Showing posts with label Hoffman Process criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hoffman Process criticism. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy Process


The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy Process

Originally posted July 31, 2004, 1st revision 9/16/2006, 2nd revision 6/6/2011, 3rd revision 5/18/2021

© Kenneth Ireland, 2004, 2006, 2011, 2021



I began research for this paper, “The Ontological Odd Couple, the Origins of the Hoffman Process” when the current owners of Hoffman's licensed intellectual property began to rewrite their marketing copy. They recast Hoffman and his Process, editing out the contributions of many people who worked hard and selflessly to help Hoffman flesh out his rudimentary insight..


There was another purpose behind my writing. I was trying to resolve my reservations about Hoffman and his work by simply recounting facts and events. However, after trying to disentangle Hoffman's bizarre and abusive behaviors from the modality of the Process itself, I see nothing original or other-worldly about his insights or his methodology either as presented nearly 40 years ago or in their current iteration. I'd advise anyone to undertake an ordinary course of therapy with a licensed professional rather than the HQP.


I have just finished a long piece about the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy and my sexual abuse by Hoffman. I intend for it to be part of a larger spiritual memoir, but that will be at least a year out.

 

To be more web friendly I have divided it into Part 1 and Part 2


Introduction


When creating an historical account, you have to start at the beginning to get it right. If you’re lucky some facts, times, and dates can be accurately reconstructed and pinpointed in documents, letters, transcripts and personal calendars. Some of the messy parts of bringing something new into the world will inevitably be buried and lost. The current owners of the Hoffman Process have recast, revised, and distorted the history. They need to create a compelling narrative to sell the Process. I do not rely on the Process for my livelihood which lifts that burden on telling the truth.


I will argue that they are following in Hoffman’s own steps in creating the narrative of a distinguished psychotherapist appearing in a psychic event in order to resolve his botched karma, and create a plausible claim that a tailor from Oakland could be the source of a complete psychological treatment.


The original Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy (FHPT) was created by Bob Hoffman between 1968 and 1973. Claudio Naranjo,the Chilean psychiatrist who introduced the “Enneagram” into the western psycho-spiritual conversation is the best known of the professionals who contributed to Hoffman’s Process, but there were many others. Hoffman sought input from many sources (who sometimes did not even know that he was talking to others about the same issue). But he always attributed the final product to his spirit guide, Dr. Fisher.


The myth that the Process came full blown from a pure source, and neglecting people who did the difficult work of bringing something new into the world is false. In addition, fostering outrageous expectations creates false standards to evaluate personal experience, and makes it  more difficult to use one’s own inspiration to gain self-knowledge and liberation. In other words, it undermines what it sets out to do.


No course of psychotherapy can produce real changes in people if it remains only theory. It changes. It reaches into areas that its creators cannot predict. If promises and expectations cannot be fulfilled, they have to be modified or eliminated. However, this evolution is distinct from marketing. Sadly, in our culture, promoting a brand name, writing persuasive copy, will prevail and in the process the contributions of many talented people are cut and lost. Their contributions were marginalized and their value neglected or attributed to others.


If nothing else, what follows can be an inclusive footnote to the revised story.



My Purpose and Sources


I propose to outline the early development of the FHPT from the basement ‘reading’ room in Hoffman’s clothing store on 15th Street in Oakland to the SAT group process. I will not cover any of the subsequent additions and deletions since the creation of the seven-day format. My focus will be the 13-week process, the exercises and mind trips (now called ‘visualizations’) that remain the framework of the HQP, to see if this yields an insight into how a very simple insight became an expensive course with sequential series of scripted emotional events, a product in the human potential market place.


The primary source of information about the early development of the FHPT is my own experience. In 1972-73, I was in the first SAT group that Naranjo used to create a group process to accomplish “a loving divorce from mother and father” that Hoffman promised. Later in the spring of 1973, I was one of approximately 55 people Hoffman invited to be in his first 13-week group that he himself “took through” the Process in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The following year I was trained as an FHPT therapist and group leader which became my primary work for several years. I lead the 13-week processes for PSI and later, I worked privately with smaller groups for another three years.


Another source is Hoffman himself and my conversations with him from 1972 until his death in 1997. Our friendship was strained and painful. While he was alive I could not talk about my observations that gave me some insight into his inner workings, puzzles and deep-seated unhappiness. Extremely concerned about his public image, he asserted that he had to present himself to the world as straight. Most people close to him, certainly those who worked with him, knew that Hoffman was gay, but he never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality. In this day of liberation and acceptance, his deception and his closeted life, cannot be overlooked. A good case could be argued that the process itself grew out of his conflict about being a man who loved men, his difficulty forming and nurturing close relationships, his creativity and sensitivity, and perhaps some of his inner doubts about the worth of his work.


I do not know all the people who contributed to the development of Hoffman’s work. There are many. I have not included hearsay material from people with whom I did not work or with whom I didn’t have focused conversations. Many disappeared after working with Hoffman and making a significant contribution to the Process, such as Dr. Ernest Pecci, M.D., a psychiatrist who founded PSI, The Center for Psycho-Spiritual Integration, to present the 13-week Process. I trained as a therapist under Pecci and worked with him for more than two years in the 70’s. Pecci’s psychotherapeutic model was influenced by New Age spirituality. My last personal contact with Pecci was a phone call about 1977 when he told me that Hoffman was going to sue everyone that he, Pecci, had trained unless we ceased to offer the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic therapy to the public. (Nearly everyone who was offering some version of the FHPT ceased under Hoffman’s threat of legal action, with the exception of one or two practitioners who had split with Hoffman before PSI, substantially altering or modifying it. He was also not successful in shutting down the Anti-Fisher Hoffman Process that was offered in the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ashrams in Pune and Antelope).


