Connecting G.I. Gurdjieff with Naranjo’s Enneagram

Enneagram Posts:

Why choose to work with the Enneagram?

Connecting G.I. Gurdjieff with Naranjo’s Enneagram

Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram

Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley

The Enneagram, the Final Reckoning, Banishment to the Darkness of Ignorance

Enneagram Bibliography

My path to the Enneagram and Gurdjieff has a sidebar of synchronicity. In 1966, I entered Shadowbrook, the Jesuit novitiate in Lenox, Massachusetts. The huge, half-empty Spartan novitiate was built on the grounds of a vast Berkshire “summer cottage” that the Carnegies, among other robber barons, had owned before becoming a Jesuit seminary and then burning to the ground in a tragic fire. Lenox was still a weekend retreat for wealthy New Yorkers. We were right across the street from Tanglewood. The old New England town center was very much like Hanover, New Hampshire, where I’d spent the best part of the last four years. 

Thursdays were our day off, and I quickly found a small bookstore that had everything except all the assistant professors’ first book. I managed to hide a few dollars so that if some title caught my attention, I could sneak it back to the novitiate like illegal contraband. “In Search of the Miraculous” had just been published in paperback in 1965, and the clerk decided that a young seminarian in pressed white shirt and black pants should expand his parochial reading list. Ouspensky’s title fit right next to the 16th-century spiritual manual, “The Practice of Perfection,” in my novitiate cubicle without a hint of suspicion.

I supplemented my lectio divina. I learned that Mr. Gurdjieff taught that humankind’s default state was sleepwalking through life, unaware of who they were or what they were doing. Ouspensky said G promised that waking up was possible, but it required paying an awake person to wake you up and then continuing to pay real money to that awake person to keep you awake because going back to sleep was inevitable. Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about, but I did understand the concept of having a person monitor your being asleep or awake in a rudimentary way. In the novitiate, our sleeping, waking, praying, and reading were carefully monitored. Life was punctuated by a bell that sounded like a fire alarm. 

I read about the Law of Three and the Law of Octaves, also known as the Law of Seven. Then Ouspensky laid the Law of Three on top of the Law of Seven on the nine-pointed Enneagram figure that he claimed unlocked the deepest secret of the Universe. But, alas, Ouspensky didn’t provide the key.

I returned to Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, but only five years later, I would find myself sitting on the floor of a ramshackle fraternity house in Berkeley, California, learning about a psychological version of this Enneagram from Claudio Naranjo. I recognized the nine-pointed figure, and now I had something to attach it to. 

 

Naranjo was obsessed with tracing an esoteric link between Ichazo’s Enneagon and the references to an Enneagram in Gurdjieff's teachings. I brought all my Jesuit training to reexamine everything Gurdjieff wrote, as well as a good deal of what his students had written. Nothing. From his fictitious “Meetings with Remarkable Men” to the very strange ”Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson,” there was no mention of a “psychological” Enneagram. Among the other writings by people who had known and worked with G directly, nothing, except perhaps John G. Bennett, but even with Bennett, there was no clear connection to what Ichazo had unearthed. 

Taking the next step in the cultist’s playbook, people suggested that the Enneagram was a secret oral teaching, akin to a Tibetan Terma* that had ripened and whose time had finally arrived, like the dusty esoteric volume that fell off a shelf into Ichazo’s lap. In that case, perhaps one of the people who had worked directly with Gurdjieff could help. 

I had a connection to Lord John Pentland, the President of the Gurdjieff Foundation. Lord Pentland had worked directly with Gurdjieff and had been changed to carry on the work. My friend, the Jesuit Tom Charbeneau, arranged for me to meet Pentland at the Foundation's headquarters in Saint Francis Wood. He spent a full hour with me. There was something about the man that was inspiring. He seemed genuinely interested in me, what I was about, and saw to the root of my questions. He did not condemn Ischazo or Naranjo’s teaching, but he was adamant that there was no trace of their use or interpretation of the Enneagram in Gurdjieff’s work. 

