The Stray Dog, Wandering with Gurdjieff

Real Wars kill people. Mythological Wars create cults

23rd April 2022, the Feast of Saint George


I write about George Ivanovich Gurdjieff against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There can be no hiding from real human suffering, but if I really acknowledge how little I can do to change the situation, I feel completely powerless. Nonetheless I find myself checking online for the latest updates. I count the number of children who have been evacuated from Mariupol, and wonder how many fighters remain in the labyrinth of bunkers and tunnels built to withstand a nuclear attack that have become the last holdout for a beleaguered regiment of the Ukrainian army.

I know which side I should root for, or more accurately, I know which side I want to win although I'm not entirely aware of all the factors that govern my impulses. From afar it seems clear that there are good guys and bad guys. I don’t know how many secret sins Volodymyr Zelenskyy is hiding, but I can see Valdimir Putin in what appear to be carefully edited Russian TV news clips keeping his distance from everyone at the end of a long white table with some arcane imperial symbols in gold holding the legs to the floor. Generals sit at the other end. According to reports, no one dares feed him accurate information about the progress of his narcissistic war. Looking at the picture, I find sympathy impossible. It seems like a world of lies and manipulation, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, although I know that if I were in Russia, I would hear an entirely different story presented over the airwaves, and I might feel differently. In fact I know I would feel differently. What is accurate information, what is propaganda, and how can I really tell the difference? Using information that comes through a filter is always tricky.

I am uneasy. My perceptions feel almost archetypal, like watching Arjuna and Lord Krishna surveying the battlefield and talking on and on about the “big picture” meaning of conflict. But I will direct my reflection back to the conversation of the Bhagavad Gita when things are less heated, the actual winners and losers have been sorted out, the bodies buried. This war will have consequences. All wars do, but right now I cannot feel in my body how or where we have been injured. I myself am not in the horrific underground labyrinth of Mariupol. It is a theoretical conversation except when I get personal about the cost.

I also know that it is from the perspective of myth and fable that I examine the story of Gurdjieff.

The Stray Dog*

More than 100 years ago during the Bolshevik Revolution, very close to this same battlefield, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff started the wandering that would eventually take him and his followers to France. Gurdjieff had tried, unsuccessfully, to establish his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man first in Tbilisi then soon after in Essentuki. But by 1920 he and his followers left Georgia for Constantinople and he became a stray dog, forced into roaming by the historical progenitors of the army currently bombing, slaughtering and raping.

This small group of men and women were mostly members of the Russian elite. Eventually they found their way to Le Prieuré in Fontainebleau-Avon, an abandoned French convent which had been the chateau of Louis XIV's secret wife, Madame de Maintenon, until a previous revolution had impoverished its aristocratic owner. Then the first major global conflict created an opportunity for a homeless group of exiles to set up an esoteric school in what was, from all accounts, a mammoth fixer-upper.

Although some very prominent people came to study with Gurdjieff, they remained an elite group over the next 29 years that he taught. He authorized very few senior students and left us scant and, for the most part, very difficult written materials, but along with several people who worked with him, Gurdjieff had an outsized impact on the world of modern spirituality. Many proponents of the Western Enneagram cite Gurdjieff as the source of their psychological/spiritual tool though this is not at all certain.

Gurdjieff always seemed a bit vague about the sources of his teachings. In Meetings with Remarkable Men, and in several other places, he makes his teachers into the stuff of legend, idealized characters, almost characterizations in his story of discovery and intrigue. They imparted a special, hidden teaching which he then promised to pass onto select students. These teachers are never clearly identified, but this is the very nature of esotericism. It is obscure and only understood or intended to be understood by a small number of people with special (and perhaps secret) knowledge. Receiving and understanding the teachings requires initiation into the group.

I meet “The Work.”