Some key people are dead. Julius Brandstatter is the man who coined the word ‘Quadrinity’ to reflect the four aspects of being human—physical, intellectual, spiritual and emotional. I met Julius and his wife Miriam when they returned from Israel in the 70’s; their work with Hoffman continued through the re-casting of the Process into the current seven-and-a- half-day format. In the opinion of most observers, their contribution was never fully acknowledged by Hoffman. I had several long conversations with Miriam in 2006. It was she who created the organization and flow for Hoffman’s early sessions. Hoffman would call Miriam in Israel and tell her what he presented that week with SAT, and later in Tolman Hall. Miriam, a trained psychotherapist, then returned what she had presented in Israel, as an orderly, effective outline which Hoffman filed and used for the next Process. Both Julius and Miriam are now dead.


The most important person in this story was dead before Hoffman gave birth to the Process. Dr. Siegfried Fisher assumed the status of legend and myth in the story of the Process as Hoffman’s guide. His name was removed from the original title when his son filed a lawsuit. He said that Hoffman had been his father’s patient and that his professional reputation was threatened by Hoffman’s claims. I will briefly examine both claims below.


Many of the people with whom I had extensive conversations were estranged from Hoffman, among them Ilene Cummings and Stanley Stefancic, who both served as Executive Director of the Institute after Hoffman’s return from Mexico. Besides long and thoughtful discussions about the origins of the Process and the contributions of various players, Stefancic showed me several documents, lists of the unique terms and phrases that were intended as teaching tools in the HQP (e.g. “negative love,” “giving to get,” “illogical logic, nonsensical sense”), as well as descriptions of several elements in the Processes, (including the bitter sweet chocolate ritual, and spirit guide and sanctuary mind trip), that Hoffman and his lawyers prepared when he was considering lawsuits against those he considered pirates. (I have used quotes around words and phrases that Hoffman habitually used to describe either his methodology or the concepts that were derived from the Spiritualist Church.)


Other people were constant friends and supporters from their first meeting with Hoffman until he died. Although I know these people and had many conversations with them, I have not used anything they told me in my presentation because I do not have their permission. Cynthia Merchant, personal assistant to Hoffman and Hoffman Quadrinity Teacher, worked as editor of the lengthy transcripts of Hoffman’s presentations that became the core of today’s Process. Ron Kayne, early supporter, by Hoffman’s admission, created the “guide and sanctuary mind trip,” as well as being the ghost writer for Hoffman’s book, Getting Divorced from Mother and Dad and the first version of The Negative Love Syndrome.


When I became serious about uncovering and documenting the origins of the FHPS, I interviewed several of the members of Naranjo’s first SAT group who had worked individually with Hoffman. Ron Deziel gave me important information about the bare bones of Hoffman’s initial work heavily laced in psychic practice borrowed from the Spiritualist Church.


Most of what I will present is not easily reconciled with the image of an inspired “intuitive,” or kindly and wise Jewish grandfather.However I feel it vital to record another version of Hoffman’s inspiration and preserve it in a small corner of the universe, and especially to note in some detail Naranjo’s contribution. If we allow a story of real creation and inspiration to be sanitized, the contributions of this highly talented man who was present at a certain moment and responded wholeheartedly to Hoffman’s questions and requests without concern for his own personal gain and enrichment might be forgotten.



The Inspiration


I heard Hoffman describe the inspiration for the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy many times. The rather bare outline of this bizarre otherworldly encounter never varied. In the middle of the night in 1967, the figure of a recently departed friend, the psychiatrist Siegfried Fischer, appeared at the foot of his bed and revealed to him the missing link in psychoanalytic therapy: the concept of Negative Love as the stream of negative behaviors unconsciously passed from one generation to the next. Then Fischer’s spirit-being took Hoffman through his own psychic therapy, uncovering the roots of his own inherited patterns of behavior and liberating him with a new understanding that reached into the depths of his emotional being. Hoffman said that he was able to forgive his parents for all the negativity he had experienced growing up. He knew that “everyone is guilty and no one is to blame.” He then severed his karmic connection to his parents’ negativity. Fischer disappeared with the promise to return and assist Hoffman to complete some of his own unfinished work, his karma, and that Hoffman could help him “move on.” Hoffman said he heard the phrase “doors will open” when he asked Fisher how he, a tailor, would enter the world of professional psychotherapy and present this insight as the missing piece, an antidote to the endless cycle of analysis.


Who was Siegfried Fischer? Hoffman claimed that Fischer was an acquaintance, a friend of his wife’s family, a German psychiatrist who managed to escape the country in 1936, making his way to San Francisco. I confirmed the basic outline of the Fischer story from the public record. Siegfried Fischer did emigrate in the 40’s and practiced psychotherapy at Langley Porter; he wrote Principles of general psychopathology: an interpretation of the theoretical foundations of psychopathological concepts, (New York, Philosophical Library, 1950).


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. I can’t overemphasize the Spiritualist Church’s doctrine: “truth” spoken by disembodied spirits to spirits inhabiting human bodies, satisfying karmic obligations. Fischer was the scientific materialist and would have none of it. Hoffman’s telling had the feel of an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil, psychotherapy vs. a psychic tailor, the psychic declaring victory after death.


After hearing this part of Hoffman’s story, with slight variations, innumerable times, I began to feel that Hoffman had an ax to grind with the enterprise of psycho-analysis, that he had probably had a failed experience in therapy himself. I began to suspect that he had been Fischer’s patient and quit, still in transference. I asked Hoffman if he had been Fischer’s patient and he said yes, that he and his wife had seen Fischer for family therapy with their son Michael. I have confirmed through reliable sources that Hoffman himself was Fisher’s patient “for years,” but Hoffman lied about his personal friendship with Fisher in order to present himself as a reliable source.


