The Dirty Secrets about the beginning of the Hoffman Process

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. I have divided it into two sections that are more web-friendly. It is a frank discussion about Hoffman’s sex abuse and my own story about being his victim. Whether or not it is relevant to the current Hoffman Process offered world wide by the Hoffman Institute International is not for me to say.

New Age Miracle or Fraud

The chapters in the first section:

Called to Jury Duty

Introduction

Bamboozled

Who I was

The Seekers After Truth meets the First Hoffman Group Process

No Better than a Ouija Board

The Long Ride Home

The chapters in the second section:

Metatron, Interlude with an Archangel

Debunking The Big Lie

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

#GayMeToo

Moving towards a Conclusion

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

Food for the Moon

August 6th, 2022

In August 2019, after I learned that Father Bob Ochs had died, I tried to acknowledge my enormous debt to him. He brought the teaching of the Enneagram to some very hungry Catholic religious whose sputtering religious practices were on life support, me among them. I tried to recount as carefully as I could the story of his post-Enneagram years when I wrote about the Jesuit transmission of the Enneagram. I will revisit some of them here. Last night, a friend who was peripherally involved in the beginning of SAT and the whole Berkeley New Age psychic scene told me that Susan Diordoni, Bob’s longtime companion, died of cancer. I now feel free to tell a less edited, much sadder story.

Gurdjieff used the term “Food for the Moon” to describe some of the process of awakening and becoming a true person of the Way as if it were organic digesting and processing esoteric teaching. We, all our living and dying, become food for the moon. The process of shedding our old beliefs and habits of perception is akin to consigning this dead weight of the alleged mysterious powers of the moon: the relentless, predictable ebbing and flooding of the tides control the shifts and flow of our ingrained emotions, thoughts, inclinations, and mindsets. I heard Naranjo use “Food for the Moon” pejoratively several times to refer to a person who begins the work and, for whatever reason, just doesn’t have the stuff it takes to see it through to a successful conclusion, whatever that means. (This mystical moonshine talk offers some clues about the exclusionary tendencies of cults).

Bob Ochs was a respected member of SAT 1, the first group that gathered around Naranjo after he returned from Arica and began to teach. Ochs, along with Charlie Tart, had the highest recognized level of academic training of all the group members. He was a professor at a prestigious Jesuit seminary with a degree from one the best Universities in France. I never asked Bob how he came to know Naranjo or what drew him to the group, but when we met at the beginning of the second year of that exploration, Naranjo had already delegated him to teach the Enneagram to groups of Jesuits, first at Loyola University in Chicago, and then at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Naranjo told me unequivocally that he’d entrusted Ochs to be his emissary, to teach the nine personality fixations and guide people in discovering their own type and subtype. Only one other person shared this responsibility, Aubrey Lundgren; others had various teaching responsibilities within SAT, notably Reza Leah Schaffer and, eventually, Kathy Speeth, though their responsibility was limited to new SAT students in Berkeley.

In that first year, a lot would change the dynamic of teaching the Enneagram in the West. Naranjo trusted Ochs, and Ochs had a knack for teaching. His presentation of the ideas behind the Enneagram was engaging and provocative. He was genuinely interested in ideas, as you might expect from the exemplary Jesuit that he was. But other forces were at work that would revoke both Naranjo’s and Ichazo’s lock on this esoteric system.

Almost everyone who teaches the Enneagram outside Naranjo’s immediate circle owes some debt to Ochs for their basic understanding, the impetus of their investigation, the outline of the nine types and 27 subtypes, their books, their students and for teachers, their livelihood. I will name a few names, but it’s by no means complete. This group has its roots in what I have labeled the Jesuit transmission. Here is a partial list of the Enneagram teachers who are linked to Ochs as the source of their practice: Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Jerome Wagner at Loyola University in Chicago; Joanna Quintrell at the Journey Center in Santa Rosa, California; Sr. Suzanne Zuercher at the Institute for Spiritual Leadership at Loyola University; Father William Meninger of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass Colorado; Don Richard Riso, a former Jesuit, (d.2012) and Russ Hudson of the Enneagram Institute, Stone Ridge, New York; Paul Robb, S.J., the founder of the Institute for Spiritual Leadership; Tad Dunne, S.J.; Maria Beesing; Robert Nogosek, C.S.C.; Patrick O'Leary. Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J., a very vocal opponent of the Catholic adoption of the Enneagram, was Bob’s student.

Helen Palmer also owes a debt to Ochs, which she may or may not have acknowledged, though it is not as direct as the people in Ochs's groups. She was not in Claudio’s SAT groups either, but she was practicing as a psychic reader in Berkeley at about the same time Naranjo’s groups were forming. She did readings with almost every member of the early SAT group, often multiple sessions. It was in large part through these readings that she became aware of the Enneagram and got a taste of the system’s power. When I did a reading with her almost 50 years ago, one of her first questions was about my fixation on the Enneagram. I also know she had access to some of our private notes about Naranjo’s Enneagram presentation and extensive notes from Ichazo’s 1968 talks at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile. Ochs had a hand in delivering some of these materials into her hands.