Another friend, Daniel Terrango, had worked for several years in Mr. W.A. Nyland's group, another of Gurdjieff’s trusted disciples. He told me that they had never used anything like Icahzo’s Enneagon or Narranjo’s Enneagram. None of the recognized Fourth Way teachers in the Bay Area were even interested in Ichazo/Naranjo’s work.

Naranjo always talked about Gurdjieff as if Naranjo stood in that teaching lineage. He did not. All the blabber about the Trickster was anecdotal. The alleged Gurdjieff teachers that Naranjo introduced to SAT, with the exception of Pamela Travers, were bullies and frauds, and none of them showed much interest in the Enneagram either. Three names come up, E.J.Gold. Alex Horn and Henry Korman. I met them all, even if briefly, though I was Korman’s student for several years. 

Lesson: Just saying that you were a teacher in the line of Mr. G might be a clue that your teaching methods will be overreaching and abusive. Oh, by the way, Oscar Ichazo, who was the origin of the modern iteration of this teaching, thought that the obsession with Gurdjieff was ludicrous.

*Terma: In Tibetan Buddhism and Bon traditions, a terma, meaning "hidden treasure," refers to esoteric teachings or objects concealed by adepts like Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal, to be rediscovered at a later, more appropriate time by tertöns (treasure revealers). 

https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-jesuit-transmission-of-enneagram.html

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.

Other Posts regarding Bob Hoffman and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

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

Bob Hoffman was a Lunatic, a Liar, a Criminal, & a Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

The Truth about Bob Hoffman

The End of Patriarchy and the Beginnings of a Cult. 

It’s a cult, damn it. Nothing more

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman 

Jonestown and Our Deliverance from Cults

Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple 

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 marketplace.

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 have 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 emigrated 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 he allowed Hoffman to 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,” or “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 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 nastier 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 the money to face off in court over his intellectual property..

 

© Kenneth Ireland, 2024

SAT, Naranjo, the Enneagram, the beginnings, and “the Work”

 Originally published in "The Enneagram Monthly"

Claudio Benjamín Naranjo Cohen (24 November 1932 – 12 July 2019) has passed away. Óscar Ichazo (24 July 1931 – 26 March 2020) died less than a year later. The meditation teacher Ajahn Dhiravamsa (5 November 1934 - 28 July 2021) passed away. More recently. Rezeleah Landman Schaeffer has left us, though I can find no obituary. The only teachers and leaders still alive from the early history of Naranjo’s SAT are Kathy Speeth, who told her story of sitting in Gurdjieff’s lap when she was a young child, and the Nyingmapa teacher Tarthang Tulku, who had an enormous influence on Naranjo. At 86, Tarthang is still teaching, though no longer traveling internationally. These were the men and women who first introduced the Enneagram in the West.

My friend Dan Kaplan forwarded an email promotion for a course by some proponents of the Enneagram that promises to unlock its radical teaching by returning to the “original intent.” Please forgive me if I'm skeptical. Are these third-generation experts going back to Naranjo’s characterization of the 9 types, or Ichazo’s prototyping, which is notably different, or the myth of an esoteric Sufi circle, or the inconclusive evidence that it lay hidden in Gurdjieff’s teaching, or William Patterson’s tracing the system back to ancient Egypt? I try to give the devil his due, but “original intent” is just hype to separate you from your money. I challenge any of these teachers to reveal the original intent in a rigorous way. If they’re just trying to distinguish themselves from Enneagram parlor games, I might be more generous.

Perhaps it is time to look at some of the threads that tie the Enneagram’s popularization in the West to the burgeoning of the psycho-spiritual integration that took California by like a New Awakening in the last part of the last century. I only know the SAT experience so that will be my focus.