Fischer’s son maintained that he was never a close personal friend of Hoffman or Hoffman’s wife. Hoffman continued to use “Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy,” and Fischer's son, David, filed a lawsuit against Hoffman. Hoffman did not contest David’s claim, and changed the name of the FHPT to the Quadrinity Process. However, Hoffman still claimed, both in private conversation and group presentations, a personal friendship with Fischer and that Fischer was his spirit guide. 


Hoffman claimed that Fischer guided him as he began to work with people who started to come to him for psychic readings. From my conversations with several people who did psychic therapy with Hoffman in the “reading room” of his 15th Street shop, Hoffman’s initial work contained the following elements. After some discussion of the problems that were plaguing a person’s life (and legendary “forceful” persuasion), and making lists of his or her parents' negative traits, Hoffman instructed clients to write an emotionally-charged autobiography of their life from birth till puberty. Then he began to direct the “prosecution” of Mother and Dad for programming a defenseless child with negative emotional traits. An “anger letter” to his or her parents capped the prosecution which provided some release as well as giving Hoffman an opportunity to evaluate the depth of the client’s emotional state.


Then Hoffman “psychically read” the emotional history the client’s parents, living or dead, describing events without prior knowledge, often including times and places, that explained and cemented difficult emotional traits into their emotional make up. This was the parents’ “defense”: to see that negative love was passed from one generation to the next. This is the concept of “negative love”: that his or her parents had unwillingly “adopted” these negative traits themselves, driven by their own emotional history and therefore could not be blamed. These deep, psychically verifiable, understandings led to the experience of forgiveness and compassion for one’s parents. “Everyone is guilty and no one to blame.”


And finally, through the mediation of Fischer and their personal spirit guide, the client got “Closure” by cutting the psychic ties to his or her parents. In a “mind trip,” the client yanked out the umbilical cord that connected his or her emotional child to their parents and allowed them to grow up to their chronological age. As an emotional adult, the client could for the first time experience unconditional love for their parents. The tools for breaking the habit of negative behaviors, now just phantom symptoms of imagined hurt, were repetition of positive traits, a process called “recycling,” and avoidance of negative behaviors by “putting your awareness on your awareness” using rudimentary self awareness exercises. There were also tapes of sessions with Hoffman and written negative trait lists and positive alternatives for reinforcement.


The original elements of the Process, according to Ernie Pecci, were the prosecution of Mother and then the defense of Mother, the prosecution of Father and the defense of Father plus the “Closure.”


One other piece was introduced into the FHPS before Naranjo took on creating the group process with Hoffman. The imagined conversation between the client’s emotional child and the emotional child of the parent came from Transactional Analysis. Hoffman no longer read his patients psychically to uncover his or her own parents’ emotional history. Hoffman found facilitators trained in transactional analysis, and adapted an existing technique, a path that he was to follow many times throughout the creation of the Process.

The Development of the Group Process


I have attempted to describe the huge emotional breakthrough that I had over several weeks in that first SAT group in Bob Hoffman—#GayMeToo. I also talk frankly about Hoffman’s predatory behavior towards me which included sexual abuse as well as my difficulty dealing with it. I’ve written about his clear violation of ethical and legal conduct as well as my struggle with it in several places including "Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." But that is not the subject of this article.


This was the very beginning of the creation of the group Process. It is very clear from Hoffman’s written notes in Stefancic’s possession that Hoffman credited Naranjo for transforming the FHPT into a group process. It is also clear from every interaction between them that I witnessed over more than 20 years, that Naranjo always regarded Hoffman as a modern day shaman. 


Lacking psychological training, Hoffman needed Naranjo’s validation, but at the same time he never trusted the techniques that Naranjo introduced to yield insight. He felt that psychotherapy was at base a misguided enterprise and any kind of self-observation was, at best, far too slow and, at worst, a head game. His style was to evaluate and attack people, then point to their emotional reactions as examples of negative programming, almost always violating the boundaries of professional behavior.


Naranjo was absent from Hoffman’s group interactions and, I suspect, just let Hoffman conduct himself in any way he chose. But Naranjo did craft the interactive exercises for most of the sessions. I will discuss two exercises in some detail, the “bitch session” and the “child/intellect confrontation.” They highlight Naranjo’s major contribution to the Process and laid the groundwork for the experiential HQP.


Hoffman instructed us to list our parents’ negative traits. He defined a negative trait as any behavior that was “giving to get,” “buying love,” “withholding love.” This warped economy of love thwarted the free exchange of affection to satisfy our innate desire to love and be loved. (Naranjo examines Hoffman’s view in The End of Patriarchy). As we listed our parents’ negative traits, Hoffman insisted that we had adopted them, every one of them, even if we had rebelled against them as children and they occurred as negative reactive behavior. He insisted that this was the sum total of what we knew about love, that our emotional life was infantile, and that we gave emotional love in the vain hope of having it returned, deprived of our birthright to give and receive love freely. This simple model became the foil that Hoffman used to reflect our behavior back to us, a rudimentary self-observation: the memory of past behaviors in relation to our parents revealed how we conducted our emotional life. Our list of negative traits became his confrontational tool. In the SAT group, Naranjo also used dyads and other tools of self-observation, notably the study of the enneagram, meditation, and methods adopted from Gestalt, but Hoffman considered those techniques cumbersome and slow.


We were then instructed to take the list of negative traits and recall scenes from our childhood, before puberty, where we had experienced these traits exhibited by our parents, and write down our reactions. Our emotional autobiography was to be as emotional as possible; we were not to censor ourselves as we wrote. (The Emotional Autobiography is no longer used— Hoffman told me that it was not necessary, but I suspect that it took too much time for the compressed version).


