The Truth about Bob Hoffman

Despite the public portrait of Hoffman as a kindly Jewish grandfather, an "intuitive" with insight into human nature, he was a fraud, a liar, a conman, a psychopath, a narcissist, and a sexual predator. Yet I followed him, and tried to be his friend. I had a powerful experience when I did the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, and I thought that being grateful was the right stance.

I was wrong, but I am still here, and angry that he took me for a ride. In therapeutic terms it was unresolved transference which took years of difficult personal work to resolve, and cost me thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in therapy. I can barely bring myself to look at the other costs, the frustration, lost opportunities and wrecked relationships which I can never recover.

Within 7 months after I finished his course of therapy, Hoffman raped me. In the real world he would have been subjected to enormous fines and barred from working with other people as a spiritual counselor, or even sent to jail, but we’re talking about the world of psycho-spiritualism, trance mediums, messages from dead relatives about their confused and deluded rearing so we’ve already abandoned reality and the normal consequences for criminal behavior.

I have earned the right to say something. Telling the truth will be my starting point.

• 
  

Here’s how Hoffman begins his story. In the dead of night, sometime in1968, the spirit of the late distinguished German psychotherapist, Siegfried Fisher stood at the foot of his bed, and woke him up with an urgent message: the key to psychological well being was contained in a concept called Negative Love–we are blindly tied to repeating the mistakes and negative behaviors of our parents because we are starved for authentic love. It’s just a game of giving to get. Then Dr. Fisher cured Hoffman by taking through psychic therapy, and charged him to spread the word. He said, “Doors would open.” 

For anyone with a taste for otherworldly drama, this has everything that Hollywood, or Mme Blavatsky could provide including a simple, down-to-earth maxim any idiot can understand. And it also comes with the validation of a highly qualified psychiatrist, bona fides all the way from Vienna, at least in his lineage.

But on closer examination, even for a person who believes in messages from the other side, the lies start right here. Hoffman claimed that Fisher was an old family friend, that he somehow knew his wife’s family. The truth is that Hoffman had been Fisher’s patient for years at Langley Porter. And Fisher’s specialty was severe psychosis. Hoffman claimed that he and Fisher had convivial dinner table conversations about the unseen world and what are generally called psychic phenomena. The dinners were perhaps the only truth in the story. Fisher, according to his son, David, did not follow the modern professional guidelines about social contact with patients. He remembers Hoffman coming to his house for dinner as well as visiting Hoffman and his family. 

But Hoffman needed a cover story. He was not in any way qualified to receive an insight that had evaded generations of highly trained psychotherapists. He was a tailor with a rudimentary education. His main interest, when not measuring the inseam of custom suits for the Oakland Raiders, was immersing himself in the Spiritualist teachings of a psychic named Rev. Rose Strongin. 

Hoffman was also a man of limited intelligence with a heavy dose of strong opinions and fixed beliefs. His reliance on spirit guides would have been difficult terrain for Fisher to negotiate as a therapist–they provided a ready defense for Hoffman to deflect any meaningful attempts to deal with his psychosis. And, Fisher’s son told me that his father thought that homosexuality was “cureable,” which, if my own experience is any measure, became a long and costly war with a very closeted, homophobic gay man.

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

I also had real experience of unresolved transference, but it was not settled with Hoffman’s death.

• 
  

Why do Intelligent people believe nonsense?

I cannot really answer this question other than to say it’s true. I know that in my own case it was unresolved transference as well as not cleanly dealing with my own homosexuality. But in the case of Claudio Naranjo, the answer is less clear. Claudio was a psychotherapist of extraordinary abilities and insight. He is best known as the person most responsible for the dissemination of the Enneagram teaching in the West. It was in his SAT Group in Berkeley that he introduced Hoffman and, it was on his recommendation that I undertook Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy.

Both Hoffman and Naranjo are dead. Neither has woken me in the dead of night, and I do not claim to have any secret knowledge about their codependent relationship. But I was a participant in their early collaboration, and will be as honest as I can about what I observed and what is substantiated by the record. 

Naranjo met Hoffman and did his rudimentary analysis, the Process of Psychic Therapy, in the basement of Hoffman’s tailor shop on 15th Street in Oakland. It was emotional and exotic enough to capture Claudio’s interest. He says that afterwards he felt he could help Hoffman shape a group process, and become his John the Baptist. Yes, Claudio really used this messianic analogy. I was a guinea pig in that initial group experiment, and this is what I saw–both painted their collaboration as destined by heaven. It was not. It was a very rocky road. Hoffman ended it before it was complete. Although both men tried to paint their rupture in the best possible light, as with an accurate reading of the Baptist’s story, it did not end well.

