The Ontological Odd Couple

and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, by Ken Ireland

Introduction

Success has many fathers and mothers.

When creating an historical account, you have to start at the beginning and get it right. Some
facts, times, and dates can be accurately reconstructed from documents, letters, transcripts and
personal calendars, if you are lucky enough to have them, but the messy parts of bringing
something new into the world are, for the most part, buried and lost.
The original Process, the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy (FHPT), was created by Bob Hoffman and
the people he gathered around him between 1968 and 1973, most notably Claudio Naranjo.* It
had to fight for a marginal existence, competing with other offerings in the world of human
potential that were then beginning to appear in California. Though the firm hand of Hoffman was
always present during this period, he sought input from many sources (who sometimes did not
even know that Hoffman was talking to others about the same issue). But he attributed final
changes to his spirit guide, Dr. Fisher, which, I will argue, was part of the story he created to make
a plausible claim that a tailor from Oakland could be the source of a complete psychological
treatment.
It is ironic that the marketing efforts required to breathe life and cash into a new offering also
distort the original vision. Reshaping history creates the impression that the Process came full
blown from a pure source, and the people who do the difficult work of bringing something new
into a world are elevated far beyond who they really are. Unrealistic expectations become a false
standard to evaluate personal experience and it becomes more difficult to use one’s own
inspiration to gain self-knowledge and liberation.
No course of psychotherapy can produce real changes in people if it remains only theory. It
changes. It reaches into areas that its creators cannot predict. If promises and expectations cannot
be fulfilled, they have to be modified or eliminated. However, this evolution is distinct from
marketing. Sadly, in our culture, promoting a brand name, writing persuasive copy, will prevail and
in the process the contributions of many talented people are cut and lost. When these
contributions are marginalized and their value neglected (or, in the worst scenario, attributed to
others), the world itself loses something of its humanity and love.
What follows is just an inclusive footnote to the revised story.
*Naranjo is best known as the person who introduced and developed the Enneagram as a tool for
self-analysis and spiritual development in the West.