Dr. Aubrey Lindgren, who was in Naranjo’s first SAT group, talked about Naranjo’s early teaching in the October 2021 edition of “The Enneagram Monthly.” Lindgren’s account tries to unwrap the Enneagram, particularly the Enneagram of Fixations, for a Western audience steeped in the language of psychotherapy. She asks why so little has been written about those early days? Her answer is “To realize the full impact of the teachings, we have to hold the container in silence. A silence that is both inside our own minds, as in not forming concepts about transformation, and outside, as in not discussing the material presented. It is a disservice to the public to hear about a theory without the full understanding and guidance as to how to effectively apply these ideas to your life.”

A gnostic response wants to keep secrets secret, or is trying to hide something, or hinting at some secret knowledge that will cost money. While I appreciate whatever caution is there about doing inner work, Lindgren's answer hides too much. As far as the Enneagram is concerned, the cat’s out of the bag. If the Enneagram ever was an esoteric teaching, it has crossed over into popular culture, at worst mimicking astrology or at best being an adjunct to the techniques of psychotherapy. The careful inner work of introspection seems too difficult for a mass audience.

I was in Naranjo’s SAT 2, which began in the Fall of 1972. By the end of the second year, the group had expanded to perhaps 60-80 people. The first group that Lindgren describes was distinct and interacted with Naranjo in a different way, often delivering his “indications” to newer students. I talked with my longtime friend Daniel Shurman, who was in Group 1; together we combed our memories and remembered many people who were and remain friends. I was particularly close to my fellow Jesuit Bob Ochs and the Franciscan priest Joe Scerbo, among others. We also remembered friends who lived communally out on Broadway and another group around Indian Rock in North Berkeley, and the women who lived with Naranjo on Allston Way. The membership included the well-known second-generation Enneagram teacher, Hameed Ali, as well as the transpersonal scholar Charlie Tart.

The influence of Oscar Ichazo on the modern Enneagram is well known, even litigated. As I pointed out in my article “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram,” as well as “Muddied Roots, Psychobabble, and Inoculation.” I was aware that Naranjo was unpacking a powerful experience he’d had in Arica, and his presentation and understanding were different from Ichazo. Actually a lot of time was spent sorting out the distinctions. I am not an Enneagram teacher so I am not going to indulge in any of the arguments about theories, typing or tests. Have at it.

I will second what Lindgren says about the inspiration of Naranjo’s personal gifts, his intelligence, and his creativity. There was also the influence of Fritz Perls’ Gestalt, echoes of the Sufi school, or what we were told was the teaching of the Brotherhood, the ego reduction in our personal and group work, some dabbling in Buddhist meditation, and, of course, what is called “The Work.” Naranjo felt that the Enneagram, as it came through Ichazo, was a kind of fleshing out of the esoteric work that Mr. Gurdjieff undertook at the beginning of the last century. He could not substantiate this, and he never claimed to be an authorized Fourth Way teacher, but he loved the “trickster” myth around Gurdjieff’s teaching, and was always on the lookout for some connections, real or imagined, with Gurdjieff.

We were a group of bright, mostly young, educated westerners ready, willing, even eager for what we imagined to be the shock of eastern spiritual practice. We were also terribly naive. At times our work together became a circus. There were many dark sides. They do not discount the value of the work that we managed to accomplish--in a way some of the more thorny issues were part of that training. However they persist. In my view we cannot allow them to stay in the shadows, or sweep them under the rug. If we purge them from our telling the history of this period, we are just not being honest.

I will examine one aspect of the early SAT story, its connection with the unofficial Gurdjieff work, and my personal experience of sexual abuse and trauma after undergoing the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy.

The Work

When G.I. Gurdjieff died in Paris in 1949, beside his recondite writings, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, and All and Everything, he left a large body of oral teaching that spanned nearly four decades. He had many devoted students, and though he did charge certain senior students to work with other interested people across the globe, he died with no clear transmission of a spiritual lineage. As with many powerful systems, it attracted a lot of interest, some from sane people who were intent on realizing the goals of liberation through self-awareness and observation that Gurdjieff advocated. In other cases, people seem to have been attracted by his unorthodox teaching methods. Several hung out a shingle with “The Work” predominantly displayed, and felt it gave them license to behave badly.

