. He was not a professional in any sense of the word. He had been the patient of a skilled and distinguished psychoanalytic professional for many years. Before finishing his course of therapy, Dr. Fischer died, and Hoffman remained in transference. He was never “cured” in any sense–the evidence is staggering if you worked with him.

During his years of psychotherapy, he learned, perhaps even experienced, one actual link in the birth of psychosis. Using as many tricks as he could glean from as many sources as he could, especially hypnosis and auto-suggestion, plus the trance state he’d learned in the spiritualist church and his teacher Rose Strongin, he pieced together a way of barging into a person’s unconscious with a blunt force that forced an opening and allowed some people a fresh view of themselves, and, if for only a second, to step out their habitual way of living and clearly distinguish parts of themselves that they’d been hiding from, neglected, or repressed.

John Tarrant Roshi once told me that creating a powerful insight, even a life-changing breakthrough experience, was relatively easy. Tried and true ways of breaking down the ego's defenses allow for an onrush of fresh stimuli. Hypnosis, sleep deprivation, forced concentration, disruption of everyday communication and human interaction, alteration of critical environmental factors related to perception, light and noise levels most obviously. Drugs, a favorite California choice, also make the list. Charlatans and cult leaders, as well as authentic teachers, have understood how to manipulate these factors from time immemorial. The Hoffman Process uses all of the above except the California favorite.

Calling this experience Negative Love, Hoffman crafted wares to take to market. Using a true huckster’s innate instincts, he had to convince us that there was something to buy. Thus, the story of his midnight visitation. I cannot say he consciously crafted the story, hallucinated, or experienced genuine insight, but it makes no difference. It allowed him to claim infallibility for the knowledge coming from an otherworldly source he could access as a gifted intuitive. We could hitch a ride, but it wasn't free. Hoffman was very interested in money.

Hoffman was in no way qualified to receive an insight that had evaded generations of highly trained psychotherapists. He had no outstanding intellectual gifts to offset his handicap, a heavy dose of strong opinions, and fixed beliefs. His primary interest, when not measuring the inseam of custom suits for the Oakland Raiders, was immersing himself in the Spiritualist teachings of a psychic named Rev. Rose Strongin.

Hoffman’s reliance on spirit guides would have been rugged terrain for any professional therapist to negotiate. Plus, voices from beyond provide a ready defense to deflect any meaningful attempts to deal with psychosis. Fischer’s son told me that his father thought that homosexuality was “curable,” which, if my own experience is any measure—Hoffman maintained that homosexuality was not a “curable condition”—became a long and costly war with a very closeted, angry homophobic gay man.

The stage was set for an epic battle, and what better way to resolve all the conflict inherent in a deep self-hatred of being gay plus transference than your therapist’s death coupled with the omniscience of seeing life “from the other side?” A dead therapist cannot defend himself. Questions are answered by the only voice we can hear. It becomes an unequal battle when one party quits or dies.


The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

Bob Hoffman died in 1997 of liver cancer. 

A spiritual enthusiast chided me. She believes everything happens for a reason and claims she would never have changed a thing. She asked me if I would have made different choices knowing what I do now. My answer was, “Of course, I’m not a complete idiot.” Fifty years ago, my life was falling apart. I made choices, and I have to live with the results of my choices but to say that I always choose wisely is pure insanity. And I will tell my story in hopes that some other kid can choose a more reasonable path. 

Hoffman’s roots were in the Spiritualist Church—not the hip Science of Mind practice, but the one with trace mediums, seances, and spirit messages. Hoffman claimed that the kernel of the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, “Negative Love,” was transmitted to him during a visitation one night in 1968 by his spirit guide, Dr. Siegfried Fischer.

Despite Hoffman being a difficult man—and I am not alone in my assessment—I always tried to remain friends with him. He was a man who had influenced my life for better or worse. He was also another gay man who struggled with his sense of self-worth and purpose in an antagonistic culture. However, I never succeeded for reasons that were inevitably labeled as my personal failing or the result of a lack of understanding, empathy, love, or compassion. Whenever I made some effort to maintain or develop the relationship, and I was always the one who reached out, it would last for a period of time, and then I would have to back off. This pattern would repeat at the end of his life.