That first Fall there were at least five weeks dedicated to this prosecution of Mother. It was mid-October when we began the bitch session. I mention this because it was the first time I noticed Hoffman’s urge to move the process ahead while it appeared to me that Naranjo was testing psychological methodology as applied to the FHPT. My observation was of course obscured by the fact that I was a participant with enormous transference already underway, but when Hoffman ended the SAT group process before it was even half complete is evidence of their tension..


The bitch session, which replaced the “anger letter,” was an experiential expression of anger, directed at a parent, using explicit language, physical motion, beating pillows, and screaming. It was first conducted with the group members observing the person on the “hot seat” and then providing feedback about the depth and expression of the anger. (A personal note here: this experience was for me one of the major breakthroughs in my entire adult life. It took weeks for me to really allow myself to express my own anger, but when I finally did touch the depth of my rage at my mother, it altered the course of my life. It was as if a huge veil had been lifted and I had to admit that I was an angry person. But more importantly, I recognized that I had a range of feelings that I’d struggled to avoid all my life, that I had constructed my life to avoid these feelings. At that moment I became solidly engaged in the exploration of myself to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom.)


The introduction of the “bitch session” was important to Hoffman. It was his first experience of psychological work allowing a person to experience the level of emotional release that he had been unable to achieve with his “anger letter.” It also, in my view, pointed to a rapid way to induce the level of feeling and emotion that is the hallmark of the current version of the HP. Later Pecci introduced another technique for inducing very early infantile feelings, the “primal,” an adaptation of Reichian body work, borrowing its name from the then-popular Primal Scream Therapy; it also continues, I think, to exist in some form in the current HQP.


The next of Naranjo’s contributions that I would like to discuss is what is now known as the “Child/Intellect Bitch Session.” This does not follow the chronological sequence because it actually occurred after Hoffman had begun to do his own work. While I worked in the first FHPT Process, I continued my participation in the SAT group. One night I took the hot seat when Naranjo himself was doing Gestalt therapy. In the FHPT, the client visualizes his or her self as composed of four parts, the physical self, the intellectual self, the spiritual self and the emotional self. The emotional self can assume whatever age where the client or patient feels some block or experiences some incident that remains unresolved. In a dream sequence that I began to act out, alternately taking the role of a stern mother and a vulnerable child, with Naranjo’s coaching, I experienced myself at war with myself, perpetuating in a kind of stalemate, hiding from my sexual feelings and repressing them fearing my mother’s disapproval. Anger and frustration surfaced, and the solution that I had crafted, the choice of the celibate religious life, began to look like just that, a solution I had crafted and not the vocation that I was trying to follow. As a follow up, it was suggested that I try to craft another kind of truce between the emotional child and the intellectual self, represented in the session as my disapproving mother. I was among the first of several people who used the persona of the child and intellect on the hot seat. Very soon Hoffman introduced an exercise where the emotional child and the adult intellect alternately expressed anger and frustration, eventually arriving at a kind of truce. This became known as the Child/Intellect Bitch Session and continues to exist in a different form in the HQP today.


By the end of November, Hoffman ended the group experiment with SAT. He told us that he would take us to a place where we could stop--the defense of mother, and that he would conduct his own 13-week group process in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. (I later learned that he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer and was going to retire to Mexico to either heal or die; that he had made the decision to entrust his group process to Pecci; and that the training in Tolman Hall was to introduce a pool of people to the group process who might be trained as therapists, or ‘teachers’ as we were called.)


A hallmark of the 13-week process was the order and the pace. The specific assignments for each week were due three days after the session; Hoffman reviewed them and his taped comments were back in your hands at the beginning of the next session. In every session Hoffman lectured, shouted, cajoled, confronted, intimidated, humiliated, bullied, abused us. He called us assholes and negative love buyers. Perhaps this behavior forced some people to examine themselves, but it far exceeded professional boundaries appropriate for therapist/teacher, student/patient relationship. Hoffman justified his behavior by claiming that his basic message was so simple that it was hard to grasp without his unyielding confrontation: human beings deserve a satisfying emotional life but are prevented from achieving that goal by the adoption of the negative traits of their parents.


He conducted other portions of his course through “mind trips” and I will mention two of them, the parents’ funeral and the birthday party, because together with the other exercises already mentioned, these fill out nearly every essential element (except “Vindictiveness,” “Play Day,” and “Dark Side”) of present HQP. After the prosecution and defense of both parents, we were asked to close our eyes and imagine that we were awakened in the dead of night by a phone call: our parents had been involved in a car crash and were near death. We were asked to follow the course of events from the emergency room to the graveside. Bob told me that this “came through” as he was speaking. Furthermore he said that if we experienced a full range of emotion, we could actually set aside our anger towards our parents and begin to experience unconditional love for them. There was another mind trip when we were asked to visualize the birthday party that we never had, where we were celebrated and feted for who we were and not who we had to pretend to be in order to experience our parents’ love. During the whole time I practiced the 13-week FHPT, I know that Hoffman struggled with achieving a high level of emotional experience he considered necessary to produce the emotional freedom he saw as the goal. Both remain today in the HQP as elaborately produced events, with music, props, food. When combined with suggested visual images, they can and do induce the powerful emotional states. I suggest that Naranjo’s early introduction of experiential exercises into Hoffman’s basic framework made it possible for Hoffman to create the controlled emotional rollercoaster of the current HQP.



Conclusion


As the history of the Process is being revised and cleaned up as a product of the human potential movement, I have tried to leave a footnote about the people who helped Hoffman in order that their important contributions are not neglected, attributed to others, or lost regardless of copyright.


I had hoped to shed light on how an “inspired insight” makes itself known in the world, examining how a core insight into human nature could become a coherent, repeatable experience that would provide people with access to their own emotional life and deepen their awareness of their own spiritual lives. Frankly I do not know if any process is able to deliver this result in a sustainable way, but there is always the possibility that even a split second experience of unconditional love might be enough to alter centuries of abuse.