My Purpose and Sources

I propose to outline the early development of the FHPT from the basement ‘reading’ room in
Hoffman’s clothing store on 15th Street in Oakland to the SAT group process that is the foundation
of today’s Quadrinity Process. I will not cover any of the subsequent additions and deletions since
the creation of the seven-day format. My interest is to examine the 13-week process, the exercises
and mind trips (now called ‘visualizations’) that remain the framework of the HQP, to see if this
yields an insight into how a very simple insight became a course with sequential series of scripted
emotional ‘events’ and a recognized ‘product’ in the human potential market place.
The primary source of information about the early development of the FHPT is my own
experience. In 1972-73, I was in the first SAT group that Naranjo used to create a group process to
accomplish “a loving divorce from mother and father” that Hoffman promised. Later in the spring
of 1973, I was one of approximately 55 people Hoffman invited to be in his first 13-week group
that he himself “took through” the Process in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The
following year I was trained as an FHPT therapist and group leader which became my primary
work for several years. I lead the 13-week processes for PSI and later, I worked privately with
smaller groups for another three years.
Another primary source is Hoffman himself and my conversations with him from 1972 until his
death in 1997. Our friendship was at times rewarding and at other times strained and painful.
While he was alive I did not talk about the personal qualities and idiosyncrasies that gave me some
insight into inner workings, puzzles and deep-seated sources of the unhappiness of the complex
man. Extremely concerned about his public image, he imagined that he had to present himself to
world as straight, a guy who had “his act together.” Most people who were at all close to him,
certainly those who worked with him closely, knew that Hoffman was gay, but he never publicly
acknowledged his homosexuality. In this day of liberation and acceptance, however, his deception,
his closeted life, cannot be overlooked. A good case could be argued that the process itself grew
out of his conflict about being a man who loved men, his difficulty forming and nurturing close
relationships, his creativity and sensitivity, and perhaps some of his inner doubts about the worth
of his work.
I do not know all the people who contributed to the development of Hoffman’s work. They are
legion. I have not included hearsay material from people with whom I did not work or with whom I
didn’t have focused conversations. Many disappeared after working with Hoffman and making a
significant contribution to the Process, such as Dr. Ernest Pecci, M.D., a psychiatrist who founded
PSI, The Center for Psycho-Spiritual Integration, to present the 13-week Process. I trained as a
therapist under Pecci and worked with him for more than two years in the 70’s. Pecci’s
psychotherapeutic model was heavily influenced by New Age spirituality. My last personal contact
with Pecci was a phone call about 1977 when he warned me that Hoffman was going to sue
everyone that he, Pecci, had trained unless we ceased to offer the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic
therapy to the public. (Nearly everyone who was offering some version of the FHPT ceased under
Hoffman’s threat of legal action, with the exception of one or two practitioners who had split with
Hoffman before PSI, substantially altering or modifying it. He was also not successful in shutting
down the Anti-Fisher Hoffman Process that was offered in the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ashrams
in Pune and Antelope).
Some key people are dead, among them Julius Brandstatter, the man who coined the word
‘Quadrinity’ to reflect the four aspects of being human— physical, intellectual, spiritual and
emotional. I met Julius and his wife Miriam when they returned from Israel in the 70’s; their work
with Hoffman continued through the re-casting of the Process into the current seven-and-a- half-
day format. In the opinion of most observers, their contribution was never fully acknowledged by
Hoffman. I had several long conversations with Miriam in 2006. It was she who created the
organization and flow for Hoffman’s early sessions. Hoffman would call Miriam in Israel and tell
her what he presented that week with SAT, and later in Tolman Hall. Miriam, a well-trained
psychotherapist, then returned what she had presented in Israel, as an orderly, effective outline
which Hoffman filed and used for the next Process.
The most important person in this story was dead before Hoffman had the powerful experience
that gave birth to the Process. In the first years, Dr. Siegfried Fisher assumed the status of legend
and myth in the story of the Process as Hoffman’s guide. His name was removed from the original
title when his widow threatened to file suit. She claimed that there was no personal friendship
between the two men and that her husband’s professional reputation was threatened by
Hoffman’s claims. I will briefly examine both claims below.
Many of the people with whom I had extensive conversations became estranged from Hoffman,
among them Ilene Cummings and Stanley Stefancic, who both served as Executive Director of the
Institute after Hoffman’s return from Mexico. Besides long and thoughtful discussions about the
origins of the Process and the contributions of various players, Stefancic showed me several
documents, lists of the unique terms and phrases that were intended as teaching tools in the HQP
(e.g. “negative love,” “giving to get,” “illogical logic, nonsensical sense”), as well as descriptions of
several elements in the Processes, (including the bitter sweet chocolate ritual, and spirit guide and
sanctuary mind trip), that Hoffman and his lawyers prepared when he was considering lawsuits
against those he considered pirates. (I have used quotes around words and phrases that Hoffman
habitually used to describe either his methodology or the concepts that were the underpinning of
his spiritual worldview.)
Other people were constant friends and supporters from their first meeting with Hoffman until he
died. Although I know these people and have had conversations with them, I have not used
anything they told me in my presentation. Cynthia Merchant, personal assistant to Hoffman and a
Hoffman Quadrinity Teacher, worked as the editor of the lengthy transcripts of Hoffman’s
presentations that became the core of today’s Process. Ron Kayne, early supporter, by Hoffman’s
admission, created the “guide and sanctuary mind trip,” as well being the ghost writer for
Hoffman’s book, Getting Divorced from Mother and Dad and the first version of the Negative Love
Syndrome.
When I became serious about uncovering and documenting the origins of the FHPS, I interviewed
several of the members of Naranjo’s first SAT group who had worked individually with Hoffman.
Ron Deziel gave me important information about the bare bones of Hoffman’s initial work heavily
laced in psychic practice borrowed from the Spiritualist Church.
While some of what I will present is not easily reconciled with the proposed image of an inspired
“intuitive,” or kindly and wise Jewish grandfather, I feel it vital to record another version of
Hoffman’s inspiration and preserve it in a small corner of universe, and especially to note in some
detail Claudio Naranjo’s contribution. It is a dangerous thing to allow a story of real creation and
inspiration to become too sanitized. The contributions of this highly talented man who was
present at a certain moment and responded wholeheartedly to Hoffman’s questions and requests
without concern for his own personal gain and enrichment cannot be neglected.