This is a good jumping-off point to describe the start of the Enneagram Wars, which also marked the beginning of Ochs’s estrangement from Naranjo. The flood of Enneagram books had started before Palmer’s creation and popularization of the “kinder, gentler,” more saleable Enneagram. When I researched and compiled my Enneagram Bibliography a few years ago, there were over 150 books and studies, a huge number for such a recondite discipline. In less than two decades, more than 100 separate practitioners, experts, and authorities, claiming some insight, led groups and individuals on an inner exploration. The armies were assembling.

You know that you are on an intellectual battlefield when, after a Google search on the origins of the Enneagram, the “Let’s set the record straight” articles appear first. I’m not going to enter that fray. Have at it. Hope y’all have fun. The main battle, the Waterloo, was the lawsuit that Ichazo brought against Palmer. Again, I am not going to put on soul armor and take sides other than to point out that there had to be some monetary upside to winning or losing to justify the enormous costs of any litigation. My interest here is the casualties resulting from friendly fire.

As various leaders and teachers waged battle about the authenticity and effectiveness, the “truth” of their particular take on the teaching, whether it came from Pythagoras, the Sufis, or some Egyptian cult, Naranjo knew that he’d lost control. And because many of the people who had forged their versions and adaptations of the teaching he’d stolen or received from Ichazo had been Ochs's students, Naranjo stopped taking Ochs's phone calls. Although very clearly in the Naranjo camp, Ochs was ostracized.

At this point in my life, I took a clear break from any investigation and controversy. I had a host of personal reasons for my hiatus, among them caring for people dying from HIV/AIDS, but I had no personal stake in the negotiated settlement. Everybody was to lay down their weapons, carry on, and do what they’ve been doing. No one was going to corner the market for the Enneagram. The command was to leave the final judgment to the Archangel Metatron when he settles all disputes among the lesser inhabitants of the heavenly realm.

After several years hiatus, Bob and I met. I was overwhelmed by what had become of my vibrant friend. He had given up his position on the faculty of the Jesuit school, stopped seeing most of his friends, and was living in a small, Spartan, nearly windowless basement apartment in a modest suburb a few miles from the epicenter of the Enneagram Wars. His only regular visitor was Susan Diordoni. Bob was not the first heterosexual Jesuit to seek a deep emotional connection with a woman. I do not know (or care) if he maintained his vow of celibacy, but I am happy that he at least had some comfort and companionship.

He and I had started to separate from regimented Jesuit life when we shared a floor in the faulty residence at the American Baptist Seminary of the West in 1973. He, however, was a priest, 14 years my senior, and had no possible means of outside support. He chose to remain within the institutional framework. I did not. He received a modest stipend and tried to justify his seclusion as work on a book. His superiors, with some recognition of his contribution to the Jesuit enterprise, did not press him to produce.

While the people whom Ochs had trained were writing, advertising, going to conferences, producing, and leading trainings that cost thousands of dollars, he was living on a few hundred dollars a month and struggling to write. He felt that he still had something to say. I will rephrase that—he felt an obligation to say something as one of the first proponents of the system. He may have also been jealous of the money his one-time students were making on “the gravy train,” but that was never his primary focus, and ultimately he would be unsuccessful. He was an Enneagram One, and the burden of trying to frame his thoughts against the conflict of the Enneagram wars proved impossible. He could never persuade himself that he’d successfully argued his case. There would be no book, but his efforts came with all of a One’s self-recrimination and doubt. Ironically, I remember that the analysis was based on typing some famous writers, but I could be conflating a couple of conversations.

He claimed he had almost no physical energy. He was eating a stringent diet whose contents and restrictions baffled me as much as they obsessed him. We only met at a Peruvian restaurant in the Mission in San Francisco because he could eat and enjoy several dishes on their menu.

Here, he told me about another obsession. He’d become infatuated with the work of Doris Lessing. “Infatuated'' is not too strong a word. Idries Shah had introduced Lessing to Sufi teachings, and she was also apparently interested in the Gurdjieff school. I do not know whether she worked with any of Gurdjieff’s longtime English students, but she was conversant with “the Work '' and its alleged connections to ancient Sufi orders. The link here is twofold: Ochs was as obsessed with discovering Enneagram’s esoteric roots as he was frustrated in his attempts to create what he considered an adequate language to describe the teaching.

He also told me about corresponding with Idries Shah, claiming that letter writing was a revered spiritual instruction among Sufis. After Shah died in 1996, Ochs tried to initiate a correspondence with Shah’s son Tahir because Ochs was sure he had been designated as his father’s spiritual heir. When Tahir replied that he was a writer, not a Sufi teacher, that his father had not designated him to teach, and that he was not interested in the job. Ochs said, “He’s supposed to say that. It’s his job to put me off.”