In the chapter of Naranjo’s book, End of Patriarchy: And the Dawning of a Tri-Une Society, about Hoffman, Claudio says that he directed the first group process, that his indications were delivered by Rosalyn Schaffer with Hoffman a silent witness. To my recollection, after one rather awkward introduction, Claudio never stayed for an entire group meeting. The mild mannered and soft-spoken Rosalyn delivered her instructions, and then yielded the floor to Hoffman who was hardly silent. His rhetorical presentation was gruff and angry. He cajoled, demeaned, and baited, picking out a participant’s single trait, the way he or she dressed, combed their hair, the tone of voice. Then he used it to humiliate them, shouting that we couldn’t love ourselves, that we were unwitting victims of negative love. 

This unprofessional behavior went unchallenged, and Hoffman continued to be a bully throughout his teaching career. He justified it as “breaking down to build up.” Fisher apparently did not cure Hoffman of a chronic sense of inferiority coupled with arrogant entitlement. Any therapist in the group was singled out for particularly harsh attention. Hoffman was afterall a psychic tailor playing in a world of highly trained mental health professionals. It’s also worth mentioning that Hoffman loved having the endorsement of a man of Naranjo’s stature.

As a participant it was clear to me after about a month that Naranjo lost control of the group process, and Hoffman was increasingly unhappy when Claudio tried to regain control, particularly in insisting on the pace of the work. Their much heralded collaboration lasted 9 weeks on the outside. After weeks working on “Mother Bitch session” (now called “bashing” in Quadrinity parlance), Hoffman had enough of the careful exploration of repressed anger, and suddenly announced that he and Claudio had reached a friendly agreement to end their experiment, and Claudio’s participation, after the “Defense of Mother.” And, with appropriate fanfare, he announced that he would be leading his own 13 week Process beginning that January. With Hoffman it was always a loving divorce, a friendly disagreement, or his righteous indignation, jejune double-speak that only highlighted that he was a very angry man.

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

I wrote extensively about the development of the 13 week Process when the first rewrite of its history was undertaken by the current owners of Hoffman’s intellectual property, The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Hoffman Process, Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, The Quadrinity Process, and The Hoffman Process, Originally posted July 31, 2004, 1st revision 9/16,/2006, 2nd revision 6/6/2011, © Kenneth Ireland, 2004, 2006, 2011. I’m not going to repeat any of it here. Needless to say, Hoffman in his self-inflated posture appropriated the work of many professionals and claimed it as his own, or the direction of Dr. Fisher, his spirit guide while the current promoters altered and streamlined the narrative for marketing purposes.

If this Process were an important breakthrough in the development of psychological treatment, such an investigation might be interesting. It is not. However, working with Naranjo and Gestalt therapy, I had a major personal breakthrough. It began an unravelling that changed the trajectory of my life. I recognized on a very deep level that I harbored a well of repressed anger towards my parents, my rearing, and the Jesuits. I began a long and difficult journey. I turned my back on 10 years of rigorous religious training and started afresh. Over the course of trying to locate Hoffman’s contribution in this equation, I can only say that he was the loudest voice in the room when my emotional defenses began to crumble. But given the vagaries of the process, I went into massive transference. 

Hoffman was not at all equipped to manage his own countertransference, much less mine. In fact he used mine to manipulate and sexually abuse me. When he announced that he would be starting his own group process, he made a point of taking me aside and strongly encouraging me to join. I was one of only a handful of SAT members who did. In retrospect, Hoffman was just following the predator’s script, grooming me for sexual conquest. His unethical and criminal behavior would play out over the next 9 months.

Hoffman’s first 13 week group Process of Psychic therapy began sometime towards the end of January of 1973 in a nondescript rented classroom in UC Berkeley’s Tolman Hall, the home of its psychological department. We met every Monday night, and an assignment was due by Wednesday. It was more of a forced march than a psychological inquiry. The main elements of the current Process were there, a rigid set of exercises, the requirement to complete the assignments with as much emotional expression as possible, and to be on time. Keeping up meant in Hoffman’s estimation that you were willing to break down your defenses and see yourself clearly.

Hoffman claimed that we would discover that “everyone was guilty and no one to blame.” After experiencing how our parents had ruined our lives by passing on their negative behaviors and admonitions through the mechanism of Negative Love, we allowed them to defend themselves. We were instructed to imagine a conversation with their prepubescent emotional self recounting a story of how they inherited negative traits from their own parents. 

We were told that these imaginary conversations had the same function as Hoffman using his psychic power to look into our parents' history and discover actual events and circumstances of their programming. Hoffman claimed that after he had opened us psychically, we could tap into the same deep unconscious emotional knowledge which contained the truth about our parents’ rearing. There's a proper term to describe this well established psychological principle--Bull pucky.