I moved to Berkeley in 1973, and began work in Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth, a name he borrowed from Gurdjieff. Our group of 50 or 60 people came from all walks of life. There were psychologists and professors, a Jesuit priest and a Franciscan Friar, two seminarians, one former nun, a devotee of Swami Rudrananda, a rabbi’s wife, and one woman who’d been associated with the Gurdjieff Foundation; several Ph.D.’s, two medical doctors, school teachers, at least one lawyer, more than a handful of psychology graduate students, body workers, therapists, a film-maker, a martial artist, a C-level New York fashion executive, Ravi Shankar’s mother-in-law, one professional journalist and a film distributor; but there were also carpenters, house painters and a French hippie. We were mostly white, straight (only 4 or 5 gay people), a large proportion of Jews, one Muslim and a few Asians.

We were also serious about exploring the Enneagram of Fixations, and by extension, engaging in “The Work.” The figure of G.I. Gurdjieff, always referred to as “Mr. Gurdjieff,” his pronouncements, statements about the nature of the universe, humankind’s ultimate purpose and his methods to undertake spiritual work were treated as sacrosanct. His inscrutable Beelzebub's Tales was spoken of in hushed tones. If you read it but didn’t understand his made-up words or the insidious properties of the mysterious organ Kundabuffer, you were advised to re-board the spaceship Karnak and delve more deeply into the mysteries that eluded you. This language purported to have roots in several esoteric Eastern spiritual disciplines. Using it, wrestling with the complexity of the inner states it purported to describe, was part of the process of introspection, or, as Gurdjieff described it, “Self-Remembering.”

Gurdjieff’s teaching and his words that have been passed down to us fall into several distinct categories. He carefully wrote one book, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man; and two others, Meetings with Remarkable Men, which apparently combine his own autobiographical work with a draft by his student, A.R. Orage, and finally Life is Real Only Then, When “I Am,” fragments of talks edited by one of his principle students, Jeanne de Salzmann. Then there is writing of students that Gurdjieff’ authorized, most notably P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous which received his imprimatur.

There are also the anecdotal memoirs of students plus extensive transcripts of his talks. The writings of men and women (both genders are represented, but men far outnumber women) who stand in the lineage of Fourth Way teachers, purport to transmit Gurdjieff’s teaching as well as claiming authority to speak in their voice. And finally there are extensive writings of people who describe their own experiences and interpretations of his teachings. These vary widely from memoir, metaphysical speculation to hagiography. Each of these kinds of writing have to be treated differently.

I use the word “myth” to denote the stories told about Gurdjieff’s understanding of the complexity of our human nature, driven by some overriding knowledge of the ultimate purpose of our human predicament. It includes the repetition of phrases or instructions to people who sought his direction as they undertook their own inner search. Though Gurdjieff was a real person who had real contacts with humans that were, from their reports, immensely transformative, the myths that I am talking about are for the most part second generation, embellished stories that share more with Aeneas’s journey from Troy than, and (I chose my example carefully) Krishnamurti’s talks at Ojai. Though I love Virgil’s poetry, I prize Jiddu Krishnamurti’s analysis.

I was born five years before Gurdjieff died in Paris, 29 October 1949. I met and had several conversations with one person, Lord John Pentland, who knew Gurdjieff over a long period of time, and had been his student as well as a person he authorized to teach. I also knew several of Pentland’s students, most intimately a fellow Jesuit and gay man, Father Tom Charbeneau. I met the writer, Pamela Travers, who was Gurdjieff’s student, and I had a long association with Kathy Speeth who sat on Gurdjieff’s knee when she was a toddler. I worked intensively for several years with Henry Korman who claimed to be in the lineage of Fourth Way teachers, but later confessed to being a fraud. Others, most importantly Claudio Naranjo, used selected phrases and stories about Gurdjieff as instructions in their own teaching. Though I have combined this experience with my wide reading, I state at the outset that I am not a student of the Fourth Way, nor do I claim to have done a complete study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching.

Gurdjieff’s public portrait is complex and tightly edited by his followers. On top of that, each one of us does his or her own editing. I have tried to report as accurately as possible what I can surmise from my own reading and research as well as what I’ve been able to glean from second hand accounts. For the purposes of argument, I have placed my narrative against an idealized version of the man I’ve pieced together. Naranjo did not set himself up as an heir to Gurdjieff’s teaching, but he was certainly conversant with it, and frequently pointed to Gurdjieff as a prototypical teacher of the kind of inner work he favored. He labeled him a “trickster” in the venerable line of teachers who use unorthodox means to help a student examine something about him or herself that they can’t see for themselves. Naranjo also talked about “The School.” It referred to the interrelated teachings and teachers whose work could be traced, using some psychic map, to the same Source.