I tried my best not to be put off by Ochs’ increasing reclusiveness, but eventually, I gave up waiting for him to return my phone calls. Looking back, I do feel some remorse for not persisting. But I also ask myself, after the truce was called in the Enneagram Wars, where were any of his former students? Did you play any role in his life? Did he shut you out? I didn’t have a lot of contact, so I don’t know if you visited, called, or offered support, but I do know that he was not included in your conferences; he was not invited to speak or write an article. I’m not suggesting that you should have included him as an obligation, like inviting a cantankerous uncle to Thanksgiving dinner, but because he had something to contribute. You missed out, yes, you, narrow-minded, parochial, greedy, war-mongering Enneagram enthusiasts. He dedicated his life, every waking minute, to making the possibility of human freedom real. If you don’t do that in all your life, relationships, and work, you’re just food for the moon.

Finally, this Midwesterner who’d learned French and earned a degree in Paris, a man who’d introduced Gurdjieff, Ichazo, Naranjo, and the Enneagram to Catholic religious, a man who’d struggled to make his own mystical experience available to others, returned to Michigan to die at a Jesuit house dedicated to the French priest who’d promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus—no food for the moon, but rather a full circle.

Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process.

Hoffman the sexual predator grooms me. 

The public narrative about the creation of the Hoffman Process is that Claudio Naranjo’s strong, professional psychotherapeutic experience guided Bob Hoffman. I will make a case that there is little substance to this claim; that it is a myth and a marketing ploy. Naranjo says in his Introduction to “No One is to Blame” that he played the role of John the Baptist. Did he forget that that relationship did not turn out well? But both were Jews so perhaps the subtlety escaped them. (For a serious examination of Claudio’s, and others’, contributions, see “The Ontological Odd Couple”).

By Thanksgiving, the conflict between Hoffman and Naranjo in the direction of the SAT Process was becoming apparent. Claudio’s directions insisted that our exploration be self-directed. The time honored and well tested practice of psychotherapy require that discovery come from the patient him or herself, not the dictates or evaluation of the therapist. Hoffman had no patience and thought it was nonsense. 

Hoffman and Claudio might have talked about the purpose or therapeutic purpose of each exercise, but I cannot remember one evening that Claudio stayed after Hoffman began his presentation. Claudio maintained control over the direction of the work that we SAT members did through Rosalyn—3 hour group meetings once week with several small cohort meetings in between. For Hoffman that was far too long, more than a month doing what he did in two hour-long sessions with the people who came for psychic readings in the basement of his tailor shop in Oakland.

After our second or third week of the “Bitch Session” against Mother, not even halfway through the Process, Hoffman announced that he and Claudio had agreed that “The Defense of Mother'' would be an OK place to end their collaboration, as if it were an amicable divorce. Actually he’d had enough, and discovered the Wiffle Bat as a way to get to the core of emotional anger. He said that he and Claudio had agreed to finish their work together and that be doing his own version of group therapy. 

Hoffman took me aside and strongly suggested that I join the group of people he’d “selected” to do the first 13 week Process in Tolman Hall. He would later tell me that he saw me sitting there in Claudio’s SAT, he knew I was “terribly unhappy.” What I didn’t realize was that I hadn’t been “selected,” rather that he’d singled me out to be a sex partner. It was not romantic. With Hoffman it was transactional. I was being groomed for Hoffman’s self-gratification.

 

Hoffman made it seem like a huge honor that he’d been invited to use the prestigious Tolman Hall, the UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology’s classroom and office building, as the venue for his presentation. In reality all it meant was that someone, Hoffman, even his secretary, or perhaps even a psychologist who supported Hoffman, called the campus rental Office, made a reservation, and paid a deposit on a room for an evening class. It was not a fancy lecture hall, actually just a drab narrow classroom with no windows and awkward plastic chairs, but Hoffman could always label his first group “Tolman Hall.”

 

50 or so people gathered on a January night for Hoffman’s first Process. 

 

Class, or session was Monday night at 7 PM. The 13 week Process quickly became a forced march. Each session had specific exercises with a clear objective, and we had to keep up. He warned us that stragglers wouldn’t make it, that we would resist but we could just take it as an opportunity to learn about our defenses.  We had till Wednesday at 5 to deliver the week’s assignment to Hoffman’s Office on 14th Street in downtown Oakland in an office building close to his former tailor shop. We listened to his taped feedback the following Monday before the session began.

 

Hoffman presented the week's objective in a rambling style. It actually felt more like he was caught up in a mental tangent, just let it rip, stream of consciousness. He claimed that he was channeling Dr. Fisher. The spirits on the other-side are apparently as disjointed and unorganized as they were in human life when they inhabited bodies, or more so—Hoffman was channeling a German professor of psychotherapy not known for flights of fancy. (It was recorded and I found out later that Mariam Brandstatter received the recordings in Tel Aviv and helped put some order and rationale into the presentation).

 

Usually Hoffman picked out one person for the demonstration of the purpose of each exercise. Often he’d just ask “who doesn’t understand, or who objects?” And the first person whose hand went up would be asked to come forward. There were compelling moments even if in retrospect they were needlessly brutal. I remember the demonstration of Negative Love in the first or second session. We had each brought a list of our mother’s negative traits to either the first or second session. One woman, she was a professional psychologist I think, a well dressed large woman—I have no idea why her image remains with me—volunteered to “work” with Hoffman.