• 
  

Shortly after 5 on a hot Wednesday afternoon, I hand delivered my “Emotional Autobiography with Father'' to Hoffman’s office on the second floor of a building in downtown Oakland. His secretary had already left for the afternoon. Hoffman was recording his feedback for another patient on a cheap cassette player. He’d thrown his feet up onto the desk. I stood awkwardly in the half open doorway. There was no chair and no invitation to engage in a conversation.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

I remember that the price of that first group Process was no more than $300. The real cost was devastating. Instead of dealing with coming out in care of a professional, compassionate therapist, I had the bad luck to land a closeted gay predator as my guide. When I described this incident to my therapist, his immediate response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And he did.

• 
  

When I returned to the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley that fall, I told my superiors honestly what I had experienced, and they supported my decision to reconsider ordination. I took a leave of absence from my religious order, and began an extremely difficult period of my life. I loved being a Jesuit, and if it weren’t for the obligation of celibacy, perhaps I might have been able to carve out a very happy and successful life as a priest. 

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

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

I recall one conversation in particular which helps me accurately date Hoffman’s obsessive pursuit; it also should have alerted me that he knew exactly what he was doing. Almost in passing, and perhaps as a way of excusing or justifying his behavior, he mentioned that although the usual period for a therapist seeing a patient was 6 months after the professional relationship had ended, he thought that I had so completely and lovingly divorced myself from my parents, perhaps the usual 6 months could be compressed. Misinformation,  or perhaps he considered himself above the law. In California, “Therapy Never Includes Sexual Behavior. . . . Sexual contact of any kind between a therapist and a client is unethical and illegal in the State of California. Additionally, with regard to former clients, sexual contact within two years after termination of therapy is also illegal and unethical.”*  Less than 4 months after working with him, he nervously gave me his “private” phone number, and asked if he could call me.

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

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

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

I had hoped to avoid a painful and lewd description of the sexual encounter, but I have decided to write about it openly, describing its repercussions. A thorough investigation, including my own missteps, is the only possible path I see to freeing myself. If my writing really leads to liberation, “the function of freedom," in the words of Toni Morrison, "is to free someone else.” 

• 
  

Was Hoffman a Wounded Healer or a fraud?

A longtime friend who also had a very difficult relationship with Hoffman contacted me. He agreed with my assessment of Hoffman, labeled him a malignant narcissist, confirmed that he was a sexual predator, a bully, and nearly impossible to work with. Yet my friend Stan spoke of a life-altering experience working with Hoffman. He compared it to receiving a sacrament from a corrupt priest. By luck or grace, my friend feels that the Process arrived unpolluted by the sins of being human.

Stan is very skilled in self-observation, and I believe him when he says that the experience was not an illusion or a panacea. His experience was life-changing and valuable in itself. He didn’t surrender to some weirdo messiah. He’s not blind to Hoffman’s flaws or inflated self-importance.

Stan describes Hoffman as a wounded healer. Carl Jung coined the term to describe one aspect of the transference between patient and therapist; he created an archetype by alluding to Greek mythology. Hoffman dealt with so many “sick people” as he called us, he was always restimulated. Yes, wounded and healer can be used in the same sentence, but identities and functions must remain separate–even if it was the experience of being hurt that allowed the healer to gain insight.

I tried to see if trying to step inside my friend’s experience might help me understand why I was so taken in by Hoffman; to see if Jung’s term wounded healer connected Hoffman's own pain and abuse in his life with his path to become a healer. And at the same time, allow me to forgive Hoffman’s continuing psychotic behavior.

I’ve never had much taste for Jung’s archetypes. The mythological centaur Chiron is the model for Jung’s archetype. Chiron is, as far as centaurs go, a rather upright creature. He doesn’t drink and carouse but rather educates young men in the healing arts that were taught to him by his stepdad Apollo. So far so good. But he has to give up his immortal status to save Prometheus–the exchange is negotiated by the immortal strong man Heracles–and Chiron dies when a poison arrow pierces his ankle.

But Chiron dies immediately; his wound is incurable. To my logical mind, I don’t see how he could be continually wounded and use his pain as a balm to heal others if he’s dead. The myth is of course a myth, and Jung had to juggle the elements of a complex mythological narrative to make it fit his archetype. We all have to compromise and make adjustments.

At the beginning of the Covid lockdown, I woke up in the dead of night and vowed never again to believe nonsense. Reliance on spirit guides giving messages in sanctuaries filled with divine light, simplistic talk of negative love and fictional scenarios of my mother’s emotional child telling me her sad story. All this is too far a stretch from Freud’s free association on a couch in Vienna. In a best case scenario, doing the Process could be something like attending an amazing show off Broadway, albeit with an expensive ticket, but deeply moving and life changing in subtle ways. In my case the performance was spoiled by the producer who hid a casting couch backstage, and raped me.

I harbor some resentment towards Claudio Naranjo for not doing due diligence before introducing Hoffman. I question Claudio's reliance on insight coming from a Spiritualist Church rather than rigorous psychotherapeutic practice. It was the 70’s. We can call it reckless experimentation.

