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.

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

New Age Miracle or Fraud

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

By Kenneth Ireland

Part 1

Contents

Bamboozled

The Seekers After Truth meets the Hoffman Process

No Better than an Ouija Board

A Second of Authentic Experience

The Long Ride Home

© Kenneth Ireland

12/8/2022

Mcleod Ganj 

Himachal Pradesh, India

Bamboozled

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you rarely get it back.” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

I heard Bob Hoffman tell his otherworldly story many times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Seekers After Truth meet the Hoffman Process  

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

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

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

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

___________

At about 7:30 on a cold Tuesday night in the early fall, I sat on the floor of a ramshackle old fraternity house near the UC Berkeley campus with the new students in Naranjo’s SAT 2. Naranjo Introduced Bob Hoffman as someone with a unique insight into our parental conditioning. Naranjo said that he’d offered to help Hoffman shape the work he’d been doing with individuals into a group process. We were to be the avant-garde of psychic therapy. Then, after these few short words, he turned the meeting over to the mild-mannered and soft-spoken Schaffer and left the room. She delivered a few “indications” about how the process would proceed and yielded the floor to Hoffman. He was hardly silent.

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

A tailor with no psychological training told 30-35 eager, curious, primarily young, highly educated people present that no one in the room really loved themselves, that like actors in a bad play with an unhappy ending, we only gave love to get love, that we’d learned everything we knew and understood about love from our negative, almost perverse relationships with our parents who didn’t know the first thing about love.

Hoffman defined Negative Love as “illogical logic and nonsensical sense but masochistically true or why would we do it.” No questions. If we didn’t understand, we were just playing the game of playing dumb; if we thought he thought he was dumb, it was negative transference and proof that we didn’t love ourselves. We were mired in self-hatred if we thought he was dressed in bad taste. I thought he was overdressed for the Trifecta, so my transference had already begun. Hoffman set himself up to be the point of transference for all the negative emotions we’d inherited from our parents. They were the main reason that we were miserable. There was no invitation to observe our reactions. No one knew anything—nobody except him. He had received an other-worldly message in a revelatory middle-of-the-night visitation when his spirit guide, Dr. Siegfried Fischer, taught us how to get a loving divorce from mommy and daddy.

We were then told to close our eyes and imagine many steps that were detailed as we built a psychically sealed vault, our Sanctuary, where we could work and be worked on in safety. Once settled into that space, Hoffman instructed us to look for a human figure, no angels, who would appear and become our spirit guide. He told us to pay attention and listen to messages, that he’d “opened us psychically,” and we would receive solutions to our problems from our spirit guide. These were real spirits and genuine messages, not some imaginary construct, and if we didn’t believe him, it was negative transference.

Once we were “psychically open,” Hoffman asked us to imagine holding a lovely fruit, an orange, but it might have been a strawberry. Then he told us to taste it, savor it, feel it drip down our throat. When we opened our eyes, of course, there was no succulent fruit in our hands; we’d created the whole thing in our minds, but didn’t it feel natural? He asserted categorically that our emotions were just like this, both negative or positive, simply the projection of our mind that dictated how we behaved, acted, felt, and most importantly, how we learned to love.

Hoffman assured us that whatever we created could be uncreated or replaced by placing our attention on our inattention, and what it could be replaced with would be shown to us by our spirit guides through "mind trips." We were instructed to pinpoint a negative trait. Then, after we’d imagined it written out in words, our guide incinerated it with beams of light shooting out of his or her hands and threw the ashes on the ground of our sanctuary, where they became seeds for flowers that grew and spelled out a word that would be the positive side of the negativity that we’d pictured. Then, we were instructed to make a list of our mother's negative characteristics and bring it to the next session.

He ended the evening with a smile, very pleased with himself. We'd also been hypnotized. I just had a few hours of spirit visitation and an Ouija board session. I knew it was ridiculous, but I felt trapped. I had just moved all the way from New York and had nowhere else to turn. I looked down and took notes, resolved to stay and do the work.

___________

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

We launched into what Hoffman called “The Prosecution of Mother.” I calculate that the exercise lasted more than a month. For Hoffman, lists of negative traits and admonitions were crucial for the Prosecution of Mother, but there didn’t seem to be any actual logic, purpose, or order in the lists or making the lists. It was just anything that we found unsetting or anything Hoffman saw that he judged to be negative. The one criterion for the lists was length. A short list was proof of denial. Then there was what he called the emotional autobiography with mother. Again, there was no fundamental analysis. It just had to be emotional.