This unfettered style often veers outside normal ethical norms, and opens the possibility for abuse. The end justifies the means. Our new found sexual freedom encouraged an attitude of laissez-faire and there was inevitably some degree of exploitation; Naranjo was very interested in psychedelics--he encouraged experimentation with drugs, notably LSD and Ayahuasca; he and his leaders allowed interactions which were outside professional guidelines; teachers’ credentials went unchecked or were inflated. In post hippie, Beatnik California Naranjo was not alone, on the one hand encouraging some of these behaviors, engaging in some and turning a blind eye to others. From my observation, many New Age teachers shared this sin to some degree. It comes part and parcel with the way conversation has been framed as a top down authority structure.

In the interests of being as transparent as one can be in this conversation, I spent an inordinate amount of time in my adult life exploring what I can only describe as the world of the New Age esoteric and occult. I never admitted to myself that it was a highly suspect endeavor, populated with the likes of Mme Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce, Charles Webster Leadbeater, or Aleister Crowley who purported to be authentic or enlightened teachers with a clear channel to “All that Is.” This is rocky terrain, rife with snake oil salesmen and outright frauds. Some of these people were more convincing than others basically because they spun better yarns, but the frauds all seem to have this in common--their stock in trade was taking advantage of vulnerable people. In my case it was a severe personal crisis that I didn’t even recognize. I was looking for a way out. By directing my attention to my plight, seeming to dismantle it and returning life to some level of normalcy, acceptance and happiness, roped me into its intrigue.

Several friends have discouraged my investigation. One asserts that Naranjo is not at all as important as he was when we were part of SAT, that his influence is waning. Another warns that any negative comments will deter people from undertaking the difficult work of introspection. These cautions do not deter me. The influence of Gurdjieff in modern, non-religious practice is far wider than might appear at first glance, and warrants examination. It extends from the presentation of the Enneagram in a Catholic setting to several “Human Potential Trainings/Processes,” notably the processes directly connected to the Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy which Naranjo promoted and introduced to SAT. The influence extends even into the world of American Zen practice. One teacher whom I admired told me that when she didn’t know where to take a student in meditation instruction, she fell back on the Enneagram.

But most importantly, “The Work '' struck a chord with me, opening up a world that I knew I had to explore. When I found myself caught in the trap of not being able to see my own plight clearly and was forced to admit that I’d been the fool, it was not the most comfortable of personal predicaments. The amount of personal capital that I’d already invested into the enterprise obscured the situation. What makes this spell of gnostic enterprise more difficult to crack is that it did begin to encroach on the entrapment and unmask self-deception, the very thing that I’d sought to free myself from in the first place. Though it provided some sense of relief, a half-right answer is still wrong. Freeing one hand provided relief, but I was still a slave.

The logical fallacy of the Argument from Authority.

Let me now examine the logical fallacy used to support the “exit plan” that brings down the whole house of cards. Gurdjieff asserts that man does have the possibility of being awake, but in order to wake up, he has to set an alarm clock, and insert a conscious mechanism into his unconscious routine to remind him that he’s dreaming. But there’s a catch: once the alarm clock has been set, and has worked a few times, the mechanisms of our human mind grow numb to its sound, and it loses its effectiveness. We fall back asleep. The human perpetual sleeping machine needs a perpetual waking machine, one that stands outside his or her habitual way of being. Thus the set up--we have need of a guru, an awake man (sometimes a woman but rarely), or one who knows vs. ordinary asleep man just going through the rituals of survival and coping. To top off the esoteric mechanism, when you realize that you are asleep, you need to find, and pay, this person who is awake to wake you up.*

The argument from authority is “[a] formal fallacy in which it is argued that because a perceived authority figure (or figures) believes a proposition (relevant to their authority) to be true, that proposition must therefore be true. This is also known as an appeal to authority. This fallacy occurs when person Y claims that person X is experienced in the topic at hand. Therefore, whatever person X believes is the truth. Alternatively, this can also occur if person Y claims themselves to be the authority, therefore whatever person Y believes is true. This fallacy is a special case of the genetic fallacy as the source is being used to justify the acceptance of a conclusion.”