The Last Act 

I phoned Hoffman in the Fall 1995, or it might have been early in ‘96. I had returned from Hawaii, where I’d tried to do a lot of self-care after working in a Buddhist AIDS Hospice for six years. Hoffman told me that he’d just been diagnosed with liver cancer and that, of course, there had to be some reason that I’d called. In Hoffman’s narcissism, there was always some great mysterious purpose in events that only he could fathom. I thought the reason might be more mundane. I had been with many men who were dying. Perhaps I might be of some service, and I easily fell into sitting with him during his doctors’ visits, CT scans, disappointments, and grasping for life.

Before he began the very invasive medical treatment, before the disease killed him, Hoffman decided to travel to Brazil, where there was a thriving Process center. He told me that he had been treated like a guru, flowers strewn in his path, and that pleased him, but the trip ended with a nearly fatal treatment by a famous psychic surgeon.

 


I’ll never forget the circumstances of that conversation. We were in his room at the old Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, where he was recovering after being flown back from Brazil in an air ambulance after a near-death experience in the Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital in Sao Paulo. He’d seen a psychic surgeon known as Dr. Fritz, who had operated on him with a kitchen knife and nicked his liver, causing bleeding, infection, and hospitalization. Luckily, he’d just received the deposit from the new US owners for the sale of his intellectual property because the $50,000 for the air ambulance had to be paid in cash in advance. Another fortunate quirk of fate, but this act of the telenovela came at a steep price, and he was a man who was always very interested in money. 

It was surreal. A man who’d built a career around an otherworldly visit from a dead psychiatrist would, of course, be nearly killed by an unlicensed, untrained man channeling a dead surgeon performing a barbaric medical procedure in a kitchen in a Brazilian suburb. I am sure it wasn’t a sterile operating room. 

The denouement of the telenovela continued to unfold. Visits to several oncologists, encouraging promises of a cure, a liver resection coupled with a tough and painful recovery, a very brief remission, and then a steep, rapid decline. 

I did not stay till the end. I saw parts of Hoffman’s personality that were simply ordinary, which I will talk about. They are both part of the story of his Process and my story, my involvement, and my transference.

Food didn’t have to be kosher; it had to look kosher. I called a rabbi to see what I could prepare that he could eat, but he refused the sandwich because the vegetable spread looked like dairy. Then, there was the saga of finding a hospital bed that had never held a dying person. It would have jinxed his recovery.

When all hope was dashed, none were immune to his anger when death finally had to be faced as inevitable.

I tried to be his personal assistant. I set up meetings with the people who meant something to Hoffman, including people with whom he had unfinished business. I hoped that Hoffman could repair some of his messier relationships and, in terms of his idiosyncratic belief system, move on. As I waded through the wreckage with him, he received—there is no other word for it—people he’d trained as teachers, people who’d helped him, different people to whom he owed a debt, people who were vying to make some money from his notoriety, There were people who chose to remain angry and resented my calls. In all fairness, there were also many people whom he’d helped. Naranjo and Schaffer visited several times.

I was personally very distressed that he would not reconcile with his son. I didn’t see this at the time as part and parcel of my own transference, but it was. Whatever outcome between Hoffman and Michael was their affair, it was this experience that eventually led me to reconcile with my own father before he died at 101 years old.

As I said, I didn't stay until the end. But I did return to visit once a few days before Hoffman died. He was in a great deal of pain and, from what I could discern, not at peace. I have no idea if the seven stages of the dying process described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross are even close to what occurs. I hope that if they do reflect a natural passage, Hoffman was able to move beyond depression and anger to some degree of acceptance. 


#GayMeToo

There is no silver lining in the story of my abuse. Trying to write about it also presents a dilemma. I feel blocked because honesty obligates me to disclose too much about personal failures. I cannot write from the position of a life that didn’t turn out, even though opportunities and possibilities were indeed closed off to me by the repercussions of my abuse. I can say with certainty that my life is not what my parents or I envisioned for myself, but it has been my own life, and I am responsible for my choices.

My hesitancy to speak out, however, began to change when I discovered the names of several Jesuits I knew and another priest friend on lists of priests who had molested adolescents; I was filled with incredible sadness. But there were also feelings that I could not pin down immediately. It was not remorse--I never abused anyone in my care. Those unidentified stirrings were the beginnings of a personal awakening. I had been abused by a person I assumed I could trust, but I managed to ignore the damage for years.