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

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

The experience was one of the major breakthroughs of my entire adult life. It was as if an impenetrable veil had been lifted. I had to admit that I was an angry person. I could no longer pretend that I was somehow spared the anguish of a domineering parent. And with that realization, the intricate spiritual world of a young Jesuit seeker that I’d constructed as a defense began to look like a sham, and ten years of rigorous, disciplined religious life began to crumble. I recognized a range of feelings I’d struggled to avoid all my life, ones I’d constructed to avoid feeling. At that moment, I became solidly engaged in the exploration to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom. It would be an arduous, long process. The breakthrough happened under Claudio’s guidance, using the technique he learned from Perls. It was also, and perhaps this is just my bad luck, part of Claudio’s efforts to help Hoffman create the Group Process.

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

Hoffman contributed to this equation because he was the loudest voice in the room when my emotional defenses began to crumble. But given the vagaries of our psychological make-up, I conflated the psychological events, which only reinforced my transference towards Hoffman. Hand in hand with an immense sense of freedom came the crippling burden of decades of dealing with transference to a narcissist sexual predator. Because it was on the level of peer counseling, no one could provide the kind of professional feedback that the situation demanded. Naranjo, for all his insight and professionalism, was woefully negligent.

I was left floundering. My guide was no better than an Ouija board.

___________

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

Hoffman’s professional behavior was also problematic. He claimed he had to break us down so that we could build ourselves up, which gave him blanket permission to be an aggressive bully, at times verging on psychotic. With a list of Mother’s Negative Traits and emotional autobiography in hand, playing tough love or good cop-bad cop, Hoffman would scrutinize gestures, mannerisms, speech patterns, slips of the tongue, ways of dressing, and pick a fight. He lectured, cajoled, confronted, and intimidated. He was extremely good at reading a person’s weakness, imitating it, and exaggerating it. He would shout, insult, mock, humiliate, bully, and belittle, accusing us of playing games. He was unrelenting. And then he went in for the kill.

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

Hoffman’s behaviors went unchallenged. They were so far outside the norms of ethical conduct for a therapist or spiritual guide that it usually left everyone speechless, but few left. Those who did were ridiculed as not having the inner strength to do real Work. Hoffman justified himself by insisting that we couldn’t see that we were just negative children. His job was to point out how we acted out of negative love and that our resistance and denial were so intense it required a firm hand. He used the “iron fist covered in the velvet glove of love.” He told us in no uncertain terms that his job was thankless and with minimal reward.

Hoffman’s arrogance in the face of sound psychotherapy went unchallenged. He had no understanding of basic genetic ordering and impulses and no grasp of complex emotional responses conditioned over time. The only economy was “buying love.” Every human action was a calculated transaction to obtain the genuine affection, love, and acceptance you craved from infancy but were denied. He’d point to any behavior he thought was negative, self-defeating, or counterproductive and taunt in a whiny voice, “See, Mommy, now will you love me?” Hoffman repeated his maxim repeatedly, “Everyone is guilty, and no one’s to blame.” We were just the sum of the sins of our fathers and mothers. The mechanism was simply learning to imitate your parents’ negative traits and internalize their negative admonitions. We acted in the exact same way to get the love we thought, no, knew we deserved, or rebelled against it.

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

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

___________

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

In late January of ‘73, 55 people gathered for Hoffman’s first 13-week group Process of Psychic therapy in a nondescript rented classroom in UC Berkeley’s Tolman Hall, the home of its psychology department. Hoffman believed that location could bestow a measure of legitimacy. We met every Monday night, and an assignment was due by Wednesday. It was more of a forced march than a psychological inquiry. The main elements of the current Hoffman Process were present: a rigid set of exercises, the requirement to complete the assignments with as much emotional expression as possible, and to be on time. “Keeping up” meant, in Hoffman’s estimation, that you were willing to break down your defenses and see yourself clearly.

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

The Long Ride Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

___________

My parents arrived in Berkeley just after the semester ended. We planned to drive back to Connecticut and spend time together; I would attend my annual Jesuit retreat and then return to California.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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