The Inspiration

I heard Hoffman describe the inspiration for the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy many times. The
rather bare outline of this otherworldly encounter never varied. In the middle of a night in 1967,
the figure of a recently departed friend, the psychiatrist Siegfried Fischer, appeared at the foot of
his bed and revealed to him the missing link in psychoanalytic therapy: the concept of negative
love, the stream of negative behaviors unconsciously passed from one generation to the next.
Then Fischer’s spirit being took Hoffman through his own psychic therapy, uncovering the roots of
his own inherited patterns of behavior and liberating him with a new understanding that reached
into the depths of his emotional being. Hoffman said that he was able to forgive his parents for all
the negativity he had experienced growing up. He knew that “everyone is guilty and no one to
blame.” Fischer disappeared with the promise to return and assist Hoffman to complete some of
his own unfinished work, his karma, and that Hoffman could help “move on.” Hoffman said he
heard the phrase “doors will open” when he asked Fisher how he, a tailor, would enter the world
of professional psychotherapy and present this insight as the missing piece, an antidote to the
endless cycle of analysis.
Who was Siegfried Fischer? Hoffman claimed that Fischer was an acquaintance, a friend of his
wife’s family, a Viennese-trained psychiatrist who had escaped from Austria before Hitler’s
invasion, making his way to San Francisco. I confirmed the basic outline of the Fischer story from
the public record. Siegfried Fischer did emigrate in the 40’s and practiced psychotherapy at
Langley Porter; he wrote Principles of general psychopathology: an interpretation of the
theoretical foundations of psychopathological concepts, (New York, Philosophical Library, 1950).
Hoffman presented a scenario of convivial after-dinner conversations with Fischer. They chatted
and argued about the existence of the psychic realm, life after death, and questions about the
efficacy of psychotherapy. I can’t overemphasize the Spiritualist Church’s doctrine: “truth” spoken
by disembodied spirits to spirits inhabiting human bodies, satisfying karmic obligations. Fischer
was the scientific materialist and believed none of it. The telling had the feel of an apocalyptic
battle between the forces of good and evil, psychotherapy vs. a psychic tailor, the psychic
declaring victory after death.
After hearing this part of story, with slight variations, innumerable times, I, and several other
participants, began to feel that Hoffman had an ax to grind with the enterprise of psycho-analysis,
that he had probably had a failed experience in therapy himself. I began to suspect that he had
been Fischer’s patient and quit, still in transference. I asked Hoffman if he had been Fischer’s
patient and he said yes, that he and his wife had seen Fischer for family therapy with their son
Michael. Nothing about any friendship. I am convinced that Hoffman created a good yarn, a myth,
and lied about his personal friendship with Fisher to present himself as a reliable source.
Fischer’s widow maintained that he was never a personal friend of Hoffman or Hoffman’s wife.
When Hoffman continued to use her husband’s name, Fischer’s heirs filed a lawsuit against
Hoffman. Hoffman acceded to the demands of the Fischer family, and changed the name of the
FHPT to the Quadrinity Process. However, he still claimed, both in private conversation and group
presentations, a personal friendship with Fischer and that Fischer was his spirit guide. [He asked
me if I had had any psychic contact with Fischer. His criterion for authentic contact was a vision of
Fischer as a real life persona, complete with grey hair, glasses, and white coat. Hoffman told me
that he was fairly certain that Naranjo had experienced Dr. Fischer as a spiritual entity, but my
vision was less certain.]
Hoffman claimed that Fischer guided him as he began to work with people who started to come to
him for psychic readings. From my conversations with several people who did psychic therapy with
Hoffman in the “reading room” of his 15th Street shop, Hoffman’s initial work contained the
following elements. After some discussion of the problems that were plaguing a person’s life (and
legendary “forceful” persuasion), and making lists of his or her parents’ negative traits, Hoffman
instructed clients to write an emotionally-charged autobiography of their life from birth till
puberty. Then he began to direct the “prosecution” of Mother and Dad for programming a
defenseless child with negative emotional traits. An “anger letter” to his or her parents capped the
prosecution which provided some release as well as giving Hoffman an opportunity to evaluate the
depth of the client’s emotional state.
Then Hoffman “psychically read” the emotional history the client’s parents, living or dead,
describing events without prior knowledge, often including times and places, that explained and
cemented difficult emotional traits into their emotional make up. This was the parents’ “defense”:
to see that negative love was passed from one generation to the next. This is the concept of
“negative love”: that his or her parents had unwillingly “adopted” these negative traits
themselves, driven by their own emotional history and therefore could not be blamed. These
deep, psychically verifiable, understandings led to the experience of forgiveness and compassion
for one’s parents. “Everyone is guilty and no one to blame.”
And finally, through the mediation of Dr. Fischer and their personal spirit guide, the client got
“Closure” by cutting the psychic ties to his or her parents. In a “mind trip,” the client yanked out
the umbilical cord that connected his or her emotional child to their parents and allowed them to
grow up to their chronological age. As an emotional adult, the client could for the first time
experience unconditional love for their parents. The tools for breaking the habit of negative
behaviors, now just phantom symptoms of imagined hurt, were repetition of positive traits, a
process called “recycling,” and avoidance of negative behaviors by “putting your awareness on
your awareness” using rudimentary self awareness exercises. There were also tapes of sessions
with Hoffman and written negative trait lists and positive alternatives for reinforcement.
The original elements of the Process, according to Ernie Pecci, were the prosecution of Mother
and then the defense of Mother, the prosecution of Father and the defense of Father plus the
“Closure.”
One other piece was introduced into the FHPS before Naranjo took on creating the group process
with Hoffman. The imagined conversation between the client’s emotional child and the emotional
child of the parent came from Transactional Analysis. Hoffman’s no longer read his patients
psychically to uncover his or her own parents’ emotional history. Hoffman found facilitators
trained in transactional analysis, and adapted an existing technique, a path that he was to follow
many times throughout the creation of the Process. If Fischer had really communicated to
Hoffman, “doors will open,” perhaps he knew that Hoffman would not hesitate to break down
doors if he found them stuck.