I also knew and worked with one of the Zen teachers plus several students who became entangled in the scandals that engulfed several important Zen Centers, creating havoc and landing a severe blow to personal practice. Three decades ago, when I learned that a high Tibetan Buddhist teacher, an American, Osel Tenzin, had recklessly infected a teenage boy with HIV, I was enraged. My teacher, Issan Dorsey, used his dying and death from the same disease to teach his students about what matters in life.

The places, circumstances, and people we encounter when our highest aspirations meet our basic human instincts are supposed to be fruitful for our practice. This practice also demands the highest level of care by everyone involved. It was a heady time when Eastern practices were first introduced into the West among more than just a few idiosyncratic, curious, and restless seekers. We were creating something new, and mistakes were inevitable. Our enthusiasm left lapses in judgment and huge gaps. We were seeking experiences we’d heard about in legend, but when we read the guidebooks, we couldn’t make out the contours of the landscape or the tricky curves on the road.  One friend said, “Looking back, it seems to me that we were all guinea pigs in some often reckless  experimentation.”

I’ve watched the #metoo movement unfold, and, at least in the press, the emphasis has been on the crimes of the predators. The public now sees them for what they are. Everyone realizes that sexual abuse and manipulation can no longer be hidden in the closet. However nuanced the arguments the lawyers present in their defense, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche were terrible actors. The ongoing scandal of priests abusing their position to satisfy their sexual drives with adolescent boys is a kind of #Catholicmetoo story. And so was the man who raped me and many other men with less notoriety. Not as sensational as Roman Catholic Cardinals being held to account for their past sins, there is more than enough evidence of older gay men taking advantage of younger men in the process of coming out that I have to tell my story. There really can be no argument. These men—there are no women abusers I am aware of—used their position and power to satisfy their sexual urges. 

We applaud the women who have come forward. Sexual abuse is also widespread in the gay community, but far fewer queer and bi men have come forward. The added stigma of identifying as queer probably played a significant role. It certainly played a part in my own silence. But I think there has been far less attention and understanding of the insult to their victims. There’s still something missing in reporting the #MeTooMovement—stories of the victims.

Living a life of victimization feeds our natural tendency to blame others, avoiding responsibility. On the other hand, my own reluctance to talk openly about my own abuse reinforced my denial about the damage that Hoffman did to me, and also in the odd reversal of roles that psychologists describe as Stockholm syndrome. I continued this relationship over many decades and glossed over my resentment with a fake veneer of compassion and forgiveness.

Staying silent is not the answer to anything, and perhaps it’s even “enabling” to borrow a term from addiction therapy. I learned an enormous amount about the effects of sexual abuse because I experienced them.

This has been difficult for me because I know that living a life of victimization feeds our natural tendency to blame others and avoid taking responsibility for our own lives. On the other hand, my own reluctance to talk openly about my own abuse reinforced my denial about the damage that Hoffman did to me, and also in the odd reversal of roles that psychologists describe as Stockholm Syndrome, allowed me to continue this relationship over many decades and gloss over my resentment with a fake veneer of compassion and forgiveness.


“It’s time to take off the gloves!”.

On Monday, June 21, 2021, I received a complaint disguised as a question from a senior Hoffman Teacher—why was I writing now about Hoffman’s unethical behavior? AM, who chooses to be anonymous, responded to my Facebook post about Hoffman’s sexual abuse by trying to shame me. He deleted his remarks after many people objected to what he said. I didn’t get a screenshot, so I can’t quote him exactly. However, this was the essence: “I’m sorry for what Hoffman did to you; we all know he was a difficult man, but now there are different people at the helm, so why are you writing a hit piece? It’s been 50 years since Hoffman raped you, and he’s been dead for 20 years. It’s too bad you still are playing the victim.” And in a second response, he said: “I’m sorry that you can’t let go of it.” 

These events happened almost 50 years ago. The man who abused me is long dead. I was 28 years old at the time, certainly not a choir boy under the age of consent. However, it’s not that I can’t “let go of it.” I’m not going to let him get away with it. I will not be bullied by Hoffman nor the man who currently teaches the Hoffman Process and charges a hefty fee. Money, power, being male, and the aggressor win the day. I publicly add my name to the list of people who’ve said enough is enough. It’s time to take off the gloves!

Here’s my response: “So the complaint continues. Is this a plea to “let it go” as if I am a bad person for calling attention to the harm caused by Bob Hoffman, who presented himself as a healer, a spiritual counselor, and a trustworthy public figure? Let me be clear. He got me drunk and raped me five months after finishing his Process of Psychic Therapy. It was not consensual. It was illegal and unethical, and there would be consequences under normal circumstances. His ineptitude destroyed my relationship with my father for 30 years. The damage was real. I should keep my mouth shut? Be a man and deal with it? This is just another form of bullying, and if it’s the mindset that comes from doing the Process, we have a problem. My response is clear: a victim never has to apologize. Period.”