However, I am certain that I demonstrated that the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy and the subsequent Hoffman Quadrinity Process came into existence through the combined efforts of Bob Hoffman and Claudio Naranjo, that it required both men to bring it to life, that the HQP would not exist at all without the generous contribution of Naranjo. Hoffman borrowed widely and used anything that he thought might be useful. He relied on Naranjo more than anyone, but also others like Pecci, to fill out his vision and give it legitimacy.


Naranjo was constant in his friendship and support. I saw Naranjo demonstrate respect and love for Bob Hoffman from the time he provided him with a group that he could use to create the FHPT to his last meetings with Hoffman when he was dying from liver cancer in his Oakland home. Naranjo thought of Hoffman as a modern day shaman. On the other hand, their relationship was not easy—Hoffman, untrained and impetuous, a tradesman by nature and choice, Naranjo, skilled and intellectual, a thorough professional—they were an ontological odd couple.


And finally, a personal evaluation, one that was also hard won.


In the last analysis, it is not difficult to create the circumstances for unique experiences that are extraordinary or yield real insights.


Teachers, real ones and charlatans, have been doing this for ages. Their bag of tricks include meditation and self-analysis, as well as trance and hypnosis, auto suggestion, even bullying as a way of barging through defense mechanisms. Despite his claims to the contrary, Hoffman made ample use of the more nasty tricks with complete impunity, always taking the higher ground. (He was, for example, never angry with anyone, but ‘righteously indignant.”) But when it comes to actually seeing if his results were lasting, the evidence is scarce or relies very heavily on anecdotal evidence. Many people say that the experience was powerful, but if they made real changes in their lives, if they were happier and not living under another despotism, however benevolent, the majority of those I interviewed had found a sustainable spiritual practice and devoted themselves to it.


In my own experience of directing people in the Process, I cut as much as I could of the trappings of the spiritualist church. I found them fraudulent, or at best embarrassing and useless. I dropped Hoffman’s inflated claims that the Process was all the therapy that anyone needed, that it was Freud’s missing link. I introduced conversations that allowed clients to explore how their early emotional programming influences their lives here and now. But listening deeply to 40 individuals a year began to take too much of a personal toll for a meager income, and I stopped offering the Process when Hoffman threatened a lawsuit. I certainly had no stomach and no money to face off in court over his intellectual property..

 

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021


Monday, July 19, 2021

Why do cults need to rewrite history?

Originally posted January 22, 2020

If I were Deep Throat, I’d tell you to follow the money. If you were asking whether to register for the Process, caveat emptor.

A core premise of all spiritual work is that we have to be honest with ourselves, including our faults and idiosyncratic distortions of truth. This applies equally to the healer. In a course of psychological treatment, you uncover parts of yourself that you’ve been hiding from and have cast their shadow over the rest of your life. You assume that your therapist has dealt with most of that material themselves, and can provide a reasonably unbiased mirror for your own work. That trust is essential.

Cults rewrite history in the interest of portraying the guru as having some access to privileged knowledge which is just a marketing plan to gain followers. The online biographies of Bob Hoffman, the founder of the Hoffman Process, or the Quadrinity Process, are awash in lies, factual inaccuracies, fabrications or, in the best case, distortions. I wonder how it could be possible that any of these people actually met or worked with Hoffman. If they did, they are not being honest. They cannot demonstrate that Hoffman had the clarity to be able to establish the trust required to do deep personal work, and thus the creation of the kindly grandfatherly “intuitive” figure who had everybody’s best interest at heart.

It’s of course total hogwash, and anyone of Hoffman’s early associates or teachers would have to admit if forced to testify under oath that he was not the gentle, sympathetic or insightful man of that narrative. They might try to get away with saying that his methods were unorthodox. Maybe they would even go so far as to say something like pig-headed. I know one who says privately he was a malignant narcissist.

His apologists might not fully agree with me that he was the bully and liar that I experienced, but I knew Bob Hoffman for more than 25 years. I discovered some of the lies he insisted he had to tell the world in order to promote what he considered his very important work. Most significantly he lied about his relationship with Sigfried Fisher. He was Hoffman’s therapist for many years, but Hoffman called him a family friend with whom he shared convivial dinners. Hoffman also closeted an unhappy, gay life. He would tell you that, of course, the people who worked with him closely knew that he was gay, but, in my view, that hardly constitutes being open. I would also say that he was what I'd call a closeted homophobe, but that is probably too much of a leap for me as I also had to deal with his sexual and emotional abuse.

The Process currently is not psychotherapy, but it does explicitly and purposefully dig into the psychological roots of emotional conditioning. Its roots are as an alternative to traditional therapy; the first version was called The Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy. The current version of the Hoffman Process is an intense, choreographed emotional rollercoaster that promises an experience of complete freedom and unconditional love in a few days. It costs a great deal of money. It’s a hard sell. It needs endorsement to pass the therapeutic hurdle as at least vaguely within the conditions of ethical practice. One glance at the waivers you agree to when you sign up and you know you’re in dangerous territory.

I Googled Volker Kohrn of the Australian branch of the Hoffman Institute, and came across a piece called 50 YEARS LATER, BOB HOFFMAN’S DREAM LIVES ON. The claims that he, or his copywriter, use to describe the endorsement of Claudio Naranjo are not accurate. Taken individually they might seem to be just a simplification of the actual history and thus not far from the truth, but in fact they are presented as if Naranjo had a strong hand in the development of the Process, giving it a kind of psychotherapeutic imprimatur. He did not.