The Development of the Group Process

When I arrived in Berkeley in 1972, I was a 28-year-old Jesuit seminarian. I also knew that I needed
psychological help—my own spiritual practice had opened up as many blank spaces as it had
satisfied—and I was at a loss for any real solutions. I had been in therapy but the result only put
me in a huge dilemma: I knew I was gay but denied it; I wanted to experience intimacy in my life,
and I wanted to have a spiritual life. My vow of celibacy presented a definite obstacle to intimacy. I
had come to Berkeley to work with a Jesuit priest named Bob Ochs who was a student of Naranjo.
I had heard that Naranjo was about to begin to “introduce” his group to the work of a man he
considered a modern shaman, a tailor from Oakland who was psychically guided by a deceased
Viennese psychiatrist, a man who was able to introduce people to the core of psychological
understanding in a very swift and complete way. This was a real “Hail Mary,” but would a Jesuit
lead me down a dead end?
At our group’s first meeting with Bob Hoffman, he wore very expensive clothes—a race-track sport
coat and tie. Standing behind Rosalyn Schaffer, Naranjo’s representative, he appeared
uncomfortable. When he began to speak, it was soon obvious that he was not educated in any
psychological discipline, but he dominated the room, alternatively talking then yelling in a kind of
dumbed-down jargon filled with what became known as ”Hoffmanisms.” The paradoxical
definition of “negative love was illogical logical and nonsensical sense,” and if we didn’t
understand that, we were just playing dumb out of negative love; if we thought he was too well
dressed, it was negative transference and an indication that we didn’t love ourselves. I was
trapped, but I had just moved all the way from New York and had nowhere else to turn so I sat and
took notes.
This was the very beginning of the creation of the group Process. It is very clear from Hoffman’s
written notes in Stefancic’s possession that Hoffman credited Claudio Naranjo for transforming the
FHPT into a group process. It is also clear from every interaction between them that I witnessed
over more than 20 years, that Naranjo always regarded Hoffman as a modern day shaman, just as
he was introduced on that September evening. Naranjo would from time to time poke fun and try
to deflate Hoffman, but he also respected the kernel of Hoffman’s insight.
Not only did Naranjo shape the group process, he also gave Hoffman a measuring stick to evaluate
the effect that the FHPS had on participants. Lacking psychological training, Hoffman needed
Naranjo’s validation, but at the same time he never trusted the techniques that Naranjo
introduced to yield insight. He felt that psychotherapy was at base a misguided enterprise and any
kind of self observation was, at best, far too slow and, at worst, a head game. His style was to
evaluate and attack people, then point to their emotional reactions as example of negative
programming, almost always violating the boundaries of professional behavior.
Naranjo was usually absent from Hoffman’s group interactions and, I suspect, just let Hoffman
conduct himself in any way he chose. But Naranjo did craft the interactive exercises for most of
the sessions. I will discuss two exercises in some detail, the “bitch session” and the “child/intellect
confrontation.” They highlight Naranjo’s major contribution to the Process and laid the
groundwork for the experiential HQP that is now produced worldwide.
Hoffman instructed us to list our parents’ negative traits. He defined a negative trait as any
behavior that was “giving to get,” “buying love,” “withholding love.” This warped economy of love
thwarted the free exchange of affection to satisfy our innate desire to love and be loved. (Naranjo
examines Hoffman’s view in “The End of Patriarchy”). As we listed our parents’ negative traits,
Hoffman insisted that we had adopted them, every one of them, even if we had rebelled against
them as children and they occurred as negative reactive behavior. He insisted that this was the
sum total of what we knew about love, that our emotional life was infantile, and that we gave
emotional love in the vain hope of having it returned, deprived of our birthright to give and
receive love freely. This simple model became the foil that Hoffman used to reflect our behavior
back to us, a rudimentary self-observation: the memory of past behaviors in relation to our
parents revealed how we conducted our emotional life. Our list of negative traits became his
confrontational tool. In the SAT group, Claudio also used dyads and other tools of self-observation,
notably the study of the enneagram, meditation, and methods adopted from Gestalt, but Hoffman
again thought those techniques cumbersome and slow.
We were then instructed to take the list of negative traits and recall scenes from our childhood,
before puberty, where we had experienced these traits exhibited by our parents, and write down
our reactions. Our emotional autobiography was to be as emotional as possible; we were not to
censor ourselves as we wrote. (The Emotional Autobiography is no longer used— Hoffman told me
that it was not necessary but I suspect that it took too much time for the compressed version).
That first Fall there were at least five weeks dedicated to this prosecution of Mother. It was mid-
October when we began the bitch session. I mention this because it was the first time I noticed
Hoffman’s urge to move the process ahead while it appeared to me that Claudio was testing
psychological methodology as applied to the FHPT. My observation was of course obscured by the
fact that I was a participant with enormous transference already underway. Subsequent events
confirmed my initial impression.
The bitch session, which replaced the “anger letter,” was an experiential expression of anger,
directed at a parent, using explicit language, physical motion, beating pillows, and screaming. It
was first conducted with the group members observing the person on the “hot seat” and then
providing feedback about the depth and expression of the anger. (A personal note here: this
experience was for me one of the major breakthroughs in my entire adult life. It took weeks for