It is possible for a lunatic to be cured, and go on to become a healer of others. Even the fake guru can heal or provide some measure of relief, but at some point the myth has to be stripped away. Our only chance is to move outside the guru’s thrall and claim the experience as our own.

And, most importantly, tell the truth. Hoffman was a fraud, a liar, a conman, a psychopath, a narcissist, and a sexual predator.

Here is a link to all my writing about Hoffman.

https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2021/06/my-hoffman-process-writings.html

I know that my remarks and observations will piss off a lot of people. Apparently Hoffman is big business and a number of people depend on the Process for their livelihood. This was a consideration, but not strong enough for me to remain quiet. 

The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram, Bob Ochs, S.J.

McLeod Ganj, Himachal Pradesh, India
Diwali, November 14th, 2020

My friend and teacher, Father Bob Ochs, S. J. died over two years ago on May 4th, 2018 at the Claude de la Colombiere Center in Clarkston, Michigan. He was 88 years old.

I began to write about Bob in December of 2019 when I learned of his death. More than anyone, Bob was responsible for the Catholic Enneagram enthusiasm, and this is where I thought I would focus my attention. But during the long retreat imposed by the Covid pandemic, more and more memories began to flood my mind, and I came to truly appreciate the gift he gave me during a personal crisis, a time of questioning that would radically alter the course of my life. Recounting our experience together today, from my home in the Himalayan foothills, I am filled with gratitude.

His story, and both of our stories where they intersect, did not follow a clear, straight path, and cannot be told without venturing into places most people don’t dare explore—places that one rarely explores without a friend or a guide. Bob was my guide, and although I can no longer ask him to clarify his side of the story, this is not a compelling reason to censor what I write. I also know how much that exploration cost Bob on a personal level. I will not censor myself here either. I cannot write a pro forma panegyric that avoids the dark places. Murky places in the mind might distort the path—there are no clear guides, except perhaps prohibition. But we cannot just declare them out of bounds and be true to ourselves. Only in myth does the word of God come emblazoned on gold tablets. In the real world, in ordinary human conversation, the truth is in the details, and sometimes those details are buried in mud.

As difficult as it is to sort out the details of a personal story, it’s also the story of passing a teaching from one culture to another, from the East to the West, from an alleged mystical Sufi source to a group of Christian practitioners, from spiritual practice to psychological investigation, from an oral tradition to one that employs books and written lists of personal traits and characteristics. Such a complex transmission opens itself at best to honest differences and interpretations. At its worst, it breeds parochial infighting, condemnation and closed-mindedness.

The lack of clarity also might add fuel to the Enneagram controversy and arm its detractors. But if we can avoid persecutions and burnings, if we trust ourselves and follow our best instincts, there is something very useful about argument and debate. They point to the most useful path for an individual. It’s a spiritual practice with a long and revered history. I remain as convinced as Bob was that we can actually connect with the numinous mystery of life.

I am an Enneagram student, not a teacher, and over nearly 50 years I’ve tried to nurture my personal understanding for my own inner work. I will try to be non-judgmental, and only speak about people and events about which I have first hand knowledge. My comments do not pretend to be definitive statements about any specific approach or understanding of the system. I’ll leave discussion of technical distinctions about typing or proto-analysis to those who specialize in Enneagram studies. However some comment and analysis may be necessary to map out the early history of the Enneagram’s transmission.

As we examine the arising and falling away of experience, some argue that if we trace its source and pinpoint its origin, we spoil the recipe. All they’re really saying is that some things are better left alone or impossible to figure out, but I'm certainly not going to discourage self-investigation. In fact I want to encourage it. The Buddhist practice that I’m familiar with teaches that we can unlock real possibility and opportunity when we deal head-on with what are known as hindrances. The Enneagram is also part of the strong tradition that inner work dictates unflinching self-observation in tracking our thoughts, feelings, memories, and “mental-reactions.” This trains our attention and allows us to see ourselves more clearly. I am thoroughly persuaded by the last option. It’s a difficult task, but we only get into trouble by not speaking directly and honestly about these matters.

It is in this spirit of animated conversation coupled with love and admiration that I’ll discuss Bob’s contribution and talk about our relationship.

———

Hot Luck

I just want to give Bob a big shout-out: You threw open forbidden doors. You were authentic. Through you I discovered a path probably cut off for this young Jesuit emerging from a straight-jacketed Catholic worldview. The reforms of Vatican II had relaxed that grip, but they were not the leap required to enter the spiritual path. I was discouraged as I witnessed the spiritual enthusiasm of Council ebb when political pressure hedged and contained its driving force. But doctrinal formulations are not about jumping from a hundred foot pole, Kierkegaard’s leap of faith without a safety net. I was in the midst of the personal crisis but barely aware of it. You, Bob, invited me to jump into life.