Here are the claims:
  • The renowned Enneagram teacher Claudio Naranjo did help Hoffman formulate his “world famous” process, but not in the ways described. In fact their relationship was far more complex and conflicted than either admitted. I have described my first hand experiences in both the first SAT version of the FHPT as well as Bob’s first group process in Tolman Hall.
  • Naranjo’s medical education and his psychiatric internship were at the University of Chile. He was a Guggenheim Fellow at Harvard for a year, a very high honor indeed and worthy of note, but it does not include matriculation and graduation from the University. I suppose you could stretch it and say “Harvard educated," but it's not accurate. Perhaps just a minor point, and “Harvard educated” sounds very impressive.
  • Naranjo did not coin the word “Quadrinity” to point to four aspects of our human nature, emphasizing the oft-neglected emotional and spiritual sides. It was the incredibly talented polymath Julius Brandstatter who came up with the word. That’s a fact. But of course if you were looking for a sign of real collaboration, why not insert that Naranjo gets credit for naming rights? Who after all is Julius Brandstatter?
  • The writer claims that Naranjo also helped Hoffman formulate the 8 day Process. Wrong. Naranjo independently crafted a 3 day version of the Process for his SAT groups, and Bob realized that a shorter process would be more marketable. Claudio had no hand in formulating what is now known as the Process. Again Julius Brandstatter along with his lovely professionally trained wife Miriam were Hoffman’s main consultants. How do I know this? Hoffman himself told me when I was an observer at one of the initial 8 day processes in the Santa Cruz mountains, and Miriam herself recounted the experience in great detail when I visited her at her home in Mountain View, California during the last years of her life.I stand by my presentation of the history of the Process. I had detailed conversations with as many people who contributed to Hoffman’s Process as I could when researching my paper, The Ontological Odd Couple. The Hoffman Institute International’s copywriter is batting four for four. I might be less critical of the Process if the current practitioners at least did their homework.

But I beg the question.

Here are the reasons that anyone should be extremely cautious. The original Process was channeled from a dead psychiatrist through a bespoke tailor from Oakland California who had absolutely no professional credentials. Undertaking this exploration outside the clear guidelines of professional therapy can be very risky. It certainly was in my case.

The Hoffman Institute needs to highlight Naranjo’s involvement as it lends credibility to their product. And to that end they’ve invented a dubious resume.

Cults rewrite history.

Buyer beware.




Here's a link to my other writing about the Hoffman Process. Caveat: it’s definitely not promotional.

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Called for Jury Duty

We walk through life pretending that our path is fairly normal and predictable until we’re caught up short, or perhaps we stumble into a situation that unexpectedly catches us off guard and something opens up that changes our perspective. Some might even call this a blessing.

I was called for jury duty, and early one Spring morning, I dutifully reported to San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. It is a nondescript building, really just a plain block of grey-white marble, filled with an odd assortment of people, police, people on their way to work paying traffic fines, lawyers in suits, municipal workers in jeans and shirts with badges, men and women, mostly people of color, in orange prison uniforms filing in for arraignment. I made my way to the second floor and joined the line of ordinary people waiting for the 8 AM call.

The doors to the courtroom opened, and we filed into a windowless grey hall with harsh lighting and simple wooden benches. Most everyone sat apart, leaving wide spaces between themselves. A few did sit together and chatted which I found odd. We were strangers to each other, and I was determined to keep it so. I knew that I would be very unhappy sitting in a courtroom for an indeterminate number of days listening to someone else’s sad story, and I certainly was not alone. After the officers of the court thanked us for doing our civic duty and introduced the lawyers, they made it very clear that the selection process would only excuse people for cause, real reasons, not just that we would be bored and might have preferred to watch daytime soap operas. We were sworn in, taking an oath to answer their questions honestly. To soften my mood, I tried to listen and make myself curious about what had occurred and why this was a complaint that had to be settled with lawyers and judges and a few of my fellow prospective jurors sitting in judgement. Others read books or newspapers.

There were perhaps 35 prospective jurors in the pool, and it was after lunch before I was interviewed. We were questioned by the lawyers to see if we could be impartial, but it was also clear they were also looking for people who could be swayed by their version of the facts. Gradually some particulars of the case came to light. A middle aged woman had accused a Latino house painter of sexual molestation. I began to piece together the thread of the prosecution's argument: the painter had mistaken the flirtations of the woman as an invitation for sex. I couldn’t determine if they’d actually had sex, but apparently the woman was also, what are the words, at ease with her sexuality. The denouement was being held in suspense as if to entice us to follow salacious emotional details in the conflicting versions of the story that would be the heart of the case.

He was younger, and although no movie star, I imagined that he would have played the lover’s role convincingly. But there was some disconnect between his attitude and the alleged aggression that was beginning to emerge as a central point of the woman’s complaint. His smile was genuine. I could see that. Of course there were language and cultural barriers. I had worked on construction sites for years. I knew many immigrants who worked with their hands, and I respected them. I also knew the sexual banter that passed the time. I recognized his clean but rumpled denim shirt. He could never pay a fine. He couldn’t even afford a lawyer, and I actually had to wonder if he even understood the gravity of the accusation.

Their inequality, the arrogance of the woman--at least that was my first impression--she’d made no attempt to dress like a nun for the proceedings, my curiosity about trying to delve into her motivation for bringing the charge--I toyed with the idea of actually sitting. Suddenly a wave of conflicting emotions swept over me, doubt and fear, sympathy and revulsion, attraction, even sexual fantasy. My first impression was that he might have misread the situation. He certainly didn’t rape her, or did he? I couldn’t be sure. But more to the point: I couldn’t rely on my own judgement. In all honesty, I knew that I couldn’t serve on the jury. Even if I could have been impartial, even if there was the possibility that I could have saved a man from an unjust accusation, I knew I couldn’t sit through days of intense psychological reckoning while lawyers tore apart a poor man’s last shred of dignity.