I don’t doubt that Kathy Speeth sat in Mr. Gurdjieff’s lap. But it is extremely unlikely, as Lindgren recounts, that it happened during the summers that her parents spent in Paris studying with Gurdjieff at 6 Rue des Colonels Rénard in the 17th arrondissement. Her parents were prominent New Yorkers who had been students of A.R. Orage, perhaps continuing to work with Jane Heap or Willem Nyland after Orage’s early death. Kathy was born in 1937 and the Second World War began in September of 1939. Her meeting with Mr. Gurdjieff was probably on one of his trips to the United States, and he did make one trip to the United States after the surrender of Germany so the timing sounds likely.

Why am I making such a big deal about the exact time that Kathy sat in Gurdjieff’s lap and where it took place? It is probably one of two verifiable connections with “the Work” in the early SAT. Kathy and Pamela Travers were the only people he introduced to the group who had actually met Mr. Gurdjieff. I want to avoid the sloppy thinking that comes from blurring facts with fanciful stories.

When Naranjo began to teach, there were several legitimate, respected Fourth Way teachers in the Bay Area, Lord John Pentland in San Francisco, Mr. Willem A. Nyland on “The Land” up near Cazadero and Mr. Robert S. de Ropp. I know that Pentland and Nyland stayed away from Naranjo’s Enneagram work although each one knew about it. Instead we were introduced to Alex Horn (by proxy--he never visited the group), EJ Gold aka “The Beast,” and Henry Korman as Fourth Way connections. Carlos Castaneda, who never claimed to have any connection with the Work but was a Hollywood example of crazy wisdom, appeared at some point to entertain us. None of these teachers had any interest in the Enneagram as Naranjo presented it, but Naranjo was interested in their teaching methods.

Lindgren describes working with Alex Horn during one of his late-night, early-morning marathon sessions on a secluded ranch north of San Francisco as a revelatory experience. It could have simply been the result of sleep deprivation and hypnosis. My only experience with Horn was at his Everyman Theater on 24th Street and Mission in San Francisco, where I watched a preposterous production about the assassination of JFK staged by Horn and his then-wife, Sharon. Horn prowled the audience before, after, and during the intermission. That was enough for me.

Horn claimed that he was in the lineage of Mr. Gurdjieff, but there is zero evidence of a real connection. I assert that Horn was attracted to the power he could reap from Gurdjieff’s unorthodox teaching methods. Period. Naranjo never encouraged me to work with Horn although several members of the early SAT groups did. I know several people who were not Naranjo’s students but had been in Horn’s group. They report sexual exploitation, coercion and even physical violence. For example, Horn would instigate a dispute between several of the men in the group and then instruct them to have a wrestling match, or even fist fight without gloves. Horn was also a known sexual predator with a voracious appetite for young women. His Bible was not anything that Gurdjieff or Ouspensky wrote but Atlas Shrugged.

E.J. Gold claimed to have been authorized to teach as “The Beast” by an esoteric Sufi School. As far as I can ascertain, he fabricated his connection with Mr. Gurdjieff. He was also the author of a cult book called The American Book of the Dead. When I met him, I could not shake the feeling that he was devoid of compassion. He invited anyone of the SAT group to come to Southern California and do an “intensive training.” By the time my friend Hal Slate arrived at a secluded bunker somewhere up on the Grapevine, the title and authority of “The Beast” had been given to one of Gold’s very young disciples who had learned everything he needed to know by performing for three days straight with a garage rock band made up of people who had no musical training. Ripping a page from the script of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, “The Exterminating Angel,” Gold seized on an unexpected change in the weather to concoct a scenario that it was the end of the world and all his trapped guests had to make some serious ontological choices. Hal escaped, walking out of the canyon on foot during the freak Southern California blizzard. As the saying goes, “Never miss the opportunity provided by a catastrophe.” I would add, “real or imagined, there are always several choices available.”