 

Moving Towards a Conclusion 

When my then-partner and I returned from India in April 2019, I realized that after nearly 10 years of being inseparable, something had changed in our relationship. I became restless and irritable. I tried to pretend that everything would eventually return to normal, but some line had been crossed. After several blowups, he told me it was over and left.

I was dazed. I felt betrayed. Not 10 minutes into the first session with a therapist, I found myself talking about Hoffman and being stalked by Hoffman not four months after I finished the Process. Before the therapist could even ask the question, I blurted out that he had raped me. It could not be mistaken for a consensual encounter between adults. It was an uninvited, unwelcome, and painful sexual violation by a man in whom I’d placed my trust. After describing how Hoffman yelled and screamed that I was gay as I stood awkwardly in the doorway of his office to my therapist, his response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And when Ashish abandoned you, of course, you felt betrayed.

I met Hoffman when I was in the midst of an enormous shift in my life’s trajectory. I left the Jesuit order; I abandoned my professional aspirations to be an architect and struggled to create a fulfilling livelihood; I came out; I embraced an active role in gay liberation; I began my quest to find a nurturing relationship. I would love to acknowledge Hoffman as the impetus for this change of direction and celebrate him, or at least be grateful to him. Instead, my only feelings toward him vary between indifference and outright hostility, depending on the circumstances.

It was clear to me that at 78, I still hadn’t buried Hoffman and the memory of his abuse. The psychological trauma still lingered.

It was difficult to tell the story of Hoffman’s death. I hesitated for years. The usual language of obituaries is not particularly honest. It is about accomplishments, survivors, and legacy. Negative words are not allowed. But if the language of death allowed us to tell the truth, we might learn something profound about a man or woman by the way they died. We might be a bit more wise in how we live our lives. Secrets of the death bed share the same cover as the truth about sex. We don’t talk honestly about sex—unless you’re a pornographer and it’s the way you make your living, which is one of the reasons why there will be many people who object to my telling my story.

The alternative to honesty, however, is to enshrine lies and build cults. For Hoffman, the psychic world could deliver no lies. Circumstances might be unclear for a moment or two but not long, but eventually, whatever words were spoken were accepted as accurate. At his memorial service, no one suggested that he’d been murdered by a charlatan in Brazil. Hoffman had advanced liver cancer, so he was going to die sooner than later, but after his psychic surgery, it would be much sooner. Certainly, no one dared mention Dr. Fritz.

It almost brings me to tears to remember standing by his bed in what was the old Mt. Zion Hospital on Divisadero and hearing him tell the story. As in all of Hoffman's stories, there were so many missing links. The woman who was with him supplied a few more details, but she skirted the parts where the psychic world failed in its promise. He’d visited a psychic healer. Something went terribly wrong.

After the botched surgery with a dirty knife on a kitchen table, he would experience more pain exiting life than he was capable of handling, but he had no choice. The possibility of bargaining was past. I saw it with my own eyes—he was not brave; he was not confident. The physical pain was excruciating. He was angry and depressed; he was not accepting or forgiving. He was in denial up until the end. As the scenario unfolded, in the back of my mind, I saw that it didn’t have to be that difficult. He was just an ordinary man.

Hoffman’s death is not an example for anyone. In those last months teachers of his process lined up subserviently with a plea to buy a franchise. If you came begging forgiveness for your offenses, you might be welcomed, but a son who needed his father’s forgiveness or a father who needed to ask his son for forgiveness, that was not possible. I was the gatekeeper up until the last few weeks. This is what I saw. People couldn’t be honest or authentic. The only possible exception was Naranjo, who visited several times.

Do I forgive him? Of course. But forgiveness includes that he takes his place as a man who tried to have power over me, took advantage of me, and deeply injured me. He made intimacy impossible even though he pretended to be a channel for intimacy with the mysterious, numinous world. He was a barrier. He conjured up power that was not his and used it for his own selfish gratification. Now that time has allowed the anger and disgust to subside, my feelings are closer to pity.

