The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy Process
Originally posted July 31, 2004, 1st revision 9/16/2006, 2nd revision 6/6/2011, 3rd revision 5/18/2021
© Kenneth Ireland, 2004, 2006, 2011, 2021
I began research for this paper, “The Ontological Odd Couple, the Origins of the Hoffman Process” when the current owners of Hoffman's licensed intellectual property began to rewrite their marketing copy. They recast Hoffman and his Process, editing out the contributions of many people who worked hard and selflessly to help Hoffman flesh out his rudimentary insight..
There was another purpose behind my writing. I was trying to resolve my reservations about Hoffman and his work by simply recounting facts and events. However, after trying to disentangle Hoffman's bizarre and abusive behaviors from the modality of the Process itself, I see nothing original or other-worldly about his insights or his methodology either as presented nearly 40 years ago or in their current iteration. I'd advise anyone to undertake an ordinary course of therapy with a licensed professional rather than the HQP.
I have just finished a long piece about the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy and my sexual abuse by Hoffman. I intend for it to be part of a larger spiritual memoir, but that will be at least a year out.
To be more web friendly I have divided it into Part 1 and Part 2
Introduction
When creating an historical account, you have to start at the beginning to get it right. If you’re lucky some facts, times, and dates can be accurately reconstructed and pinpointed in documents, letters, transcripts and personal calendars. Some of the messy parts of bringing something new into the world will inevitably be buried and lost. The current owners of the Hoffman Process have recast, revised, and distorted the history. They need to create a compelling narrative to sell the Process. I do not rely on the Process for my livelihood which lifts that burden on telling the truth.
I will argue that they are following in Hoffman’s own steps in creating the narrative of a distinguished psychotherapist appearing in a psychic event in order to resolve his botched karma, and create a plausible claim that a tailor from Oakland could be the source of a complete psychological treatment.
The original Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy (FHPT) was created by Bob Hoffman between 1968 and 1973. Claudio Naranjo,the Chilean psychiatrist who introduced the “Enneagram” into the western psycho-spiritual conversation is the best known of the professionals who contributed to Hoffman’s Process, but there were many others. Hoffman sought input from many sources (who sometimes did not even know that he was talking to others about the same issue). But he always attributed the final product to his spirit guide, Dr. Fisher.
The myth that the Process came full blown from a pure source, and neglecting people who did the difficult work of bringing something new into the world is false. In addition, fostering outrageous expectations creates false standards to evaluate personal experience, and makes it more difficult to use one’s own inspiration to gain self-knowledge and liberation. In other words, it undermines what it sets out to do.
No course of psychotherapy can produce real changes in people if it remains only theory. It changes. It reaches into areas that its creators cannot predict. If promises and expectations cannot be fulfilled, they have to be modified or eliminated. However, this evolution is distinct from marketing. Sadly, in our culture, promoting a brand name, writing persuasive copy, will prevail and in the process the contributions of many talented people are cut and lost. Their contributions were marginalized and their value neglected or attributed to others.
If nothing else, what follows can be an inclusive footnote to the revised story.
My Purpose and Sources
I propose to outline the early development of the FHPT from the basement ‘reading’ room in Hoffman’s clothing store on 15th Street in Oakland to the SAT group process. I will not cover any of the subsequent additions and deletions since the creation of the seven-day format. My focus will be the 13-week process, the exercises and mind trips (now called ‘visualizations’) that remain the framework of the HQP, to see if this yields an insight into how a very simple insight became an expensive course with sequential series of scripted emotional events, a product in the human potential market place.
The primary source of information about the early development of the FHPT is my own experience. In 1972-73, I was in the first SAT group that Naranjo used to create a group process to accomplish “a loving divorce from mother and father” that Hoffman promised. Later in the spring of 1973, I was one of approximately 55 people Hoffman invited to be in his first 13-week group that he himself “took through” the Process in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The following year I was trained as an FHPT therapist and group leader which became my primary work for several years. I lead the 13-week processes for PSI and later, I worked privately with smaller groups for another three years.