Hoffman took the list she’d prepared of her mother’s negative traits and admonitions and started at the top. “Your mother complained about your father in an uncompromising fashion. Ok, How often do you complain about your husband?” “Never.” “Really? Be honest. Never? The thought never enters your mind? You’re always positive and loving? Don’t play your games. You never have to stop yourself from complaining just like your mother did?” And eventually the woman admitted that she had to fight with herself not to behave in exactly the same way that her mother treated her father. Onto the next trait on the list. Same interrogation. Same result: imitation to get love, or rebellion to the trait and experience conflict. Every thought, every action, every impulse was a conditioned response. There were no redeeming qualities, and no other possibilities. One thing was clear: we were nothing but the sum total of what we’d learned from our parents. Negative love was negative.

The woman was devastated. There was zero therapeutic, compassionate presence when Hoffman dealt with a person and their “games.” It was a frontal, take-no-prisoners assault, and he relished the fight. He ended the attack with a scripted, fake, all knowing, condescending smile coupled with the assurance that if we honestly stepped into his Process, and submitted to him, we’d come to realize deeply that everyone was guilty and no one to blame, and finally be free from the chains of Negative Love.

Contrast Claudio’s careful, respectful, even compassionate invitation to look into one’s self with Hoffman’s brutality and the reason why they separated couldn’t be more clear.

I also have to admit that I had never seen my own personality as some reflection of my mother’s in such stark relief before. It was enough to allow me to follow along. 

 

Hoffman the Predator Groomed Me! 

 

In the sixth or seventh week I had a very uncomfortable experience. The beginning of Hoffman’s sexual abuse started in a setting that was allegedly therapy!

 

Late one Wednesday afternoon I hand delivered my emotional “autobiography with father” to Hoffman on 15th Street. It was past 5, and the receptionist had left. Hoffman was sitting at his desk in a cramped office, with his feet on the desk. I stood in the open door. 

 

He told me to hand him my work, and he began to read it right on the spot. He would read a paragraph, comment on the emotional tone, and then try to make some connection between the specific circumstances I’d described and what he called the negative emotional patterns and character traits that I’d adopted from my father in an attempt to bargain for his love.

 

Hoffman read through to an incident I wrote 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 was ferociously defending 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 began by complimenting the emotional tone of my writing. But then he began to raise his voice. He said that obviously my Dad was a homosexual, and then, “You’re also gay too, aren’t you?” I countered with a question about how he could deduce that my dad was gay based on his bludgeoning a woodchuck? He just repeated “You’re gay.” His voice became louder and louder. Now he was almost screaming—obviously my father was a sadist. What? Then he repeated his question: “You’re gay? Don’t play games with me. I know these things.” I admitted that of course I had gay feelings, but I was unsure if I was gay. By now he was shouting loudly: “Don’t play games with me.” I had heard that Hoffman often often attacked clients—he claimed that he was breaking us down in order to build us up—but I could barely believe it. 

 

I was in nearly complete denial about my homosexuality, but my Dad was not gay. I actually think that the idea of same sex relationship never once crossed his mind in his entire life. I am also certain that Hoffman’s deductions from what I related in my writing were entirely projections and his own pathology. Other things that he said or implied were entirely off base and not even worthy of the weirdest pop psychology. But because there was one note of truth in analysis, the whole thing became plausible, and I lost any possibility of a real relationship with my father for the next 30 years. In exchange I got the debilitating transference to Hoffman. I also remember that the 13 week process cost $300. The real cost was devastating.

This part of my therapy with Hoffman happened in March. He began stalking me in September. He raped me in late October or early November.

 

When I described this incident to my therapist, his response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And he did. 

 

 

The End of Patriarchy and the Beginnings of a Cult

The old Tolman Hall UC Berkeley

I received an email from a Hoffman Process teacher about my last post, “Bob Hoffman, The First Encounter.” After noting that we hadn't spoken in perhaps 20 years, and acknowledging that indeed Bob Hoffman was a difficult guy and, by the way, sorry for the way he treated you, he then asked why I didn’t acknowledge that there are different people teaching the Process now? Why didn't I mention the “defense” of the parent? And why now did I write this “hit piece”?

I will answer this teacher’s questions in reverse order: why now did I write this “hit piece”? I have been writing about the Process for nearly 17 years. When the current owners of Hoffman’s “intellectual property” began to fashion a narrative about the Process that I felt conflated, confused and distorted some of the history, I meticulously researched and chronicled the early development of the Process in The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy which was published on July 31, 2004 and revised September 16, 2006. 12 other pieces followed, several critical of the Process, others talking about my experience of Hoffman and the Process, as well as my sexual abuse at the hands of Hoffman within 6 months after I finished the first 13 week Process, clearly a criminal offense. Nothing I wrote was a “hit piece.” I have been as honest and accurate as I can be about the facts and dates. I have carefully described the personal interactions as such and when I’ve stated an opinion, I’ve labeled it. If any of this does not match some other narrative, please present evidence to support the counter claim. Just labeling what I write “a hit piece” is not good enough. Ad hominem arguments are the bottom of the barrel.