A small insight in the hands of a narrow-minded man can be dangerous. In the murky cesspool of his spiritualist drivel, I ask myself: Is this where I want to end it? Instead, I will try to quiet the conflicting inner conversation and listen for a dim voice of reason: If I think I know everything, it’s hard to taste the unexpected. If the New Age meant anything, it might be to open up an experience of intimacy that was blocked off for our parents.

 

Why did I write this?

Any light at the end of the tunnel would mean that the residue of the abuse was over, and I would be able to forget Hoffman and our relationship for 50 years that did not happen. It’s not enough for me to declare, “This happened,” and move past it as I’ve been counseled by many quarters, new age therapists, love and light gurus. All that I can say for certain is that Hoffman’s selfish actions had an effect on me. Of course, they cut off some avenues and added unnecessary suffering. As I recently told a friend, every gay person I know would love to be guided by the loving, wise and resourceful example of an older queer man or woman, but by the luck of the draw, I got a narcissistic predator.

Bob Hoffman is an easy target. He was not what he claimed unless you subscribe to his otherworldly insight, which is, I suppose, a choice covered by the freedom of religion, but it is not rational. He tried to substitute being a bully clothed in the robes of a spiritualist healer for being a man of wisdom and compassion. I am convinced that he was a pathological liar and fraud, but you don’t have to agree with me.

You will not find Hoffman’s Negative Love Syndrome listed among any recognized and treatable psychological disorders. It is entirely made up. It poisoned my relationship with my parents, who did not deserve to be treated poorly and certainly were in no way healed by any psychic balm. Hoffman’s premise is that they were victims of unconsciously passing on the negative patterns of their parents in an unending chain that goes back to the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. This added story is the stuff of cults, not professional psychotherapy,

Who were my parents, and did they teach me about love? Did they make mistakes? From where I stand today, could they have done better as I tried to sort through my life’s problems? Could they have stood beside me, or could we have tried to stand closer together? After years of self-study and observation, the answer is that they were not evil and did not deserve to be cut out of my life. For years, I placed the blame entirely on them. I imagined that it was their fault that they never really accepted me. The truth is closer to this: Everyone knew I was going to grow up to be gay, which, for my parent's generation as for countless generations before them, was a painful life of secrecy and pretense, so we just pretended it wasn’t true.

From an early age, I was just too gay for them to accept me as I was. It would always be my mother’s project to do her version of conversion therapy, and it would be mine to fight and resist. My father and I were creatures from different planets. Every attempt to understand one another failed. Not knowing how to work through this, we settled on non-violent neglect.

 

Is this where I leave it?

I will adapt one of Hoffman’s famous “mind trips.” Close your eyes and dream of lemons, bitter and hard to swallow. Then imagine that you’re tasting chocolate, sweet and wonderful. This is not even close to the truth. The fantasy of a wonderfully emotional childhood might make you happy, but it’s a story of your creation. Excavating the memories of the painful and repressed part of childhood may be bitter and sore, but the work is not done by imagining a bitter taste in your mouth.

The truth about life is closer to kumquats. If you’ve ever had one, you know that the experience is neither lemon nor chocolate and if you’ve never experienced the taste, it’s not at all what you expect.

If we’re lucky, life is kumquats.

 

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

April 9, 2007 

It’s a cold Monday night in San Francisco, and I am in tears. I watched a documentary on Jim Jones and the People's Temple cult. Some call it mass suicide of some 900 people in Guyana, but no, that's not right at all—Jim Jones murdered them. Some, like Representative Leo Ryan, literally died in the crossfire, but the majority were victims of the group insanity instigated by Jones.

The documentary forced me to remember that event as if it had happened yesterday. When I ride out Geary, I see the gap between buildings where the Peoples' Temple used to be. I see the faces of people whom I knew and worked with in politics. I cannot remember their names. I was very involved in the campaign to elect George Moscone as mayor, which put the People's Temple in the public eye. I had defended the Peoples' Temple in conversations with friends just because Jones's followers had worked for Moscone. Home-grown spiritual leaders were not uncommon, so Jim Jones presented no obvious warning signs. I never bothered to learn more because it didn't interest me.

The spiritual landscape of those heady days allowed us to imagine California as a new Buddha field while only giving lip service to the much less serious study of the rich meditative practices that spanned more than 2,000 years. And we because, or perhaps even though there were so many people engaging in spiritual exploration, we had plenty of anecdotal experience to bolster our claim.

