The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Fischer-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, 2024

I began research for this paper, “The Ontological Odd Couple, the Origins of the Hoffman Process” when the current owners of Hoffman 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 also have to note here that my observations are colored by a sexual and emotionally abusive relationship with Hoffman. See: Bob Hoffman was a lunatic, a liar, a criminal, & a fraud.

Introduction

When creating a 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 some of the constraints on telling the truth.

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

Bob Hoffman created the original Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy (FHPT) between 1968 and 1973. Claudio Naranjo, the Chilean psychiatrist who introduced the “Enneagram” into 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. Fischer.

The myth that the Process came full-blown from a pure source and neglected people who did the difficult work of bringing something new into the world is false. In addition, fostering outrageous expectations creates false standards for evaluating 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 a 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 led 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-Fischer 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 is dead before Hoffman gives birth to the Process. Dr. Siegfried Fischer 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, an 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, especially in order to note Naranjo’s contribution in some detail. Suppose we allow a story of real creation and inspiration to be sanitized. In that case, 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 in completing some of his unfinished work and his karma; and that Hoffman could help him “move on.” Hoffman said he heard the phrase “doors will open” when he asked Fischer how he, a tailor, would enter the world of professional psychotherapy and present this insight as the missing piece, an antidote to the endless 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 40s 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 a scientific materialist and would have had 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 psychoanalysis 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 was Fischer’s patient “for years.” Still, Hoffman lied about his personal friendship with Fischer 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 “Fischer-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 of 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 makeup. 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.”

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 a 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.

According to Ernie Pecci, the original elements of the Process were the prosecution of the Mother and then the defense of the Mother, the prosecution of the Father and the defense of the Father, and 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 psychically “reads” his patients 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. Hoffman’s written notes in Stefancic’s possession clearly show that Hoffman credited Naranjo with transforming the FHPT into a group process. Every interaction between them that I witnessed over more than 20 years also clearly shows that Naranjo always regarded Hoffman as a modern-day shaman. 

Lacking psychological training, Hoffman needed Naranjo’s validation, but 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. However, Naranjo crafted 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 highlighted 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 unnecessary, but I suspect it took too much time for the compressed version).

That first Fall, at least five weeks were 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, it was 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 I’d struggled to avoid all my life and a set of defenses I had constructed to avoid these feelings. At that moment, I became solidly engaged in my exploration 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 bodywork, 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 in which 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. Specific assignments for each week were due three days after the session; Hoffman reviewed them, and his recorded comments were back in your hands at the beginning of the next session. In every session, Hoffman lectured, shouted, cajoled, confronted, intimidated, humiliated, bullied, and 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 and student/patient relationships. 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 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 emotions, we could 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 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 in the HQP today as elaborately produced events with music, props, and food. When combined with suggested visual images, they can and do induce 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 Fischer-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, autosuggestion, 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 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 experience 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 influenced 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 neither the stomach nor money to face off in court over his intellectual property..

 

© Kenneth Ireland, 2024

Bob Hoffman's Dirty Secrets, Part 2

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

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

By Kenneth Ireland

Contents

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

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

Metatron, Interlude with an Archangel 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debunking The Big Lie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

Bob Hoffman died in 1997 of liver cancer. 

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

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

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

The Last Act 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#GayMeToo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s time to take off the gloves!”.

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

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

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

 

Moving Towards a Conclusion 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Why did I write this?

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

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

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

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

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

 

Is this where I leave it?

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

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

If we’re lucky, life is kumquats.

 

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

April 9, 2007 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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