Who stands in the position of X at the top of the enterprise of the Western Enneagram as the person of authority? When describing the origins of this Enneagram, we only find oblique references to Gurdjieff. The main candidates for an authorized source swing between the truly secret teaching of Gurdjieff or his followers, to Arica founder Oscar Ichazo and his student Naranjo with some far more dubious stops in the Sarmoung or Naqshbandi brotherhood, or (this one is close to my heart) in the work of a 17th century Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher. I argue that all these stories are fishy--to use a technical term.

This conversation about spiritual life is crippled by lame arguments. The impulse to expand the world beyond what we can perceive and verify is not the exclusive property of Gurdjieff's metaphysical construct. The awake person knows something that you do not know, something your present condition blinds you from seeing, but something that can alter your present condition by correct analysis. I argue that this argument from authority is consistent throughout all revealed religion: for example the dogmatic pronouncement that the Pope can, by virtue of his authority alone, utter statements that are “infallibly true” despite any factual evidence. I will also point to the passion for miracles, physical occurrences that stand outside the normal laws of cause and effect. I use the word “passion'' purposefully because even if we can’t personally witness these extraordinary events, we “believe” them, assuring ourselves in the benevolence of the unseen world, guiding us when we lack clarity, and for the purposes of this argument, providing authority as we grapple with the unknown.

The proponents of what I call the Western Enneagram Teaching as a tool for self-observation point to the appearance of the nine-pointed mandala in Gurdjieff’s teaching plus a few other references, found mostly in the works of Ouspensky and Bennett. But in Gurdjieff the Enneagram outlines the steps for the movements or sacred dancing combined with a rather complex set of laws of three and octaves--certainly nothing that points to 27 categories of personality fixations, virtues or holy work.

The first person that we know of in the Americas, and as far as we know, the first person to refer to an Enneagon, was the Bolivian Oscar Ichazo. In 1968 Ichazo presented lectures on his theories of Protoanalysis and the ego-fixations at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile. It was here that Naranjo made contact with Ichazo, and later at Ichazo’s first training in Arica Chile, Naranjo began his own investigation of what he termed the Enneagram of Fixations.

Naranjo told a convoluted tale echoing Sufi masters disguising their teaching and tricking their disciples, and wove it into his story about receiving the Enneagram from Ichazo. My skeptic says that he was just trying to establish an authorized teaching lineage by characterizing his difficult relationship with Ichazo as a Sufi trick. To further break with difficult factual history, at some point Naranjo describes his understanding of the Enneagram as the result of automatic writing. Appealing to this otherworldly realm of evidence, one of Ichazo’s disciples says that an esoteric volume fell from a shelf in Ichazo’s study, opened up to the Enneagon diagram, and Ichazo divined its gnostic meaning.

I want to point out that these conversations themselves are privileged. They rely on the status of the speaker rather than hard evidence as to the root of the Enneagram/Enneagon to prove the validity of the system. Both the claims and statements fall entirely within the argument from authority. But they still continue to be used for confirmation of the system’s validity and ultimate use.

You don’t believe me? Then why are we still having this argument about the correct, or authorized source? Q.E.D.

Debunking some myths around “Mr. Gurdjieff” and “The Work.”

Before I begin to debunk any mythological constructs. I will note what first attracted me to ``The Work,” what I found useful, where I opened myself to abuse, and finally how I began to become disenchanted. Throughout I will be paying close attention to language. Zen posits that a lot of what is important to discuss is beyond words, but we have to use words; they may be an approximation, but they are only tool available to humans. Some of this esoteric language points to important issues in life while other language--I will use a less technological, but very precise word to describe this abuse--is gobbledegook.