The Hoffman Process itself has the hallmarks of a cult. When I started to lead my own groups with Nancy Dannenberg, we tried to reduce the trappings of psychic spirituality that Hoffman espoused and, of course, to the best of our abilities to not engage in the bullying and manipulation that Hoffman favored. However, any attempt to delve into a person’s family history, to unearth past events and relationships that color present-day events, is not risk-free. Some of the water will be muddied by transference.

A young African-American activist and a follower of Jones did the Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy in one of my groups. Early on, during the part of the Process called “the prosecution of Father,” the name Jim Jones kept coming up in our conversations—my client said that Jones was a remarkable psychic, healer, prophet, and seer.

I’d never heard of Jones before, even though the People’s Temple was only a few blocks from where I lived in San Francisco. I just kept encouraging my client to examine any transference he might have to Jones. After a few more weeks and the “prosecution of father,” I noticed Jones’s name was not coming up. I asked how he was feeling towards Jones. He replied that Jones was just another fraud preying on the black community. He left the Peoples’ Temple before the exodus to Guyana and escaped the horrific aftermath. 

Working through the transfences that present themselves in our everyday lives offers value and freedom. In this case, it might have literally saved his life.

 

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 an 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 rarely 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 Fischer, who had recently died. Dr. Fischer, as Hoffman always called him, stood at the end of his bed and revealed an essential 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, the concept of Negative Love and the "world famous" Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy was born; both have the dubious markings of revealed Truth and Hoffman, an awakened Teacher.

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

The tale is as absurd as it was unlikely. Over time, cracks inevitably 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 a scientific materialist and would have had none of it. Hoffman’s telling felt like an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil, psychotherapy vs. a psychic tailor, and ultimately, 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 psychoanalysis and 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 Fischer’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, and a German psychiatrist who escaped the country in 1936, making his way to San Francisco. I confirmed from the public record that Siegfried Fischer did emigrate in the 40s 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 either Hoffman or Hoffman’s wife. David filed a lawsuit against Hoffman to cease using his father’s name, “Fischer-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, 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 and that the trauma caused by his selfish and unethical behavior would last for the rest of my life. It was not satisfactory if the criteria for resolution were that I could forgive and forget. 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 continue 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, and 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 1973, after several months of psychological investigation in Naranjo’s group, I had an awakening. I saw that I was responsible for my life precisely 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, and no one else is responsible. And that was a kind of awakening, in a way.” (The Mysterious Madame B., Tricycle, The Buddhist Review)


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 differently: 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 supported Hoffman and tried to implement some professional practices in the process. Still, I couldn't 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 and 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 “otherworldly” 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 did use 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 Rosalyn Schaffer delivered his indications 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 FHPT 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 until Hoffman and Naranjo ended their experiment. I will alert you when I speculate and say something not substantiated by the record.

___________


At about 7:30 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 someone with 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 how 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. Hoffman wore an expensive sports coat and garish tie while we were mostly in jeans and tee shirts. He appeared highly uncomfortable standing behind Schaffer, and when he began to speak, it was evident that he was not educated in any psychological discipline. His presentation was gruff and aggressive. He dominated the room, alternately talking and yelling in a kind of dumbed-down jargon, the teaching style that would later be recognized as a trademark.

A tailor with no psychological training told 30-35 eager, curious, primarily 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.

Hoffman defined Negative Love as “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. We were mired in self-hatred if we thought he was dressed in bad taste. 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 Fischer, 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, Hoffman instructed us to look for a human figure, no angels, who would appear and become our spirit guide. He told us to pay attention and listen to messages, that he’d “opened us psychically,” and we would receive solutions to our problems from our spirit guide. These were real spirits and genuine 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, 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 natural? He asserted categorically that our emotions were just like this, both negative or positive, simply the projection of our mind that dictated how 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. 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 our mother's negative characteristics and bring it to the next session.

He ended the evening with a smile, very pleased with himself. We'd also been hypnotized. I just had a few hours of spirit visitation and an Ouija board session. 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 crucial for the Prosecution of Mother, but there didn’t seem to be any actual logic, 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 criterion 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 fundamental 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 its level and depth in the most complete way possible.

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, they are 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 sitting beside a woman friend in my support cohort.