Now to the “defense” of parents. I ended “The First Encounter” with a description of Hoffman’s unprofessional behavior with his students, patients--the people who signed up for the Process. I said that it was my opinion that it was borderline unethical and abusive. Hoffman claimed that he was “breaking down to build up.” I say he was acting out as a bully for whatever reason his own psychosis demanded, and it went unchallenged. I know I didn’t call him out and over 25 years I didn’t hear anyone really confront him despite an enormous amount of complaining behind his back. If you contradicted Hoffman, you would be considered unsuitable as a teacher or Process owner and that would cost you a career and money. I know several people who did try to confront him and were fired. He was a dictator who was also very interested in money. I stand by my assessment.

Our SAT group was the first and only Process that Hoffman did under the auspices of Claudio Naranjo, and, as I will show, it was incomplete. A lot has been said and written about Claudio’s assistance, most of that cast as approbation plus stamping it with the seal of legitimate psychotherapeutic practice. I cannot deny that Claudio did remain one of Hoffman’s supporters, and that he continued to see Hoffman as a kind of shamanistic healer through Hoffman’s death. I helped take care of Hoffman at the end of his life and remember Claudio’s visits well, but I want to review and question other claims.

I went back to what Claudio had written about the Hoffman Quadrinity Process in “The End of Patriarchy” to review his actual comments. I was an actor and participant in this history so it heightened my interest though it also colored it. Claudio describes his position as that of an ambassador between the intuitive world that gave birth to the Fisher-Hoffman Process and the world of scientific psychology, a role akin to that of John the Baptist. Leaving aside the preposterous messianic claims, he goes on to describe his involvement in the formation of Hoffman’s group process: “Reza Leah Landman led a group of about fifty people (with Bob present as silent witness) using the format of written guidelines. (I produced these guidelines at a time of rare inspiration, and when I visited Bob shortly afterwards, he interestingly commented, quite spontaneously, that Dr. Fischer had been with me.)”

This description is simply not accurate. I was in that group. Claudio was never present (perhaps briefly at the first session to introduce Hoffman. I can’t be certain, but he was definitely never present at any of the other sessions that followed). Bob Hoffman was not in any sense a silent witness. I have described the attitude of Hoffman in the group--after a few minutes of Reza Leah’s low key instructions, she invited Bob to take the floor and he did. I will also add that I am certain he hated the group process whether or not he told Claudio that Fisher had inspired the written guidelines. The pace was far too slow, and he had no patience for interpersonal work. The evidence I offer that it displeased Hoffman is that he ended the experiment before it was finished. After about three weeks into the prosecution of Mother, he announced that he and Claudio had agreed to end their work together, and that he would “take us through the defense of Mother” which would be an “OK” place to stop.

That occurred just after Thanksgiving. He also announced that he would be leading his own 13 week process beginning at the end of January in Tolman Hall, the facility of the UC Berkeley Psychology Department. He came up to me privately and suggested that I strongly consider taking part in that process. I remember our brief conversation very well. In my later therapy I recognized that this was the beginning of his predatory grooming.

The part he did feel had been “inspired” by Fisher was the physical, emotional, verbal, and I would add, necessarily violent expression of anger. It opened the possibility of a deep emotional catharsis after which the artificial process of understanding and forgiveness would foster a deep understanding that “everyone is guilty and no one to blame.” If our pain had been as great as we’d experienced in the Prosecution of Mother, her own pain had to be equally deep and debilitating.

The Defense Process entails envisioning your mother as a pre-adolescent child, telling her story. It is conducted in your sanctuary with your spirit guide as the interlocutor. Hoffman called these imagined scenarios “mind trips” and insisted that they were the channel for real information. You are instructed to ask questions about the origins of the Negative love traits and admonitions that you unwittingly inherited, one by one, leaving no stone unturned.

Of course in the real world, this is all “Best Guess,” or assumption, or hearsay, or fantasy or hallucination. If I were to be generous, it might be a “good enough” narrative to allow you to see that your parents suffered the same kind of programming that they passed on. The origins of the exercise were the psychic readings in the tailor shop on 15th street when Hoffman looked into your past and saw the incidents that excused your parents.

But I do not choose to be so generous. In my own case the narrative I created was so far fetched that it destroyed relationships with both my parents. I was actually led to believe that somehow I could get the root of my struggles with them. After I completed the Process, and the quirky working out of the loving divorce that Hoffman promised, I had so alienated my parents that they cut me off for nearly 20 years.

Of course this is not good psychological practice. That's a fact. It’s seeing a witch doctor. That's an opinion.

Claudio faults psychoanalyst Mauricio Knoble who observed in connection with No One is to Blame, “The traditional historical background was missing, as well as the scientific background, the theoretical foundation, the experimental data, the statistical validation, and the bibliography.” It’s a fair question to ask what he replaces it with. Claudio says [I] “hope that I may show that, while the ‘traditional historical background’ has not been known to Hoffman, his work is most congruent with it, as well as with the background of current psychological discourse.” My experience points to a less optimistic view of Hoffman’s methodology, one that skirts the necessary professionalism of psychological work.