Another source is Hoffman himself and my conversations with him from 1972 until his death in 1997. Our friendship was strained and painful. While he was alive I could not talk about my observations that gave me some insight into his inner workings, puzzles and deep-seated unhappiness. Extremely concerned about his public image, he asserted that he had to present himself to the world as straight. Most people close to him, certainly those who worked with him, knew that Hoffman was gay, but he never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality. In this day of liberation and acceptance, his deception and his closeted life, cannot be overlooked. A good case could be argued that the process itself grew out of his conflict about being a man who loved men, his difficulty forming and nurturing close relationships, his creativity and sensitivity, and perhaps some of his inner doubts about the worth of his work.
I do not know all the people who contributed to the development of Hoffman’s work. There are many. I have not included hearsay material from people with whom I did not work or with whom I didn’t have focused conversations. Many disappeared after working with Hoffman and making a significant contribution to the Process, such as Dr. Ernest Pecci, M.D., a psychiatrist who founded PSI, The Center for Psycho-Spiritual Integration, to present the 13-week Process. I trained as a therapist under Pecci and worked with him for more than two years in the 70’s. Pecci’s psychotherapeutic model was influenced by New Age spirituality. My last personal contact with Pecci was a phone call about 1977 when he told me that Hoffman was going to sue everyone that he, Pecci, had trained unless we ceased to offer the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic therapy to the public. (Nearly everyone who was offering some version of the FHPT ceased under Hoffman’s threat of legal action, with the exception of one or two practitioners who had split with Hoffman before PSI, substantially altering or modifying it. He was also not successful in shutting down the Anti-Fisher Hoffman Process that was offered in the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ashrams in Pune and Antelope).
Some key people are dead. Julius Brandstatter is the man who coined the word ‘Quadrinity’ to reflect the four aspects of being human—physical, intellectual, spiritual and emotional. I met Julius and his wife Miriam when they returned from Israel in the 70’s; their work with Hoffman continued through the re-casting of the Process into the current seven-and-a- half-day format. In the opinion of most observers, their contribution was never fully acknowledged by Hoffman. I had several long conversations with Miriam in 2006. It was she who created the organization and flow for Hoffman’s early sessions. Hoffman would call Miriam in Israel and tell her what he presented that week with SAT, and later in Tolman Hall. Miriam, a trained psychotherapist, then returned what she had presented in Israel, as an orderly, effective outline which Hoffman filed and used for the next Process. Both Julius and Miriam are now dead.
The most important person in this story was dead before Hoffman gave birth to the Process. Dr. Siegfried Fisher assumed the status of legend and myth in the story of the Process as Hoffman’s guide. His name was removed from the original title when his son filed a lawsuit. He said that Hoffman had been his father’s patient and that his professional reputation was threatened by Hoffman’s claims. I will briefly examine both claims below.
Many of the people with whom I had extensive conversations were estranged from Hoffman, among them Ilene Cummings and Stanley Stefancic, who both served as Executive Director of the Institute after Hoffman’s return from Mexico. Besides long and thoughtful discussions about the origins of the Process and the contributions of various players, Stefancic showed me several documents, lists of the unique terms and phrases that were intended as teaching tools in the HQP (e.g. “negative love,” “giving to get,” “illogical logic, nonsensical sense”), as well as descriptions of several elements in the Processes, (including the bitter sweet chocolate ritual, and spirit guide and sanctuary mind trip), that Hoffman and his lawyers prepared when he was considering lawsuits against those he considered pirates. (I have used quotes around words and phrases that Hoffman habitually used to describe either his methodology or the concepts that were derived from the Spiritualist Church.)
Other people were constant friends and supporters from their first meeting with Hoffman until he died. Although I know these people and had many conversations with them, I have not used anything they told me in my presentation because I do not have their permission. Cynthia Merchant, personal assistant to Hoffman and Hoffman Quadrinity Teacher, worked as editor of the lengthy transcripts of Hoffman’s presentations that became the core of today’s Process. Ron Kayne, early supporter, by Hoffman’s admission, created the “guide and sanctuary mind trip,” as well as being the ghost writer for Hoffman’s book, Getting Divorced from Mother and Dad and the first version of The Negative Love Syndrome.
When I became serious about uncovering and documenting the origins of the FHPS, I interviewed several of the members of Naranjo’s first SAT group who had worked individually with Hoffman. Ron Deziel gave me important information about the bare bones of Hoffman’s initial work heavily laced in psychic practice borrowed from the Spiritualist Church.