The experience was one of the major breakthroughs of my entire adult life. It was as if an impenetrable 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 a defense began to look like a sham, and ten years of rigorous, disciplined religious life began to crumble. I recognized a range of feelings I’d struggled to avoid all my life, ones I’d constructed to avoid feeling. At that moment, I became solidly engaged in the exploration to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom. It would be an arduous, long process. The breakthrough happened under Claudio’s guidance, using the technique he 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 started a long and challenging journey. I recognized on an intense 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 ten years of rigorous religious training and had to start afresh.

Hoffman contributed to this equation because 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 woefully negligent.

I was left floundering. My guide was no better than an 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 psychological training, I think, opened the emotional world for exploration. Still, Hoffman was not interested in anything more than the psychic and emotional motivation for adopting the negative behaviors of a parent or parent surrogate. In his one-on-one process, he’d worked with people in 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 an aggressive bully, at times verging on psychotic. With a list of Mother’s Negative Traits and emotional autobiography in hand, playing tough love or 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. Hoffman justified it as “breaking down to build up.” He singled out every therapist in the group for harsh attention. I guess 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 deficient 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 see that we were just negative children. His job was to point out how we acted out of negative love and that our resistance and denial were so intense it required a firm hand. He used the “iron fist covered in the velvet glove of love.” He told us in no uncertain terms that his job was thankless and with minimal reward.
Hoffman’s arrogance in the face of sound psychotherapy went unchallenged. He had no understanding of basic genetic ordering and impulses and no grasp of complex 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 you craved from infancy but were denied. He’d point to any behavior he thought was negative, self-defeating, or counterproductive and taunt in a whiny voice, “See, Mommy, now will you love me?” Hoffman repeated his maxim repeatedly, “Everyone is guilty, and no one’s to blame.” We were just the sum of the 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 had 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 nine weeks on the outside. After weeks of 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 their parents after they’d written an emotional autobiography. He had little use for Naranjo’s therapeutic exploration, not Fritz Perls's methodology or the Enneagram. It took too long and 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 from his psychic readings, would reappear repeatedly in the development of the current Process. Hoffman loved an emotional jolt. He was a junkie and a one-trick pony.
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With appropriate fanfare, Hoffman announced that he would lead his own 13-week Process beginning in January. He took me aside and strongly encouraged me to join his pilot Process at Tolman Hall. He told me that I would go on to lead groups and that I should 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, 55 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 a psychological inquiry. The main elements of the current Hoffman Process were present: 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 examine our parents' history. We would discover actual events and circumstances of their programming and could tap into the same deep unconscious emotional knowledge that 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 five 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 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 furious, 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 had never crossed his mind in his entire life. Hoffman’s readings were projections and his 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 the analysis–that I was in denial about my 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 had become a kind of forced march. I remember that the price of that first group Process was about $300. The actual cost was devastating. Instead of dealing with coming out in the care of a professional, compassionate therapist, I had the bad luck of landing 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.
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My parents arrived in Berkeley just after the semester ended. We planned to drive back to Connecticut and spend time together; I would attend 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 parent's full attention, you just said “I love you” and kissed them. My parents thought it strange, but I always followed instructions as closely as possible. Hoffman said that no matter how awkward it felt, you had to do it. It was extremely awkward, but I dutifully followed Bob’s directions, disregarding my doubts. I even rehearsed it 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 planned to spend one night at Brophy Prep, the Jesuit high school in Phoenix, and visit some younger Jesuits 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 Fischer-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 many upsets and questions, my mother announced that we were going straight home. She’d found the diary 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 work, I could never change my parents.

The drive across the 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 known for nearly a decade was beginning to fall apart.
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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, where a person with religious vows is allowed to live outside the cloister or have a formal religious life. Thus began a 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 that 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 he usually 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–precisely out of the predator’s playbook.

I recall one conversation in particular that helped 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 to see a patient was six months after the professional relationship had ended, he thought that I had so thoroughly and lovingly divorced myself from my parents, perhaps the usual six 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, about former clients, sexual contact within two years after termination of therapy is also illegal and unethical.”* Less than four 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 thought it was dinner. I can’t in any way recreate the events or the conversation that ended with him returning to my apartment. Still, 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 window into my psychology far more accurate than his psychic reading. After a highly 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 blame shifting—Hoffman told me that pain was expected when a man first had anal sex and that in time I’d learn to enjoy it—that anal sex was an essential 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. Whenever I think about this, I ask myself why I didn’t 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. 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 missteps is the only possible path I see to free myself. If my writing 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 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. Instead, 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 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 ’70s. I became promiscuous, but at the same time, I was miserable 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 sure 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.