In the early Summer of 1973. I was living in a large, sprawling apartment in New York’s Upper West Side with a group of seven other Jesuit scholastics and our mentor, Avery Dulles. Late one evening and into the early morning hours, during a rambling conversation with another young Jesuit from Chicago, I heard about a priest who taught a nine pointed diagram that described personality types, about study that led to a sense of liberation through intense self-scrutiny, and finally, to give the story the feel of the real stuff of human life, a description of a group, men and women, lay and religious, taking off their clothes during the last session as a sign of fearless self-investigation. He assured me that it was not at all sexual, that the nuns carefully folded their habits and laid them down almost reverentially.

I was stunned. But I also remember being dazzled by his enthusiasm—something inside me knew that I had to meet this Jesuit. I was not unique among young seminarians of my generation in feeling that conventional religious practice had failed me. Looking back it might have been a classic “Hail Mary!”

I phoned my religious superior in Boston and asked for permission to transfer to the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Within 10 days I was traveling across the country, with a complete stranger. I was about to open a chapter of my life that I could never have imagined. My own awakening would wait for the recognition of how much pain I carried inside.

When I arrived in Berkeley I called Bob. He asked me, “Why don’t you join Claudio’s group?” I called the number he gave me, and I started four years of work with Claudio and Bob.

———

Naranjo-Ochs Redux

In 2009 I asked Claudio Naranjo to do an interview about the “Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram.” Bob’s relationship with Claudio Narnajo and first SAT groups, “The Seekers After Truth,” in Berkeley were the source of his teaching. If we distill the teaching from this amalgam, we cannot come close to tapping the Enneagram’s power. Claudio and Bob’s relationship as teacher-mentor is central, and I will talk about the small part I understand though much remains a mystery, lost in the passing of both men.

I am absolutely certain that Claudio had his own powerful insight working with Óscar Ichazo in Arica Chile. Although it may be misleading to describe Claudio’s experience as an enlightenment, the word hints at the power of the insight he was “unpacking” while at the same time formulating his own vision, informed by his psychological training. Bob also had a powerful experience working with Claudio, and became part of creating what we now recognize as the Western Enneagram.

Claudio and I talked at length on four occasions. He might have preferred “The Jesuit Jumbling of the Enneagram” because he insisted that there was no transmission. He asserted that the errors in prototyping by Jesuit and Catholic practitioners invalidated the authentic passing of his knowledge and understanding. But he confirmed that he had indeed “delegated” Bob to do SAT work with the group of Jesuit and religious students at Chicago’s Loyola University as well as the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (JSTB), the settings were where Ochs introduced the Western Enneagram to a Catholic audience.

Claudio also laughed about what he called the “now-infamous event” when everyone took off their clothes in a Chicago seminary. He said he just threw out this indication on a whim hoping to give the religious students a powerful experience of self-remembering.

Although Claudio said that Bob carried his “indications” to the groups, that he had not been authorized to teach the Enneagram, Bob brought his own passion to the work. It was no polite intellectual exercise. It was spiritual in the deepest sense of the word. His intellectual and spiritual gifts were a good match for Claudio. He was a Jesuit through and through with outstanding theological credentials. He had trained at Université Catholique de Louvain, Jesuitenkolleg in Innsbruck, and was awarded a PhD in Theology from Institut Catholique de Paris in 1969. He had written two books.* He was dedicated to the work of spiritual revolution in the spirit of Vatican II.

*Bob’s books include The Death in Every Now (1969) and God is More Present Than You Think (1970).

———

The Jesuit Enneagram

In a letter that I sent to Father Paul Lucy, who was my direct Jesuit superior, I wrote, “If this is not what Father Ignatius intended in the Examen, it’s what he should have intended.”

As a Jesuit novice I was trained in the Examen: three times a day, for 15 minutes, just note how many times I’d broken the rule of silence, when I’d had stray thoughts, where I’d neglected to keep “custody of the senses.” After taking inventory, I was instructed to generate compunction, and resolve to avoid specific thoughts or actions—avoiding sin and the occasions of sin were the way towards self-perfection.

Bob’s adaptation of the Examen was far more nuanced and sophisticated. He asked us to really experience the feelings in our body as we looked over our day—How did it feel to get up in the morning? Did we smell the stew we cooked? What attitude did we bring to our study, did we notice the way we held the book in our hands, even how we felt when we used the toilet?

We have to train ourselves to feel directly, not after-the-fact judgment or analysis. To be present at the moment when we feel, see and act is not something that we do naturally, or if we do, we soon learn to forget it. This immediacy of experience is closer to what Gurdjeiff taught about self-remembering: “it is to know you are angry when you are angry.” G. also described the practice with an admonition: “You do not remember yourselves. You do not feel yourselves, you are not conscious of yourselves. You do not feel: I observe, I feel, I see.’”