Most of what I will present is not easily reconciled with the image of an inspired “intuitive,” or kindly and wise Jewish grandfather.However I feel it vital to record another version of Hoffman’s inspiration and preserve it in a small corner of the universe, and especially to note in some detail Naranjo’s contribution. If we allow a story of real creation and inspiration to be sanitized, the contributions of this highly talented man who was present at a certain moment and responded wholeheartedly to Hoffman’s questions and requests without concern for his own personal gain and enrichment might be forgotten.
The Inspiration
I heard Hoffman describe the inspiration for the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy many times. The rather bare outline of this bizarre otherworldly encounter never varied. In the middle of the night in 1967, the figure of a recently departed friend, the psychiatrist Siegfried Fischer, appeared at the foot of his bed and revealed to him the missing link in psychoanalytic therapy: the concept of Negative Love as the stream of negative behaviors unconsciously passed from one generation to the next. Then Fischer’s spirit-being took Hoffman through his own psychic therapy, uncovering the roots of his own inherited patterns of behavior and liberating him with a new understanding that reached into the depths of his emotional being. Hoffman said that he was able to forgive his parents for all the negativity he had experienced growing up. He knew that “everyone is guilty and no one is to blame.” He then severed his karmic connection to his parents’ negativity. Fischer disappeared with the promise to return and assist Hoffman to complete some of his own unfinished work, his karma, and that Hoffman could help him “move on.” Hoffman said he heard the phrase “doors will open” when he asked Fisher how he, a tailor, would enter the world of professional psychotherapy and present this insight as the missing piece, an antidote to the endless cycle of analysis.
Who was Siegfried Fischer? Hoffman claimed that Fischer was an acquaintance, a friend of his wife’s family, a German psychiatrist who managed to escape the country in 1936, making his way to San Francisco. I confirmed the basic outline of the Fischer story from the public record. Siegfried Fischer did emigrate in the 40’s and practiced psychotherapy at Langley Porter; he wrote Principles of general psychopathology: an interpretation of the theoretical foundations of psychopathological concepts, (New York, Philosophical Library, 1950).
Hoffman presented a scenario of convivial after-dinner conversations with Fischer. They chatted and argued about the existence of the psychic realm, life after death, and questions about the efficacy of psychotherapy. I can’t overemphasize the Spiritualist Church’s doctrine: “truth” spoken by disembodied spirits to spirits inhabiting human bodies, satisfying karmic obligations. Fischer was the scientific materialist and would have none of it. Hoffman’s telling had the feel of an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil, psychotherapy vs. a psychic tailor, the psychic declaring victory after death.
After hearing this part of Hoffman’s story, with slight variations, innumerable times, I began to feel that Hoffman had an ax to grind with the enterprise of psycho-analysis, that he had probably had a failed experience in therapy himself. I began to suspect that he had been Fischer’s patient and quit, still in transference. I asked Hoffman if he had been Fischer’s patient and he said yes, that he and his wife had seen Fischer for family therapy with their son Michael. I have confirmed through reliable sources that Hoffman himself was Fisher’s patient “for years,” but Hoffman lied about his personal friendship with Fisher in order to present himself as a reliable source.
Fischer’s son maintained that he was never a close personal friend of Hoffman or Hoffman’s wife. Hoffman continued to use “Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy,” and Fischer's son, David, filed a lawsuit against Hoffman. Hoffman did not contest David’s claim, and changed the name of the FHPT to the Quadrinity Process. However, Hoffman still claimed, both in private conversation and group presentations, a personal friendship with Fischer and that Fischer was his spirit guide.
Hoffman claimed that Fischer guided him as he began to work with people who started to come to him for psychic readings. From my conversations with several people who did psychic therapy with Hoffman in the “reading room” of his 15th Street shop, Hoffman’s initial work contained the following elements. After some discussion of the problems that were plaguing a person’s life (and legendary “forceful” persuasion), and making lists of his or her parents' negative traits, Hoffman instructed clients to write an emotionally-charged autobiography of their life from birth till puberty. Then he began to direct the “prosecution” of Mother and Dad for programming a defenseless child with negative emotional traits. An “anger letter” to his or her parents capped the prosecution which provided some release as well as giving Hoffman an opportunity to evaluate the depth of the client’s emotional state.