When I was 29 years old after just a few months working with Naranjo, I had an experience that lifted a huge weight that I’d been carrying for many years. Sitting in that ramshackle fraternity house in Berkeley, it struck like lightning. Its debris would take years to sweep up. I uncovered the motivation for my life choice to train as a Jesuit, a dream that began when I was just an adolescent. Unpacking it, dealing with the consequences, including the abuse that played out, would be a long, slow and costly process, but it opened a new vista for my life that I could not have imagined. I remain grateful, but in retrospect, the experience was so overwhelming I was blinded to its limitations.

These were heady days, Naranjo told us that he was setting up a school that would be a smorgasbord of available spiritual disciplines, shorthand for “Esalen Style.” Experimentation was the norm and, given the circumstances, the path might prove rocky, even dangerous. I knew that I needed psychological help, but I also wanted to avoid professional treatment. As a Jesuit, therapy was not out of bounds but still carried enormous baggage if I wanted to advance in the Order. The prospect of blending spirituality with the insights of psychology provided cover. For any psychological process to work, however, it still required a level of vulnerability, but in the freewheeling world of SAT, time-tested ethical and professional principles had been suspended. There were casualties, and personally I ran up against very difficult obstacles. Being raped by a uneducated tailor who claimed to be the psychic channel for a dead psychiatrist certainly fits in that category.

Naranjo, much like Gurdjieff in Meetings with Remarkable Men, told tales of receiving information from other sources. Bob Hoffman told him things about his past that Hoffman could not have possibly known, or that was Naranjo’s claim,* and therefore the whole group would be subjected to the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, despite Hoffman’s obvious lack of professionalism. The discipline of Fritz Perls was far from unprofessional, and when Naranjo sat in that chair, he was the consummate professional, but that happened rarely. People in SAT relied on Helen Palmer’s costly psychic readings, as prognosticators of behavior patterns, things to work on. There were people who used their alleged connections to the other side as sources for psychological investigation. There was Anne Armstrong (who gave me unsolicited and disastrous advice about a business deal) and a specious Chilean palm reader to whom Kathy Riordan Speeth is indebted to for losing her license to practice therapy in California.

I have made a list and named names, far from complete, in order to point out to the other-worldly and suspect sources for many of the psychological techniques that were used to dig down to the roots of personal psychological make-up. Key to any of this having therapeutic benefits is surrender. Suspension of judgment opens the back door to the unexpected and revelatory, hidden motivations, the dark family secret that has been lurking and putting up barriers. However investigation shifts from analysis of counterproductive behaviors to tracing their source using suspect means, as if dream analysis á la Oracle at Delphi had become a substitute for free association, and the mind-altering experience of LSD a quick route to the fruits of meditation practice.

But what if this type of inquiry does not stand the test of time or produce real results? Spiritual charlatans have a huge bag of tricks--they act like drugs--to induce experiences of ecstasy and revelation. I was told over and over to “suspend [my] judgment, enter into another state where things will be revealed.” This gibberish is an exact quote; some version is repeated ad nauseam to this day. To be honest, sometimes sleight of hand is useful in discovering a personal blind spot, but at some point the trick has to be revealed for what it is. Otherwise it just becomes part of the illusion.

We know that some mental processes work below the surface. They are unconscious; if they remain hidden, they wield enormous influence and we remain in their thrall. But a simple dream about having a heart attack is no predictor. Casual or surface exploration serves little purpose other than to induce fear. When a friend told me about having a dream like this, I asked if he’d seen a cardiologist. But I also knew that I suspended my judgment many times when it would have been better to allow my actually well-trained critical facility to maintain the upper hand.

Hoffman once told me that his dreams had predicted that he would be cured of cancer because he had a higher calling, and I believed him until I took care of him when he was dying of cancer. I’d been doing professional hospice work for nearly a decade so I was not particularly shocked by his lack of acceptance of his own death. He was in complete denial, expecting another psychic miracle and very angry when it didn’t appear. I have detailed some of the unraveling of his pretense and absurd lies behind his psychic understanding of life in other writings. Perhaps I ought to listen to my mother and not speak ill about the dead, and in honesty I have to confess that I was far too close to the man to be objective. His sexual abuse was always in the background, and there were never any amends--he was far too arrogant to admit any personal faults. But there was also something more interesting going on, the beginnings of the erosion of the framework underpinning his system and by extension, the entire work that Naranjo undertook with his groups.