During this period, I was also learning to meditate in formal posture, breath-centered forms of concentration, and the difficulty in learning to sit for long periods, just as taking the time required for the work of taking personal inventory, was offset by my recognition of my own pain. In mindfulness practice, at least as we know it from the Theravaden tradition, there was, I thought, the promise of clearing of the senses and mind as you simply experience your body and breath. But “self-remembering” is different from my understanding of mindfulness: just paying attention, no promise of it disappearing.

The first thing I noticed about Bob was the bright glean in his eyes and his animated voice. He was a very engaging teacher who loved to laugh. I was sitting on the floor of a large open room in one of the buildings at JSTB when Bob said, with chuckle, that the origin of the teaching might have been the esoteric school that trained Jesus. Bob was not certainly not given to blind faith or superstition, but this assertion is as unsupported as the claim that during Jesus’s lost years, the time between when he stood up and amazed the synagogue elder’s and his baptism by John, he was initiated and trained by an Indian guru. Yet not one person in the room challenged it, myself included. Bob repeated the Tibetan oracle that "when the iron bird flys,” the Dharma will come to the West. This was only 14 years after His Holiness the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa in disguise as the People’s Liberation Army marched towards the Potala Palace.

But laying aside the otherworldly language and extravagant claims of New Age spirituality, most of us who were drawn to a spiritual practice that demands something more than sitting in a church pew and forking over some cash came from a place of experiencing personal pain—sometimes excruciating and seemingly inexplicable. I didn’t feel any magic in the New Age hype, and I am still no fan of Nostradamus style pronouncements, but I was seeking a remedy, and if I had to learn a new language, I was willing to try.

In fact Christians do not have a big issue with using pain in spiritual work, but it is seen as the result of sin. To ease the Enneagram into a Catholic/Christian context, Bob began with a kind of rift on the Nine Deadly Sins—traditionally the list contains only seven: Pride, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Lust and Greed. Stretching the definition of Envy to include Melancholy, and then adding Lying and Fear, we have the nine points of the Enneagram. But here’s where it gets dicey. None of the Enneagram “sins'' actually describe deeds.

In 1998, the US Cathoic bishops warned about using the Enneagram said, "sin is indeed unhealthy behavior and can be combated by an improved understanding, but it is at its root a moral problem, so that repentance before God and one’s neighbor must be the fundamental response. Enneagram teaching thus obscures the Christian understanding of sin." Human nature is basically sinful. Acts in violation of the expressed will of the Deity require repentance. To save yourself, follow the rules; this leads to redemption which in turn leads to salvation. This is the catechism that I learned as an Irish Catholic boy.

“Sin is unhealthy behavior”—get the memo out to the Garden before Eve falls under the serpent’s spell and all hell breaks loose. The work of the Enneagram sees liberation as a struggle against ignorance, blindness, greed, cowardice and laziness which in themselves are not sinful.

At the JSTB Bob taught that the fixations are a hindrance rather than a reflection of fallen human nature. He said many times that ideas themselves when coupled with a solid inner practice could change a person’s attitude and actions. And this conviction was, I feel, the intersection where the inspiration of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, particularly the identification of what Ignatius called the “chief fault” matched the work with the Enneagram.

He opened the investigation with a question: Is the way we distort the world the root of all of our negative behaviors? Each of the 9 points was the point of entry for an extended meditation on the nature of ego fixation. In the Spiritual Exercises the first meditation is what Ignatius calls I will quote one sentence from what Ignatius calls “The Principle and Foundation:” . . . it follows that we are to use the things of this world only to the extent that they help us to this end (the praise reverence and service of God), and we ought to rid ourselves of the things of this world to the extent that they get in the way of this end. Before we examined our own Ego-Fixation, we were encouraged to look at the nature of spiritual hindrances central to the Enneagram in detail, weeks long meditations on points 9, 3, and 6. We explored how the major anchors of all nine fixations, sloth, lying and fear, were present in all our actions.

In Bob’s teaching the One point was very present—methodical, meticulous and exacting. He took us through the types and subtypes in an orderly way, using the material that Claudio had given the first SAT groups, and, in an exploratory way, tried to “type” each of us. Although we tried to type ourselves, he, like Claudio, did not hesitate to point to where we should begin our examination. [Bob typed me as “Plan,” the 7th fixation, Gluttony. I worked with this for years until in the late 90’s I met with Claudio a number of times over an extended period. He re-typed me as a 9! I have written about the experience in How I moved from Point 7 to 9.]

He asked us questions. He might say, “Ah that sounds like something a 6 might say. Why don’t you look and see if fear might be the motivator? Just explore it. Trace it back. Look for other places in your life where fear might be operative.” It was colloquial. It was friendly. As each of us began to understand the system and see similarities in our own behaviors with various points, Bob would ask us to “say a little more.” He was always gentle and good humored, never harsh or demeaning. I remember when he asked a meticulous nun not to comb her hair for a week and report back on how she felt. Although it drove her nuts, she loved the laughs as she shared in an entirely authentic and revealing way.