Then Hoffman “psychically read” the emotional history the client’s parents, living or dead, describing events without prior knowledge, often including times and places, that explained and cemented difficult emotional traits into their emotional make up. This was the parents’ “defense”: to see that negative love was passed from one generation to the next. This is the concept of “negative love”: that his or her parents had unwillingly “adopted” these negative traits themselves, driven by their own emotional history and therefore could not be blamed. These deep, psychically verifiable, understandings led to the experience of forgiveness and compassion for one’s parents. “Everyone is guilty and no one to blame.”
And finally, through the mediation of Fischer and their personal spirit guide, the client got “Closure” by cutting the psychic ties to his or her parents. In a “mind trip,” the client yanked out the umbilical cord that connected his or her emotional child to their parents and allowed them to grow up to their chronological age. As an emotional adult, the client could for the first time experience unconditional love for their parents. The tools for breaking the habit of negative behaviors, now just phantom symptoms of imagined hurt, were repetition of positive traits, a process called “recycling,” and avoidance of negative behaviors by “putting your awareness on your awareness” using rudimentary self awareness exercises. There were also tapes of sessions with Hoffman and written negative trait lists and positive alternatives for reinforcement.
The original elements of the Process, according to Ernie Pecci, were the prosecution of Mother and then the defense of Mother, the prosecution of Father and the defense of Father plus the “Closure.”
One other piece was introduced into the FHPS before Naranjo took on creating the group process with Hoffman. The imagined conversation between the client’s emotional child and the emotional child of the parent came from Transactional Analysis. Hoffman no longer read his patients psychically to uncover his or her own parents’ emotional history. Hoffman found facilitators trained in transactional analysis, and adapted an existing technique, a path that he was to follow many times throughout the creation of the Process.
The Development of the Group Process
I have attempted to describe the huge emotional breakthrough that I had over several weeks in that first SAT group in Bob Hoffman—#GayMeToo. I also talk frankly about Hoffman’s predatory behavior towards me which included sexual abuse as well as my difficulty dealing with it. I’ve written about his clear violation of ethical and legal conduct as well as my struggle with it in several places including "Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." But that is not the subject of this article.
This was the very beginning of the creation of the group Process. It is very clear from Hoffman’s written notes in Stefancic’s possession that Hoffman credited Naranjo for transforming the FHPT into a group process. It is also clear from every interaction between them that I witnessed over more than 20 years, that Naranjo always regarded Hoffman as a modern day shaman.
Lacking psychological training, Hoffman needed Naranjo’s validation, but at the same time he never trusted the techniques that Naranjo introduced to yield insight. He felt that psychotherapy was at base a misguided enterprise and any kind of self-observation was, at best, far too slow and, at worst, a head game. His style was to evaluate and attack people, then point to their emotional reactions as examples of negative programming, almost always violating the boundaries of professional behavior.
Naranjo was absent from Hoffman’s group interactions and, I suspect, just let Hoffman conduct himself in any way he chose. But Naranjo did craft the interactive exercises for most of the sessions. I will discuss two exercises in some detail, the “bitch session” and the “child/intellect confrontation.” They highlight Naranjo’s major contribution to the Process and laid the groundwork for the experiential HQP.
Hoffman instructed us to list our parents’ negative traits. He defined a negative trait as any behavior that was “giving to get,” “buying love,” “withholding love.” This warped economy of love thwarted the free exchange of affection to satisfy our innate desire to love and be loved. (Naranjo examines Hoffman’s view in The End of Patriarchy). As we listed our parents’ negative traits, Hoffman insisted that we had adopted them, every one of them, even if we had rebelled against them as children and they occurred as negative reactive behavior. He insisted that this was the sum total of what we knew about love, that our emotional life was infantile, and that we gave emotional love in the vain hope of having it returned, deprived of our birthright to give and receive love freely. This simple model became the foil that Hoffman used to reflect our behavior back to us, a rudimentary self-observation: the memory of past behaviors in relation to our parents revealed how we conducted our emotional life. Our list of negative traits became his confrontational tool. In the SAT group, Naranjo also used dyads and other tools of self-observation, notably the study of the enneagram, meditation, and methods adopted from Gestalt, but Hoffman considered those techniques cumbersome and slow.