In response to a request from a friend to examine particular Gurdjieff sources, I came across some talks, very definitive statements he made about the differing roles of women and men. These were the urtexts, transcriptions of his talks to students either at Le Prieuré or in his Paris flat. It seemed all very high-tone, even provocative. But it had the confrontational tone of a bully. Part of my mind revolted, and I began to realize that what I read was simply outright misogyny, delivered in a extremely arrogant tone, quite similar to what I experienced in the men whom I’d met who claimed their authority by referencing the Armenian seer.

There was no abrupt “Ah ha” moment. In my mind I started to construct a protective shield for this figure who was held in utmost reverence by people I respected. He was, we were told, a man who knew himself. I told myself that the misogyny had to be a function of time, place and circumstance; this charismatic member of an elite group who’d undertook a heroic exploration of ancient traditions and helped find a key to some of the mysteries that had presented themselves to me, and provided a key, or what I imagined was a key, to self-understanding.

But that made Gurdjieff himself just an ordinary man ruled by circumstance, and being a man lulled to sleep by life’s circumstances was exactly what “The Work'' sets out to conquer. The sleep state keeps us enslaved. What about all the rest of what Gurdjieff claimed? The house of cards began to fall. I gave up surrendering to a set of ideas that produced a modicum of results. They were based almost exclusively on the word of a man who claimed authority by his experience and hard won understanding of man’s plight. But it all stood or fell on his authority, real or imagined. I could no longer stake my life on this teaching.

The argument from authority is “[a] formal fallacy in which it is argued that because a perceived authority figure (or figures) believes a proposition (relevant to their authority) to be true, that proposition must therefore be true.” But what this authority figure proposed was blatantly false. What Hoffman claimed about the psychic workings of the mind was absurd. What Naranjo claimed about the origin of the Enneagram of fixations was an hallucination at best. Gurdjieff was a bully, a sexist and misogynist. Believe them at your own peril. Q.E.D.

I do not however want to throw out the whole barrel as if it were filled with rotten fish that stinks to high heaven. I remembered the words of Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii whom Gurdjieff thought was a convivial partner to share a glass of vodka with at The Stray Dog, but “a weak man”. If Self-Remembering can get us here, even for an instant, it was worth all the effort.

“…that you can know consciousness only in yourself. Observe that I say you can know, for you can know it only when you have it.” 

 And I emphasize this sentence: “And when you have not got it, you can know that you have not got it, not at that very moment, but afterwards.” 

After a period of time and reflection. It took me a while.


____________________

Notes:

*The Stray Dog. A Saint Petersburg cafe where Gurdjieff held forth, according to G. Lachman. It is the presumed site that elicited the comment from Gurdjieff that Ouspenskyy was a personable guy to drink vodka with but a weak man.

* When I first heard of wokeism, this is what my mind conjured up, and the term does insist on a degree of blanket “correctness,” including its underlying assumptions.

Oscar has said that “in order to understand the originality of the perspective of the Arica Integral Teachings, it is important to remember that Buddhism is based on the epistemological and immediate discovery or knowledge of the world as being fundamentally in a state of suffering (Skt. samsara). This is the First Noble Truth. What the Arica Theory proposes is an ontological foundation with the discovery that one step behind suffering, we find the actual root of that suffering, and this step behind discovers, answers and defines the ontological proposition that there must be a being, an Ego–entity, that supports that suffering.” The Roots of Buddhism and Arica Integralism

Bibliography

Claudio Naranjo
End of Patriarchy: And the Dawning of a Tri-Une Society Paperback – 1 Jan. 1994
Cf. Chapter on the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

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. 

Bob Hoffman, The First Encounter

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

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

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

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

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

Why do intelligent people believe nonsense?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting Hoffman for the first time

About 8:30 on a cold Tuesday night in the early fall of 1973, I sat on the floor of a ramshackle old fraternity house near the UC Berkeley campus. Rosalyn Schaffer, acting as Claudio Naranjo’s representative, introduced Hoffman as a person who had a unique insight into our parental conditioning. Claudio had offered to help Hoffman shape the work he’d been doing with individuals into a group process. We were to be the avant garde of psychic therapy.