Of all the Gurdjieff students and teachers who visited our groups, meeting Pamela Travers was remarkable. The real Mary Poppins had actually been Gurdjieff’s student. Because I’d actually read some of her books, despite all the technicolor dancing and singing I knew that Poppins would be very English prim and proper with a mystical bent. And here was a middle aged woman, not at all glamorous, as much the portrait of an English nanny as my imagination allowed, who was also very present. She talked and answered our questions in a completely no nonsense way but with a lilt in her voice; she mentioned that she still met with a group and she named one of Mr. Gurdjieff’s senior students as her teacher.

By 1975 Naranjo began to withdraw from teaching the Enneagram. Others with more personal knowledge can comment or speculate on his motivation. My sense is that the initial work had been exhausting and the inspired impulse of his Arica experience had petered out and drained him personally. Some of the second generation Enneagram teachers have speculated that his drug experimentation had taken a toll which from my observation was a strong possibility. One member of the first group told me that much of his distress stemmed from the end of his intimate relationship with Kathy Speeth. All these are possible scenarios. There was also the concern that he felt after that the Enneagram materials had also been released to a wider audience. I do know from my conversations with him that he was apprehensive about the possible distortion of the Enneagram. He also told me that popularizers had watered it down. The SAT experiment would go dark at least temporarily.

He introduced Henry Korman as a person who would possibly inherit his SAT groups. Korman was leading a group in New York but had agreed to come and work with anyone who wished to continue to do what we imagined was Gurdjieff’s Work.

I worked with Korman for almost 3 years, group meetings twice a week and every Sunday. We began with an exercise called “Sensing, Looking and Listening,” then observations and questions from the group under Korman’s heavy-handed direction. Korman also organized elaborate dinners with exacting preparation, like the ones we read about in former Gurdjieff students’ memoirs. Sundays were dedicated to a Work exercise, and once a month we would begin on Saturday and extend it throughout the whole night. This pattern of group meetings, intensive concentration and work coupled with sleep deprivation seemed to be something imitated from the way Gurdjieff is said to have worked with his students. Alex Horn and E.J. Gold also made ample, and often manipulative, use of forcibly breaking up normal cycles.

While there was none of the physical violence that was reported in Horn’s groups, my experience of Korman was that he was a bully. He had no qualms about interfering in the sexual relationships of couples in the group or openly sleeping with students. He tried to arrange for a woman in the group to introduce me to heterosexual experience. Thank god she had the presence of mind to say no. He “strongly” suggested that I join with two other group members and start a construction company which he named “Double Action Builders.” This is the one real regret of getting involved in his group. It set me up to follow a dead end career for way too long.

After I had left Henry’s group, I was living in San Francisco, and trying to piece together some of that frayed experience. A Jesuit whom I knew and worked with was a member of the San Francisco Gurdjieff Group. He arranged for me to meet Lord John Pentland. I arrived at the upper middle class home in Saint Francis Woods at the appointed time for a congenial conversation with Pentland. He asked about my intentions, my experience, and talked about our mutual friend whom he knew well and respected. Pentland suggested that one of his longtime students, the woman who owned Fields Book Store on Polk, would meet and talk with me while we decided if I should join the group. When he asked me if I had any questions, I asked if he knew Korman and about the exercise of “Sensing, Looking and Listening.” Pentland said that yes, he had heard of Korman. Then he asked me to describe the exercise completely and fully which I did. He then asked about some specific details, particularly the attention to breath, or really the absence of any instruction about the breath. He paused, then looked at me directly and said that the exercise had absolutely no relationship to anything Mr. Gurdjieff taught. He would not comment about its possible usefulness.