We were then instructed to take the list of negative traits and recall scenes from our childhood, before puberty, where we had experienced these traits exhibited by our parents, and write down our reactions. Our emotional autobiography was to be as emotional as possible; we were not to censor ourselves as we wrote. (The Emotional Autobiography is no longer used— Hoffman told me that it was not necessary, but I suspect that it took too much time for the compressed version).
That first Fall there were at least five weeks dedicated to this prosecution of Mother. It was mid-October when we began the bitch session. I mention this because it was the first time I noticed Hoffman’s urge to move the process ahead while it appeared to me that Naranjo was testing psychological methodology as applied to the FHPT. My observation was of course obscured by the fact that I was a participant with enormous transference already underway, but when Hoffman ended the SAT group process before it was even half complete is evidence of their tension..
The bitch session, which replaced the “anger letter,” was an experiential expression of anger, directed at a parent, using explicit language, physical motion, beating pillows, and screaming. It was first conducted with the group members observing the person on the “hot seat” and then providing feedback about the depth and expression of the anger. (A personal note here: this experience was for me one of the major breakthroughs in my entire adult life. It took weeks for me to really allow myself to express my own anger, but when I finally did touch the depth of my rage at my mother, it altered the course of my life. It was as if a huge veil had been lifted and I had to admit that I was an angry person. But more importantly, I recognized that I had a range of feelings that I’d struggled to avoid all my life, that I had constructed my life to avoid these feelings. At that moment I became solidly engaged in the exploration of myself to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom.)
The introduction of the “bitch session” was important to Hoffman. It was his first experience of psychological work allowing a person to experience the level of emotional release that he had been unable to achieve with his “anger letter.” It also, in my view, pointed to a rapid way to induce the level of feeling and emotion that is the hallmark of the current version of the HP. Later Pecci introduced another technique for inducing very early infantile feelings, the “primal,” an adaptation of Reichian body work, borrowing its name from the then-popular Primal Scream Therapy; it also continues, I think, to exist in some form in the current HQP.
The next of Naranjo’s contributions that I would like to discuss is what is now known as the “Child/Intellect Bitch Session.” This does not follow the chronological sequence because it actually occurred after Hoffman had begun to do his own work. While I worked in the first FHPT Process, I continued my participation in the SAT group. One night I took the hot seat when Naranjo himself was doing Gestalt therapy. In the FHPT, the client visualizes his or her self as composed of four parts, the physical self, the intellectual self, the spiritual self and the emotional self. The emotional self can assume whatever age where the client or patient feels some block or experiences some incident that remains unresolved. In a dream sequence that I began to act out, alternately taking the role of a stern mother and a vulnerable child, with Naranjo’s coaching, I experienced myself at war with myself, perpetuating in a kind of stalemate, hiding from my sexual feelings and repressing them fearing my mother’s disapproval. Anger and frustration surfaced, and the solution that I had crafted, the choice of the celibate religious life, began to look like just that, a solution I had crafted and not the vocation that I was trying to follow. As a follow up, it was suggested that I try to craft another kind of truce between the emotional child and the intellectual self, represented in the session as my disapproving mother. I was among the first of several people who used the persona of the child and intellect on the hot seat. Very soon Hoffman introduced an exercise where the emotional child and the adult intellect alternately expressed anger and frustration, eventually arriving at a kind of truce. This became known as the Child/Intellect Bitch Session and continues to exist in a different form in the HQP today.
By the end of November, Hoffman ended the group experiment with SAT. He told us that he would take us to a place where we could stop--the defense of mother, and that he would conduct his own 13-week group process in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. (I later learned that he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer and was going to retire to Mexico to either heal or die; that he had made the decision to entrust his group process to Pecci; and that the training in Tolman Hall was to introduce a pool of people to the group process who might be trained as therapists, or ‘teachers’ as we were called.)
A hallmark of the 13-week process was the order and the pace. The specific assignments for each week were due three days after the session; Hoffman reviewed them and his taped comments were back in your hands at the beginning of the next session. In every session Hoffman lectured, shouted, cajoled, confronted, intimidated, humiliated, bullied, abused us. He called us assholes and negative love buyers. Perhaps this behavior forced some people to examine themselves, but it far exceeded professional boundaries appropriate for therapist/teacher, student/patient relationship. Hoffman justified his behavior by claiming that his basic message was so simple that it was hard to grasp without his unyielding confrontation: human beings deserve a satisfying emotional life but are prevented from achieving that goal by the adoption of the negative traits of their parents.