The request that I take into consideration that a new cohort of Process teachers followed Hoffman and did not share his unorthodox, borderline practices leads into more New Age mire. The majority were people who came from the same mix who took the Process, members of the SAT groups, refugees from est and the work of Werner Erhard, sannyasins who had followed Osho in Antelope and Pune, and a few licensed mental health professionals. I will have more to say about this phenomena after I describe my experience of the first 13 week Process in Tolman Hall and the story of Hoffman’s stalking and abusing me, which by the way was a criminal action.

Here is a link to the description of "Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process. Hoffman the sexual predator grooms me."

Here is another link to my other writing about the Process.

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021

Bob Hoffman, The First Encounter

I was an idiot, slow to learn. I was duped, seduced by the promise of an easy path. I also know that countless other people have jumped at what appeared to be the safety of a lifeboat when they were floundering and in pain. And if they’d managed to save a few bucks, there are always charlatans with a life jacket for sale.

Rocky times are a normal place to begin a spiritual journey, and a good place to begin to write about that search. It is not easy to look back and feel no regret when I realize that I let a pearl slip through my fingers. At 77 I no longer have the prospect of a long leisurely life, no time to indulge in speculation or convoluted arguments. In Zen retreats they beat a big drum at the end of the day, and caution us to be alert and not let the moment slip away in delusion. I know how little time there is to waste.

It was not entirely my bad luck that I met Bob Hoffman. What was seriously damaging is that I didn’t realize that I’d fallen hook line and sinker, and did not take steps to repair the damage caused by my own unresolved transference. Hoffman was a criminal. Period. He sexually abused me less than half a year after I completed the first group Psychic Therapy. He told me it was love. Sexual predators lie.

Something totally unexpected and liberating happened to me during those first few months in Berkeley, working with Claudio Naranjo, and his expertise with Fritz-Perls’ Gestalt therapy. I didn’t fully grasp the experience, and I tried to hold onto the power of that gift. The context of Claudio’s working with Bob Hoffman to create a group process set the stage for my transference.

When nearly 50 years later I began to recognize the truth about my relationship with Hoffman, something equally liberating took place.

Why do intelligent people believe nonsense?

I used to think that you could separate the person who originates an exploration or course of therapy from the technique itself, something like the paradox of a wounded healer. But that's far too mysterious. Transference is a very real and sufficient answer.

The current proponents of the Hoffman Process cast Hoffman as a kindly grandfatherly “intuitive” to market their Process, a kind of Jewish Cosmo Topper or a psychological Colonel Sanders. When I stopped laughing at that ridiculous folly and recognized my own story, I began to experience some relief.

Hoffman was a crafty fraud. Is it possible to watch a Woody Allen movie with a clear eye after the revelation of substantial accusations of sexual relationships with very young girls? It’s certainly difficult. I asked myself why I cannot put Hoffman's abuse in the past and even honor the work that has been beneficial to many people. That answer is simple. Because it would be a lie.

In 1973 I was a 28 year old highly educated and bright Jesuit who’d completed almost 8 years of rigorous religious training on top of an Ivy league education. I had invested a lot in getting to that point in my life, both in terms of building a tough defense system as well as constructing what I thought was a pretty well reasoned personal sense of my world and purpose. But I was also miserably unhappy, and desperately looking for a way out.

I wrote about the early days of the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy in The Ontological Odd Couple. I tried to be objective and state facts: the actual words spoken in a particular time, to a specific group of individuals, with a defined purpose; to identify as clearly and honestly as possible the real people, actual living humans, who were involved, with their own prejudices, training, and background. Specific circumstances help us set aside personal reactions that prejudice our interpretation, but also help someone else who might be trying to sort through their own experience.

That’s the high road, clear-headed and noble. Everyone has their say. It lends authority and even a hint of blessing to the enterprise. Plus in matters of the soul and the inner workings of the psyche, it’s better to err on the side of righteousness rather than condemnation.

But my early attempt to write about the origins of the Process was just window dressing, softening the blow. It was as bad as I'm going to describe or probably worse. What I had to ask myself is why I was such an idiot, or to soften the harshness of that question, I’ll pose it in a different way: why do intelligent people believe nonsense?

Meeting Hoffman for the first time

About 8:30 on a cold Tuesday night in the early fall of 1973, I sat on the floor of a ramshackle old fraternity house near the UC Berkeley campus. Rosalyn Schaffer, acting as Claudio Naranjo’s representative, introduced Hoffman as a person who had a unique insight into our parental conditioning. Claudio had 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.

To this day I remember most of the details of the bizarre introduction clearly. He wore an expensive sport coat and garish tie while we were mostly in jeans and tee shirts. He appeared extremely uncomfortable standing behind Rosalyn, but when he began to speak, his voice was angry; his presentation was gruff and aggressive. It was obvious that he was not educated in any psychological discipline, but he dominated the room, alternately talking then yelling in a kind of dumbed-down jargon.

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 as an uneducated tailor from Oakland told the 20-25 eager, inquisitive, mostly young 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 perverse relationships with our parents who didn’t know the first thing about love.