In the seminary setting, there was no intense interactive “ego-grinding” as there was in SAT. Rather Bob asked us time and again to focus attention on those places where we know we hurt but are blind to the source of our pain. Those are very fertile places in our psyche to explore our connection to the vast mystery of the universe. He was committed to helping ease suffering, but highlighted the practices of meditation, particularly the examen, and meditation on humility, tools Saint Ignatius outlined for contemplatives in action.*

The hallmark of what I’m calling the Jesuit Enneagram was that rigorous self-examination and analysis coupled with daily attention to our thoughts, impulses, actions and motivations could bring about real changes and an experience of unconditioned freedom. Good ideas could change people. Solid ideas would have a lasting effect.

*For those who are unfamiliar with Ignatian spirituality and would like to learn more, I have written a brief summary, along with some practice guides, The Spiritual Exercises and the Examen, in my blog “Koan Conversations.”

———

Towards the End

In the Spring of 1974 Claudio decided to introduce the Enneagram to a wider audience outside SAT. He asked Kathy Speeth to organize a series of presentations about the Enneagram aimed at psychologists and mental health professionals. He told me that he wanted to design a presentation for people who already had ability and training in self-observation. Bob asked me to represent Point 7 in the panels where SAT members described the fixed way of being, inclinations and behaviors of each of the nine points. Claudio acted as moderator, and, when the need arose, interrogator, always keeping us true to our lived experience.

This series of panels was the source of another line in the dissemination of the teaching, and the results are beyond dispute. Helen Palmer attended these sessions, and the panels may be the origin of what she calls the Oral Tradition. She also had access to some of our private notes about Claudio’s presentation of the Enneagram as well as extensive notes from Oscar’s talks in Chile from another source. She was never in a SAT group or Bob’s Enneagram courses, but she did psychic readings with almost every member of the early SAT group, often multiple sessions. It was in a 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, one of her first questions was the number of my fixation on the Enneagram.

Whenever Bob was unclear about a particular course of action, he consulted the psychic Ann Armstrong as well as Helen Palmer who was offering clairvoyant readings. He would often start a conversation with some prediction about the future that he thought entirely implausible. Although he himself knew his role in introducing the Enneagram to Christians, I don’t think he could have ever imagined how large an audience he’d reach. And he was not at all confident that he could measure up to what he imagined people would ask of him. He was not afraid to confront his insecurities, and while he tried to project a confidence in everyone’s innate abilities despite failings and missteps, he didn’t experience that certainty himself. This responsibility would be a daunting prospect for anyone, but especially for a One. It haunted him. Perhaps his reliance on psychics was an antidote.

In the Berkeley of the 70’s, reading past lives, psychic healing, consulting astrologers, I Ching and Tarot readers were as common as brushing your teeth. My SAT group was the first to experience what was then known as Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy. Bob Hoffman was a gruff, uneducated tailor from Oakland who claimed to have received the key to the underpinnings of our relationship with our mothers and fathers from a respected Viennese psychiatrist who had been dead five years. I was skeptical, but, following Claudio recommendation I worked with Hoffman, entrusted my psychological well-being to him, and worked with the Process for many years. I experienced some freedom but also some very painful personal consequences, including a sexually abusive relationship with Hoffman, which I’ve written about in several blog posts.

Bob and I both began to separate ourselves from ordinary Jesuit life. He followed me to the faculty residence of the American Baptist Seminary of the West, a small rudimentary building on Hillegass Avenue across from Peoples’ Park, where I’d found two small rooms. I remember how much he thanked me—finally he was able to have the kind of privacy that is not possible in a close knit religious community. Both Bob and I both had many non-Jesuit friends, mostly members of the SAT group, and although we could of course have invited them to visit us at the Jesuit residences, every move would have been scrutinized, questioned and, sadly, become fuel for gossip.

And it was not just friendships with SAT members which might have raised suspicion. I had filed a meticulous expense report to a crusty Irish priest for review. I remember a call from Boston asking me about money that I spent on Shiatsu massage in San Francisco. I blamed it on Bob, explaining that the kinds of meditation we were learning required us to become aware of our physical bodies. Joe Scerbo, the Franciscan who was also a member of SAT, gave message workshops. This was way outside the normal course of studies for a Jesuit seminarian.

Soon after I left the Jesuits, Bob ended his active career in the theology faculty, and retreated to the seclusion of a small basement apartment in a quiet suburb north of Berkeley. He became terribly concerned about his lack of energy. A homeopathic practitioner diagnosed allergies and mineral deficiencies, and he adhered to severe dietary restrictions with a healthy regime of supplements. Among other things, he was entirely gluten free before it became a fad. We could only eat at certain restaurants.