I’m not going to say that my time with Korman was completely wasted, but I cannot pretend that I was in any way participating in “The Work.” Just a quick footnote--Korman met Mr. William Patrick Patterson, and began to work with him. He stopped teaching, admitted to a “grave” mistake, and wrote a letter of apology to his former students. He did not include me. I had to read a copy of the letter sent to a friend. He was in many ways brilliant, and I hesitate to put him into the category of an arrogant, destructive prick. Sadly he belongs in that bin.


Bob Hoffman and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

Both Lindgren and Ernest Lowe talk about the psychic Bob Hoffman. They both used Hoffman’s Process working with clients as did I. Naranjo introduced this tailor who had zero psychological training to SAT. Hoffman claimed to have had a midnight vision of Dr. Siegfried Fisher, a well known and respected psychiatrist and also a family friend, who revealed the secret of what Hoffman called Negative Love and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy that allowed us to undo the negative consequences of our childhood programming.

Most of my first year in SAT was spent doing the Fisher-Hoffman Process. Hoffman became infatuated with me, and within 6 months after I finished working with him, Hoffman began stalking me at Berkeley’s gay bar. After a few more months invited me to dinner and raped me. He was a psychotic and a criminal.

Naranjo did not condone or in any way encourage aggression, violence or sexual exploitation between students and teachers or among SAT members, but I do fault him for not doing appropriate due diligence before allowing Hoffman to work with SAT members. Hoffman was a “psychic.” Hoffman allegedly told Naranjo several things about his childhood which he could not have known. The normal training for a mental health professional was superseded or abrogated.

Although I don’t think he would have approved of Hoffman’s sexual conduct, Naranjo did sleep with students. To my knowledge he did not coerce or manipulate anyone, but inevitably it had negative consequences.


The Soup of the Soup

Looking back, I find it odd that none of the teachers that Naranjo introduced to the group were conversant or really even interested in the Enneagram as Naranjo presented it. They were generally teachers, monks, therapists devoted to the Path of Liberation, but mixed in were some who lied about being in the lineage of Mr. Gurdjieff and fraudsters who made preposterous claims but really were just out for power, money or sex. It was the soup we swam in, and, like the air we breathe, no matter how careful we try to be, we cannot be certain that we’re not getting a whiff of poison.

Naranjo loved a Sufi story, attributed to Mulla Nasruddin, called the Soup of the Soup. A generous neighbor gave the Mulla a fat duck, which his wife dressed and made into a fine dinner. Everyone was happy. The next day, a guest knocked on the door, “I heard that Mustafa gave you a big duck, do you have any left?” Of course, observing the obligation of hospitality, the Mulla invited the guest in for some hearty soup made from the leftovers. The next day, a friend of Mustafa's friend smelled the still rich soup bubbling in the kitchen, knocked on the Mulla’s door, and asked to taste the savory dish. The Mulla invited him in. This goes on for several more days and several more friends of the friends of Mustafa. (In the West, we’d call this a shaggy dog story.) About the 10th day, after the now familiar knock on the door, the Mulla invited another friend of the friend of the friend of Mustafa's friend in for the remainder of the soup, but when the guest sat and tasted nothing more than hot water, he asked, “Where’s the duck?” The Mulla answered, “I’m sorry, but all I have to offer you is the soup of the soup of the soup of the soup of the duck that Mustafa gave me.”

That is my impression of the end of our work with SAT. We were just going through the motions of the Work of the Work, but we’d lost the taste of that fine fat duck that we were given for our feast. However we'd also tasted real Duck Soup that Naranjo had served, and, with persistence and a bit of luck, we could buy a fat bird and recreate the recipe ourselves. We can, in the words of Lord John Pentland, create what Mr. Gurdjieff called self-remembering, “. . . a state of attention . . . a state of vibrant attentiveness, of inner alignment and attunement, which, when we are sufficiently still inside, possesses a potency reminding us that the real inner work is a response to a higher and deeper calling.”