The definition of Negative Love was “It is illogical logic, nonsensical sense, and insane sanity, yet masochistically true or we wouldn’t behave in such a fashion.” 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. If we thought he was dressed in bad taste, we were mired in self-hatred. I thought he was overdressed for the Trifecta so my transference had already begun.

There was zero invitation to observe our reactions. Hoffman's teaching method was to set himself up for the transference for all the negative emotions we’d inherited from our parents, and were the main reason that we were miserable. No one knew anything—nobody except him. He had received a saving, other-worldly message, in a revelatory middle-of-the-night visitation when Dr. Siegfried Fisher, who had recently died, appeared and cured Hoffman of negative love, then enlisted Hoffman’s help to allow him to “move on” by teaching us how to love ourselves and get a loving divorce from mom and dad.

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

When my guide appeared to be my great aunt Mary, my grandfather’s younger sister, the first female graduate of Harvard College, and an extraordinary woman, he dismissed the authenticity of my vision because in my "mind-trip" she wore her signature tailored navy blue suit. Any real spirit guide had to be dressed in white, like Fisher in his Langley Porter uniform although the truth about Aunt Mary was more real than Hoffman’s story about Dr. Fisher. Colors and white light played an outsized role in the otherworld.

Once we were “psychically open”—and vulnerable—Hoffman asked us to imagine that we held a lovely tasty fruit, an orange I think, 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 he told us that of course there was no succulent fruit in our hands, that we’d created the whole thing in our minds, but didn’t it feel real? He asserted categorically that our emotions were just like this, both negative or positive, simply the projection of our mind that dictated the way we behaved, acted, felt and most importantly, how we learned to love.

As the evening session was drawing to a close, 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 of a negative trait, and 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 all the negative characteristics of our mother, and bring it to the next session.

He ended the evening with a smile on his face, very pleased with himself. We'd also been hypnotized. I just had a spirit visitation along with a ouija board session served up in a few long hours. Yes, it was really that bad.

Hoffman’s Primitive Understanding of Psychology

The Prosecution of Mother and the creation of the “Bitch Session."

As the weeks progressed our course of Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy got worse. We launched into what Hoffman called “The Prosecution of Mother.” I calculate that the exercise lasted at least five weeks.

The differences between Claudio and Hoffman were also becoming apparent, and the strain between the men started to show. Claudio was interested in exploring some of the possibilities of professional therapy and applying it to the Process. Bob was not interested in this endeavor at all. Claudio was interested in using the techniques of Perls to explore our anger, but Hoffman was only interested in its emotional expression. In Hoffman’s individual work, lists of negative traits and admonitions were the key to the Prosecution of Mother. There didn’t seem to be any real logic or purpose or order in the lists or making the lists. It was just anything that we found unsetting, or anything he saw that he judged to be negative. The one criteria for the lists was length. A short list was proof of denial.

If Hoffman’s psychic understanding of our emotional life was primitive, his behavior in the group setting was also becoming problematic. He claimed he had to break us down so that we could build ourselves up, but he was just giving himself blanket permission to be a confrontational bully, at times verging on the psychotic. List of Mother’s Negative Traits and emotional autobiography in hand, playing the tough-love, or alternatively the bad cop role, 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, 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.

Because Hoffman’s behaviors went unchallenged and were tolerated, they became his go-to teaching technique throughout his career. It was 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 even see that we were just negative children. His job was to point out all the ways we acted out of negative love and that our resistance and denial were so strong it required a very strong hand. He used the “iron fist covered in the velvet glove of love.” And he let us know in no uncertain terms his job was thankless with very little reward. (My Lord, he reflected almost mirror sentiments as my Mother). Most independent observers would see these behaviors as pointing to some very deep level of psychosis.

Not only was his practice outrageous, his arrogance in the face of sound psychotherapy was astounding. There was no understanding of basic genetic ordering and impulses, no grasp of a complex set of emotional responses conditioned over time. There was only the economy of “buying love.” Every human action was only a calculated transaction to obtain the genuine affection, love and acceptance that you craved from infancy but were denied. That was it. He’d point to any behavior he thought was negative, self-defeating, counterproductive and echo in a whiny voice, “See mommy, now will you love me?”

It was long before the wounded child syndrome hit therapeutic TV, but Hoffman’s concept wasn’t even that sophisticated. He envisioned a pristine emotional harmony that had somehow been usurped by the vagaries of our parental conditioning perpetuated through generations. Hoffman repeated over and over, “everyone is guilty and no one to blame.” We were just the sum of 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.

A quick anecdote about a scientific hoax demonstrates part of my thesis that Hoffman’s psychology was pure quackery. In 1972, National Geographic published an article about the “discovery” of a Stone Age tribe in the Philippines called the “Tasaday.” Hoffman, with the enthusiasm of a latter day Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was convinced that he had found the noble savage, and demonstrated the truth of Negative Love, that humankind’s natural state was the free exchange of emotional feelings without the blockage of parental conditioning.

There was, however, not one shred of evidence that this group was “pre-clothing, pre-fire-making, pre-anything cave-dwelling family unchanged since prehistoric times, who had no words for War or Anger, never fought among themselves & burst into tears if you brought up the subject of death.” It was an elaborate hoax created at the end of the Marcos regime. Their cave was only 8 miles from the nearest village, an easy trek for a steady stream of celebrities eager to connect with their pristine roots, and a quick trip home for tele-melodramas after a hard day’s work sitting around naked and speaking gibberish.