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

I felt trapped. I had just moved all the way from New York and had nowhere else to turn. I looked down and took notes as an uneducated tailor from Oakland told the 20-25 eager, inquisitive, mostly young people present that no one in the room really loved themselves, that like actors in a bad play with an unhappy ending, we only gave love to get love, that we’d learned everything we knew and understood about love from our perverse relationships with our parents who didn’t know the first thing about love.

The definition of Negative Love was “It is illogical logic, nonsensical sense, and insane sanity, yet masochistically true or we wouldn’t behave in such a fashion.” If we didn’t understand, we were just playing the game of playing dumb; if we thought he thought he was dumb, it was negative transference, and proof that we didn’t love ourselves. If we thought he was dressed in bad taste, we were mired in self-hatred. I thought he was overdressed for the Trifecta so my transference had already begun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hoffman’s Primitive Understanding of Psychology

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

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

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

If Hoffman’s psychic understanding of our emotional life was primitive, his behavior in the group setting was also becoming problematic. He claimed he had to break us down so that we could build ourselves up, but he was just giving himself blanket permission to be a confrontational bully, at times verging on the psychotic. List of Mother’s Negative Traits and emotional autobiography in hand, playing the tough-love, or alternatively the bad cop role, Hoffman would scrutinize gestures, mannerisms, speech patterns, slips of the tongue, ways of dressing, and pick a fight. He lectured, cajoled, confronted, and intimidated. He was extremely good at reading a person’s weakness, imitating it, exaggerating it. He would shout, insult, mock, humiliate, bully and belittle, accusing us of playing games. He was unrelenting. And then he went in for the kill.

Because Hoffman’s behaviors went unchallenged and were tolerated, they became his go-to teaching technique throughout his career. It was so far outside the norms of ethical conduct for a therapist or spiritual guide that it usually left everyone speechless, but few left. Those who did were ridiculed as not having the inner strength to do real Work. Hoffman justified himself by insisting that we couldn’t even see that we were just negative children. His job was to point out all the ways we acted out of negative love and that our resistance and denial were so strong it required a very strong hand. He used the “iron fist covered in the velvet glove of love.” And he let us know in no uncertain terms his job was thankless with very little reward. (My Lord, he reflected almost mirror sentiments as my Mother). Most independent observers would see these behaviors as pointing to some very deep level of psychosis.

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

It was long before the wounded child syndrome hit therapeutic TV, but Hoffman’s concept wasn’t even that sophisticated. He envisioned a pristine emotional harmony that had somehow been usurped by the vagaries of our parental conditioning perpetuated through generations. Hoffman repeated over and over, “everyone is guilty and no one to blame.” We were just the sum of sins of our fathers and mothers. The mechanism was simply learning to imitate your parents’ negative traits and internalize their negative admonitions. We acted in the exact same way to get the love we thought, no, knew we deserved or rebelled against it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Huge Personal Breakthrough

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

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

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

This experience was for me one of the major breakthroughs of my entire adult life. It was as if a huge veil had been lifted, and I had to admit that I was an angry person. I could no longer pretend that I was somehow spared the anguish of a domineering parent. And with that realization, the intricate spiritual world of a young Jesuit seeker that I’d constructed as defense began to look like a sham, and 10 years of rigorous disciplined religious life began to crumble. I recognized a range of feelings that I’d struggled to avoid all my life, that I’d actually constructed my life to avoid feeling. And in that moment I became solidly engaged in the exploration to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom. It would be a very difficult, long process.

What is important for me to note here is that the breakthrough happened under Claudio’s guidance, carefully using the technique he’s learned from Perls. It was also, and perhaps this is just my bad luck, part of Claudio’s efforts to help Hoffman create the Group Process, and I conflated the psychological events which only reinforced my transference towards Hoffman. Hand in hand with an immense sense of freedom came the crippling burden of decades of dealing with transference to a narcissist who was also a sexual predator.

The “Bitch Session” was born

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

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

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

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

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



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

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021