Possibly I could have negotiated a path through the prosecution and the defense’s arguments. Possibly I could have sorted out my own feelings and really listened to what actually occurred. Or could I? I had been trying to do that in many situations in my own life with mixed results. My sexual encounter with Bob Hoffman was rape. I had been the person who misread the circumstance. Although I fully understood that my naivete didn’t relieve Hoffman’s guilt, I couldn’t trust myself to render judgement in a situation where so much was at stake. I couldn’t trust myself to render judgment in my own life.

My name came up. I was asked if there was any reason I couldn’t serve. “I was raped,” I responded. “Thank you. You’re excused,” the judge said quickly. I wish it were that easy.


Here is a link to the page that lists other pieces I've written about my relationship with Hoffman.

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021


Saturday, February 13, 2021

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

It is with a great deal of sadness that I find myself writing again about Bob Hoffman of the “world famous” Hoffman Process. I am aware that the group work that was developed by Claudio Naranjo and Hoffman, among others, has seemed to have been the catalyst for positive change for some individuals. As with many “New Age” personal development courses however, its promises do not mitigate the risks. I have detailed my involvement with Hoffman and Process in my other writing about the Process, but this is a story about Hoffman’s death in 1997.  

An enthusiast chided me with her spiritual understanding that everything in life happens for a reason, and claimed that she would never have changed a thing. She asked me if I would have made different choices knowing what I do now? My answer, “Of course, I’m not a complete idiot.” Nearly 50 years ago my life was falling apart. I made choices. Of course I have to live with the results of my choices, but to say that I always chose wisely is pure insanity. And I will certainly tell the story in hopes that some other kid can perhaps choose a more reasonable path. 


Hoffman’s roots are in the Spiritualist Churchnot the hip Science of Mind practice, but the one with trace mediums, seances, and spirit messages. Hoffman claimed that the kernel of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, “Negative Love,” was transmitted to him during a visitation one night in 1968 by the spirit of Seigfried Fisher, a respected psychiatrist who had fled Vienna during the Nazi occupation. The disembodied Dr. Fisher took him through his own process and became his “Spirit Guide” who promised to open doors for him. 


Although Naranjo, along with Dr. Ernest Pecci and several other mental health professionals tried to mould a process that might allow a person to experience his or her own psychological life as the result of negative attitudes, behaviors, habits from their parents, it remains an orchestrated, contrived emotional experience where the risks far outweigh any promises. 


Despite Hoffman being a very difficult manand I am not alone in my assessmentI always tried to remain friends with him. He was a man who had deeply 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, for reasons that were inevitably labeled as my personal failing or the result of a lack of understanding, empathy, love or compassion, I never succeeded. 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. 


I phoned Hoffman in the Fall of 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 several years. Hoffman told me that he’s 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 Sao Paulo Brazil where there was a successful Process center. I forget the exact reason for the visit, but he told me that he had been treated like a guru, flowers strewn in his path, and that pleased him. 



I’ll never forget the circumstance of the 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 of the intellectual property of the Process because the $50,000 for the flight 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 doing a barbaric medical procedure in an filthy kitchen in a Brazilian suburb.


The denouement of the melodrama unfolded. Many visits to several oncologists, encouraging promises of cure, liver resection, an extremely difficult and painful recovery, a very brief remission, and then a steep rapid decline. 


I did not stay till the end. I saw some parts of his personality that for an ordinary man might be best left unsaid, but given that he is now a public figure, I will talk about them. I think that they are both part of the story of the Hoffman Process as well as my story and I intend to write more about my involvement and my transference. But for now, I will just mention that food that didn’t have to be kosher but had to look kosher. I called a rabbi to see what I could prepare that he could eat, but the sandwich was refused because 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. And I confess that my hostility took a nasty turn when I tricked Hoffman into telling a very uncomfortable joke to his doctors at an elaborate party he organized to celebrate his cure.


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 had hoped that Hoffman might be able to repair some of his messier relationships and, in the terms of his personal belief system, be able to move on. God it was difficult. As I waded through the wreckage with him, he receivedthere is no other word of itpeople he’d trained as Process teachers, people who’d helped him, other people to whom he owed a debt, people who were vying to make some money from his notoriety, and in all fairness, many people whom he’d helped.


I was personally very distressed that he would not reconcile with his own 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, but it this experience eventually led me to finally reconcile with my own father before he died 15 years later. I will try to unravel this in my next post.


So I am faced with a personal dilemma here: do I call Hoffman a fraud? From what I experienced myself, he was a powerful force and it was negative. Has the Process that bears his name actually helped people? The answer is yes to both questions.



Here are the pieces that I've written about Hoffman. Although I have tried to be objective, it is impossible to take a disinterested position with regard to the Process. Hoffman sexually abused me about 6 months after I finished that first process.

 

The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

#GayMeToo

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

This Victim Refuses Silence 

A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman?

Forgive and Forget? Impossible. An inquiry into Victimization.

"Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." 

New Age Miracle or Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

Science vs. Spooks

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults


© Kenneth Ireland, 2021




Monday, September 7, 2020

A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman?

During the very first Hoffman Process, under the direction of Claudio Naranjo, I had a breakthrough that radically altered my life’s trajectory. I saw clearly the reality of a circumstance in my life that I’d been struggling with since puberty, and, at least for an instant, I experienced enormous freedom. There was no turning back.

I was, however, as naive about the workings of my mind as I was about my sexuality. Because my insight involved sex, the fire was bright and ferocious. Although I had been warned that the power of the libido was enormous, I had no idea that it was no match for the power of self-deception. As the Indian Buddhist monk Shantideva wrote, “by the mind the world is led . . . The mind swings like a firebrand, the mind rears up like a wave, the mind burns like a forest fire, like a great flood the mind bears all away.” When my sexually awakened life began to present its own difficulties, I returned to the well where I’d first tasted freedom, expecting to dredge up water to put out the fire, but it had gone dry. 