me to really allow myself to express my own anger, but when I finally did touch the depth of my
rage at my mother, it altered the course of my life. It was as if a huge veil had been lifted and I had
to admit that I was an angry person. But more important, I recognized that I had a range of
feelings that I’d struggled to avoid all my life, that I had constructed my life to avoid these feelings.
At that moment I became solidly engaged in the exploration of myself to achieve some degree of
resolution and freedom.)
The introduction of the “bitch session” was important to Hoffman. It was his first experience of
psychological work allowing a person to experience the level of emotional release that he had
been unable to achieve with his “anger letter.” It also, in my view, pointed to a rapid way to induce
the level of feeling and emotion that is the hallmark of the current version of the HQP. Later Pecci
introduced another technique for inducing very early infantile feelings, the “primal,” an adaptation
of Reichian body work, borrowing its name from the then-popular Primal Scream Therapy; it also
continues to exist in some form in the current HQP.
The next of Naranjo’s contributions that I would like to discuss is what is now known as the
“Child/Intellect Bitch Session.” This does not follow the chronological sequence because it actually
occurred after Hoffman had begun to do his own work. While I worked in the first FHPT Process, I
continued my participation in the SAT group. One night I took the hot seat when Naranjo himself
was doing Gestalt therapy. In the FHPT, the client visualizes his or her self as composed of four
parts, the physical self, the intellectual self, the spiritual self and the emotional self. The emotional
self can assume whatever age where the client or patient feels some block or experiences some
incident that remains unresolved. In a dream sequence that I began to act out, alternately taking
the role of a stern mother and a vulnerable child, with Naranjo’s coaching, I experienced myself at
war with myself, perpetuating in a kind of stalemate, hiding from my sexual feelings and
repressing them fearing my mother’s disapproval. Anger and frustration surfaced, and the solution
that I had crafted, the choice of the celibate religious life, began to look like just that, a solution I
had crafted and not the vocation that I was trying to follow. As a follow up, it was suggested that I
try to craft another kind of truce between the emotional child and the intellectual self,
represented in the session as my disapproving mother. I was among the first of several people
who used the persona of the child and intellect on the hot seat. Very soon Hoffman introduced an
exercise where the emotional child and the adult intellect alternately expressed anger and
frustration, eventually arriving at a kind of truce. This became know as the Child/Intellect Bitch
Session and continues to exist in a different form in the HQP today.
In the middle of January, Hoffman and Naranjo decided to end their group experiment with SAT.
Hoffman told us that he would take us to a place where we could stop the defense of father and
that he would conduct his own 13-week group process in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.
(I later learned that he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer and was going to retire to Mexico
to either heal or die; that he had made the decision to entrust his group process to Pecci; and that
the training in Tolman Hall was to introduce a pool of people to the group process who might be
trained as therapists, or ‘teachers’ as we were called.)
The hallmark of the 13-week process was the order and the pace. The specific assignments for
each week were due three days after the session; Hoffman reviewed them and his taped
comments were back in your hands at the beginning of the next session. In every session Hoffman
lectured, shouted, cajoled, confronted, intimidated, humiliated, bullied, abused us. He called us
ass holes and negative love buyers. This behavior perhaps forced some people to examine
themselves, but it far exceeded professional boundaries appropriate for therapist/teacher,
student/patient relationship. Hoffman justified his behavior by claiming that his basic message was
so simple that it was hard to grasp without his unyielding confrontation: human beings deserved a
satisfying emotional life but were prevented from achieving that goal by their parenting, the
adoption of the negative traits of their parents.
He conducted other portions of his course through “mind trips” and I will mention two of them,
the parents’ funeral and the birthday party, because together with the other exercises already
mentioned, these fill out nearly every essential element (except “Vindictiveness,” “Play Day,” and
“Dark Side”) of present HQP. After the prosecution and defense of both parents, we were asked to
close our eyes and imagine that we were awakened in the dead of night by a phone call: our
parents had been involved in a car crash and were near death. We were asked to follow the course
of events from the emergency room to the graveside. Bob told me that this “came through” as he
was speaking. Furthermore he said that if we experienced a full range of emotion, we could
actually set aside our anger towards our parents and begin to experience unconditional love for
them. There was another mind trip when we were asked to visualize the birthday party that we
never had, where we were celebrated and feted for who we were and not who we had to pretend
to be in order to experience our parents’ love. During the whole time I practiced the 13-week
FHPT, I know that Hoffman struggled with achieving the high level of emotional experience he
considered necessary to produce the emotional freedom he saw as the goal. Both remain today in
the HQP as elaborately produced events, with music, props, food. When combined with suggested
visual images, they can and do induce the powerful emotional states Hoffman sought. I suggest
that Naranjo’s early introduction of experiential exercises into Hoffman’s basic framework made it
possible for Hoffman to create the controlled emotional rollercoaster of the current HQP.