He conducted other portions of his course through “mind trips” and I will mention two of them, the parents’ funeral and the birthday party, because together with the other exercises already mentioned, these fill out nearly every essential element (except “Vindictiveness,” “Play Day,” and “Dark Side”) of present HQP. After the prosecution and defense of both parents, we were asked to close our eyes and imagine that we were awakened in the dead of night by a phone call: our parents had been involved in a car crash and were near death. We were asked to follow the course of events from the emergency room to the graveside. Bob told me that this “came through” as he was speaking. Furthermore he said that if we experienced a full range of emotion, we could actually set aside our anger towards our parents and begin to experience unconditional love for them. There was another mind trip when we were asked to visualize the birthday party that we never had, where we were celebrated and feted for who we were and not who we had to pretend to be in order to experience our parents’ love. During the whole time I practiced the 13-week FHPT, I know that Hoffman struggled with achieving a high level of emotional experience he considered necessary to produce the emotional freedom he saw as the goal. Both remain today in the HQP as elaborately produced events, with music, props, food. When combined with suggested visual images, they can and do induce the powerful emotional states. I suggest that Naranjo’s early introduction of experiential exercises into Hoffman’s basic framework made it possible for Hoffman to create the controlled emotional rollercoaster of the current HQP.
Conclusion
As the history of the Process is being revised and cleaned up as a product of the human potential movement, I have tried to leave a footnote about the people who helped Hoffman in order that their important contributions are not neglected, attributed to others, or lost regardless of copyright.
I had hoped to shed light on how an “inspired insight” makes itself known in the world, examining how a core insight into human nature could become a coherent, repeatable experience that would provide people with access to their own emotional life and deepen their awareness of their own spiritual lives. Frankly I do not know if any process is able to deliver this result in a sustainable way, but there is always the possibility that even a split second experience of unconditional love might be enough to alter centuries of abuse.
However, I am certain that I demonstrated that the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy and the subsequent Hoffman Quadrinity Process came into existence through the combined efforts of Bob Hoffman and Claudio Naranjo, that it required both men to bring it to life, that the HQP would not exist at all without the generous contribution of Naranjo. Hoffman borrowed widely and used anything that he thought might be useful. He relied on Naranjo more than anyone, but also others like Pecci, to fill out his vision and give it legitimacy.
Naranjo was constant in his friendship and support. I saw Naranjo demonstrate respect and love for Bob Hoffman from the time he provided him with a group that he could use to create the FHPT to his last meetings with Hoffman when he was dying from liver cancer in his Oakland home. Naranjo thought of Hoffman as a modern day shaman. On the other hand, their relationship was not easy—Hoffman, untrained and impetuous, a tradesman by nature and choice, Naranjo, skilled and intellectual, a thorough professional—they were an ontological odd couple.
And finally, a personal evaluation, one that was also hard won.
In the last analysis, it is not difficult to create the circumstances for unique experiences that are extraordinary or yield real insights.
Teachers, real ones and charlatans, have been doing this for ages. Their bag of tricks include meditation and self-analysis, as well as trance and hypnosis, auto suggestion, even bullying as a way of barging through defense mechanisms. Despite his claims to the contrary, Hoffman made ample use of the more nasty tricks with complete impunity, always taking the higher ground. (He was, for example, never angry with anyone, but ‘righteously indignant.”) But when it comes to actually seeing if his results were lasting, the evidence is scarce or relies very heavily on anecdotal evidence. Many people say that the experience was powerful, but if they made real changes in their lives, if they were happier and not living under another despotism, however benevolent, the majority of those I interviewed had found a sustainable spiritual practice and devoted themselves to it.
In my own experience of directing people in the Process, I cut as much as I could of the trappings of the spiritualist church. I found them fraudulent, or at best embarrassing and useless. I dropped Hoffman’s inflated claims that the Process was all the therapy that anyone needed, that it was Freud’s missing link. I introduced conversations that allowed clients to explore how their early emotional programming influences their lives here and now. But listening deeply to 40 individuals a year began to take too much of a personal toll for a meager income, and I stopped offering the Process when Hoffman threatened a lawsuit. I certainly had no stomach and no money to face off in court over his intellectual property..
© Kenneth Ireland, 2021