My mind always tagged Hoffman with that sense of freedom. This proved problematic because Hoffman himself was problematic, and for many reasons other than the fact that he raped me. I will not blame Hoffman and his behavior for my allowing my life to deteriorate, but I do trace the roots of the problem back to him. He stood for nothing other than enhancing his own self image, position and power. He was not at all professionalin fact he was as vehemently anti-professional as he was anti-intellectual. This of course came from deeply unresolved feelings of inadequacy, but I was trapped listening to an important person in my life denigrate what I cherished most. He was gay but consciously took a stance against the emerging gay liberation movement. He lied about his own life. He was a fraud.

When I could not stomach him anymore, I looked for some other figure to guide me, beginning a long series of teachers whom I could not trust. I switched my allegiance to Scientology, then to the Gurdjieff work, and then the Landmark Forum—grasping for something outside myself to deliver me from problems I created myself. For many years I stumbled around, fumbling for solutions, sabotaging my relationships, throwing all my energy into poorly conceived plans to get my life on track and ending up disappointed, all the while using alcohol and drugs to soothe my frustration.

Why do I feel so strongly about Hoffman? Why can’t I put his abuse in the past and even honor the work that has been beneficial to many people? Listening and reading the reactions to my posts, several friends have commented that often those who assume spiritual leadership, even if they do have spiritual gifts, seem to be hopelessly entangled with predatory, abusive and larcenous behaviors. One wonders why so many people continue to be swayed. Does setting an example make any difference at all? Of course we all have faults, but some leaders can't really be open and honest? Many of course are simply charlatans who obscure the truth for their own enrichment, but some have had genuine enriching, enlightening experiences.  


Forgiveness seems to be the clearest path to putting the past in the past. But one thing is certain: the abuse of any responsibility as a teacher, a therapist and spiritual guide cannot be forgiven or excused in any way. Here in India, particularly among the practicing Buddhists I live with, the key is compassion. It has a different nuance than the Western notion of forgiveness. It doesn’t offer an easy promise of freedom. Coming to understand Hoffman’s influence on me required rigorous self investigation. I discovered that forgiving him would be an act of compassion to myself.  The introspection that Buddhist teachers advocate looks something like what Fyodor Dostoevsky, describes in Notes from the Underground: “You look into it, the object flies off into air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left againthat is to beat the wall as hard as you can.”


Hoffman said over and over, “everyone is guilty and no one to blame.” In the crude psychological model of his Process, this refers to what might be understood as intergenerational guilt. Hoffman’s understanding of forgiveness was a kind of psychological jolt or emotional release, but as a tool for self analysis or understanding, it is, in my experience, a blunt instrument. The trauma passed from parent to child involves a complex psychological mechanism; it’s a disorder which, like much of Hoffman’s work, painted all negative behaviors passed from parent to child with a broad brush. Treatable psychological disorders, stage fright or anorexia, for example, are lumped together with severe depression, and the solution is always the same: after experientially touching the repressed anger through a bitch session, or bashing as it now called, the client traces the origins of the negative influence back to his or her parental figures. Then there is usually a kind of staged emotional release that allows a release.


In the 12-Step world, there is the counsel to make amendswhen you discover that your actions caused harm, even if your mind was hijacked by alcohol or drugs, you are required to clean up the mess you made. Over 25 years of intermittent contact with him, I found no evidence that Hoffman ever felt that he was obligated to make amends to anyone. I certainly don’t feel any need to make amends to him. Ironically I was in such denial that I actually thought that if I made the effort to repair my relationship with him, it might bring some order to my life. I finally came to the realization that I needed to make amends to myself.


At least from my prejudiced point of view, Hoffman suffered from internalized homophobia. I never saw any change in his behavior. On the contrary I saw him over and over enter into relationships with younger men, try to dominate them, and then sabotage the relationship. I personally met two other young men whom he singled out for his attention which was not reciprocated. Of course I have no way of knowing if they involved sexual encounters such as I experienced, but I do know that he was insistent that these men have a romantic relationship with him, and that the men found their relationships with him “complicated.”


And this brings me to my own life and living my amends. I am blessed. Now in my mid-70’s, I lead a relatively quiet life in northern India surrounded by many interesting and dedicated monks and nuns from most of the Buddhist traditions. I have many wonderful Himachal friends, Hindus, but also Muslims, mostly young entrepreneurs from Kashmir, and I cherish my friendship with several other fellow expats. I know several very creative, amazing young Indians. It was one of them, Kumar Abhishek, who asked me a question about continuing my relationship with an abuser that inspired so much of the self-reflection here. My own path is clear: to continue the rigorous work of self investigation, to help where I can, to never exploit another human for my own pleasure or greed, and to speak the truth when required. At this point this is the place where my abusive relationship with Bob Hoffman and the Hoffman Process have taken me.


My Buddhist koan guide, Jon Joseph, sent me this poem which captures the irony of the teaching. I’ll end with these lines from “A Color of the Sky” by Tony Hoagland as my capping verse. 


What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.   

What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.   

What I thought was an injustice

turned out to be a color of the sky.


Outside the youth center, between the liquor store   

and the police station,

a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;


overflowing with blossomfoam,   

like a sudsy mug of beer;

like a bride ripping off her clothes,


dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,


so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.   

It’s been doing that all week:

making beauty,

and throwing it away,

and making more.


___________

Here are the pieces that I've written about Hoffman. Although I have tried to be objective, it is impossible to take a disinterested position with regard to the Process. Hoffman sexually abused me about 6 months after I finished my first process.

The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

#GayMeToo

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

This Victim Refuses Silence 

A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman?

Forgive and Forget? Impossible. An inquiry into Victimization.

"Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." 

New Age Miracle or Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

Science vs. Spooks

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults


© Kenneth Ireland, 2020