Of course the supporters of the Process will point out that Hoffman was not alone in falling for Marco’s wild fabrication. But I think it is extremely revealing of his naive psychological understanding, falling for the myth of a primitive people with no word for war, as if all psychological exploration of anger was misplaced.

Hoffman painted all negative behaviors passed from parent to child with this crude, broad brush. Sloganeering is a blunt instrument for self-analysis or understanding. In his crude psychological model, Negative Love refers to what might be understood as intergenerational guilt, and Hoffman grabbed anything to support his simple thesis: Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China to lay the groundwork for the Nixon visit and beginning of the end of détente was running all over the world to get approval from his father he’d never had in real life, but that something good might come from it. The absurdity of this reductionist analysis points to the messianic overlay of Hoffman’s thinking: if the world just got some understanding of negative love, if it were taught in the schools, if there were departments of psychology in major universities devoted to its study. . . .

The trauma passed from parent to child involves a complex psychological mechanism; it’s a psychological disorder, and there are several recommended therapies for treatment. But for Hoffman, treatable psychological disorders, stage fright or anorexia, for example, were lumped together with severe depression, and the solution is always the same: after experientially touching the repressed anger through a bitch session, or “bashing” as the PR professionals now call it, the client traces the origins of the negative influence back to his or her parental figures. Then some staged catharsis facilitates an emotional release.

I stayed and did the work. I had nowhere else to go, but I also trusted Claudio Naranjo. He had vouched for Hoffman, and urged him to develop a group process. Naranjo, as well as Dr. Ernie Pecci and other psychologists tried to tie whatever value they saw in Hoffman’s Process to the professional practice of psychotherapy. The basic structure of the analysis might have been original to Hoffman, but I am skeptical—he wasn’t that bright. Everything else was an adjustment by professional psychotherapists.

Claudio may have tried to justify and rationalize the framework of Hoffman's psychological insight, but I don’t think it was a very serious attempt. What was more serious was Claudio’s attempt to use the professional tools he’d learned, especially from Fritz Perls, to allow us to explore our anger towards our parents. We worked through the “Prosecution of Mother” which for Hoffman was just the lists of negative traits, silent and overt admonitions, writing an emotional autobiography and finally writing an angry letter.

A Huge Personal Breakthrough

Claudio said that even just a second of authentic experience would change our world. Under his direction, we worked several times a week in small groups of three people, and through role play, questioning and feedback, tried to understand in the most complete way possible the level and depth of adopting our parent’s negative attitudes and behaviors.

It took weeks for me to allow myself to express my own anger, but when I finally did touch the depth of my rage at my mother, it completely altered the course of my life. With the group members observing the person on the “hot seat” and providing feedback, we were instructed to touch the core of any latent anger we harbored towards our mothers.

So I was in the hot seat, and I tried to express my anger. No one in the group believed me. So I tried again. Again just surface complaints about a trivial matter. But then something inside me opened. I could use the word snapped. And my anguish and anger exploded. The pitch of my voice broke a glass that was sitting beside Sundari, a cherished friend in my support cohort.

This experience was for me one of the major breakthroughs of my entire adult life. It was as if a huge veil had been lifted, and 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 defense began to look like a sham, and 10 years of rigorous disciplined religious life began to crumble. I recognized a range of feelings that I’d struggled to avoid all my life, that I’d actually constructed my life to avoid feeling. And in that moment I became solidly engaged in the exploration to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom. It would be a very difficult, long process.

What is important for me to note here is that the breakthrough happened under Claudio’s guidance, carefully using the technique he’s 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, and 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 who was also a sexual predator.

The “Bitch Session” was born

This is the actual story of how “bitch session” replaced the “anger letter” in Naranjo's SAT group. In the Hoffman Process it is an experiential expression of anger, directed at a parent, using explicit language, physical motion, beating pillows, and screaming. The invention of the “bitch session” was important because it was Hoffman's first experience of a person experiencing the level of emotional release that he had been unable to achieve with his “anger letter.” It also pointed to a rapid way to induce the level of feeling and emotion that is the hallmark of the current version of the Process.

When Hoffman used the Bitch Session in his 13 week Process, he stripped out the subtlety of Gestalt Therapy which he considered useless and didn't understand it anyway. All that remained were the Wiffle bats, pillows and fellow participants to egg you on. This also set the stage for the inevitable heart attacks and psychological breaks that became part of the cost of doing Process business.

But this also marked the end of Naranjo’s and Hoffman's collaboration. Hoffman announced that the “Defense of Mother” would be an “OK” place to finish, and that he would begin his own Process starting in January in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. I will take up the description of Hoffman’s first group in another post.

Hoffman came up to me privately and strongly suggested that I join his Tolman Hall Process. Looking back it was the beginning of his predatory sexual grooming. He was a very sick man.

If you want to read the sequel to this post, click on "Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process."



Here is a link to my other writing about the Process.

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021