I recall a vivid conversation at a Peruvian restaurant he liked on Mission Street in San Francisco. He told me about corresponding with Idries Shah, claiming that letter writing was a revered form of spiritual instruction among Sufis. After Shah died in 1996, Bob tried to initiate a correspondence with Shah’s son, because Bob was certain Tahir had been designated as his father’s spiritual heir. When Tahir replied that he was just a writer, not a Sufi teacher, that his father had not designated him to teach, that actually he was not interested in the job, Bob said to me, “He’s supposed to say that. It’s his job to put me off.”

He became 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 Gurdjeiff school although I have no clear knowledge that she actually worked with any of Gurdjeiff’s longtime English students. But she was very conversant with what is known as “the Work” and its alleged connections to the long spiritual tradition of the Sufi orders. The link here is twofold: Bob 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.

By this time Bob’s relationship with Claudio ended, Enneagram studies had become big business. He was amazed at the deluge of Enneagram books, and although he never talked pejoratively about the career path of teachers who wrote books to build a client base, he did criticise their books. He felt that as the person in many ways responsible for the widespread of Enneagram work outside SAT, he had an obligation to speak, but he could not, at least not in the larger public forum where he might have had some impact. He spoke about his frustration—What shape would the writing take? Would there be illustrations to point to the chief characteristic of the nine points? Could he use public figures as examples? What would Claudio think? He also told me that his superiors were pushing him to write, that he’d explained withdrawal from the Jesuit community as a writing retreat. However I have no real knowledge about Bob’s relationship with his Jesuit superiors.

Then came the very public feuds between the various threads of Enneagram teaching. Ichazo sued Palmer in a case that attracted a lot of attention. Oscar tried to argue that the Enneagram was a rational, objective system, and the courts turned a blind eye. Claudio had serious disagreements with Palmer, Hudson, Riso, and Rohr. The names of the fixations, the descriptions of the traits and underlying motivations were modified as more and more people, in Claudio’s view, misdiagnosed themselves and their students.

In the end there was no book, no reconciliation with Claudio, and very little acknowledgement of Bob’s contribution from the huge number of Enneagram enthusiasts who trace their understanding and practice to his courageous immersion in the Enneagram.* And I failed. By the mid 90’s he wasn’t returning my calls promptly, and I stopped calling. I had also started a downward spiral of drug abuse which would last 10 years. Two years ago when I started working with the Enneagram again, I realized how much I owed Bob. After several attempts to reconnect, I discovered that he had died.

The formal notice of his death in the Midwest Jesuit publication didn’t match his contribution. I had to express my love and admiration myself.

———

The Wild Elephant

Writing about Bob is a daunting task. Mystics have been seeking, talking and arguing about the experience of freedom from time immemorial, or least since they invented language, but they cannot even really define the goal. It is not a fixed destination. There is no objective truth revealed by using the Enneagram system.

I have a Tibetan tanka in my study that represents the Samatha path to Enlightenment. As the elephant trudges up the path towards the highest goal, bit by bit grey smudges sluff off and the animal becomes luminous. I’ve ridden an elephant, a trained one, and even that was difficult.


The Enneagram teaching sprang from a distant source, passed on through Gurdjeiff, Ichazo, Naranjo, Ochs, Palmer and many more, and now it has been handed to us. Some have tried to domesticate the fixations by creating names that were more palatable to a wide psychological audience—a kinder, gentler way of naming our dense barriers to seeing reality. Others tried to calm the elephant’s unruly behavior through a series of carefully formulated descriptions of uncomfortable behaviors. Many taught and wrote tirelessly to explicate the most profitable way for people to use the tool in a careful and rigorous project of self inquiry, but their work is tossed around in the swirl of hundreds of books and seminars from varying perspectives.

The wild elephant has escaped the pen. Along with its monk mahoot, it’s on the Path. They are the Path. The clear, orderly and systematic portrayal from a Tibetan instruction manual reflects the way that many people would like the Enneagram to exist, a fixed point that grounds us in our searching. But the reality is that this Teaching, no matter how pure its origin, despite the most diligent application of the best psychological tools, does not come from the world of immutable truth. Just like ourselves, our teachers, our lovers and friends, it is impermanent. The wild elephant will not play circus tricks. It follows its own more primitive nature. The only thing that we can control, the only consistency possible, is our own rigorous self-inquiry and attempts to see the world as it really is.

I say enjoy the ride. Thank you Bob.

———

*Some of the Enneagram teachers who are linked to Ochs as the source of their practice include: 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 also Bob’s student in Chicago.

*The first SAT group included Charles Tart, PhD., Hameed Ali and Donovan Bess. Marlys Mayfield, Daniel Shurman, Fr. Joe Scerbo, S.A., and Michael Smith, were also among Claudio’s early students and my friends, all of whom I kept in touch with over many years.

K. L. Ireland, ©Kenneth Ireland, 2020

Here is a list of my other writing about the Enneagram, and a Bibliography.