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.