Conclusion
As the history of the process is being revised and cleaned up as a product of the human potential
movement, I have tried to leave a footnote about the people who helped Hoffman in order that
their important contributions are not neglected, attributed to others, or lost regardless of
copyright.
I had also hoped to shed light on how an “inspired insight” makes itself known in the world,
examining how a core insight into human nature could become a coherent, repeatable experience
that would provide people an access to their own emotional life and deepen their awareness of
their own spiritual lives. Frankly I do not know if any process is able to deliver this result in a
sustainable way, but there is always the possibility that even a split second experience of
unconditional love might be enough to alter centuries of abuse.
However, I am certain that I demonstrated that the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy and the
subsequent Hoffman Quadrinity Process came into existence through the combined efforts of Bob
Hoffman and Claudio Naranjo, that it required both men to bring it to life, that the HQP would not
exist at all without the generous contribution of Claudio Naranjo. Hoffman borrowed widely and
used anything that he thought might be useful. He relied on Naranjo more than anyone, but also
others like Pecci, to fill out his vision and give it legitimacy.
Claudio Naranjo was constant in his friendship and support. I saw Naranjo demonstrate respect
and love for Bob Hoffman from the time he provided him with a group that he could use to create
the FHPT to his last meetings with Hoffman while he was dying from liver cancer in his Oakland
home. Naranjo thought of Hoffman as a modern day shaman, a man who received an inspiration,
an insight that broke into his life unexpectedly and that he wrestled with for the rest of his life. On
the other hand, their relationship was not easy—Hoffman, untrained and impetuous, a tradesman
by nature and choice, Naranjo, skilled and intellectual, a thorough professional—they were an
ontological odd couple.
And finally, a personal evaluation, one that was also hard won.
In the last analysis, it is not difficult to create the circumstances for unique experiences that are
extraordinary or yield real insights.
Teachers, real ones and charlatans, have been doing this for ages. Their bag of tricks include
meditation and self-analysis, as well as trance and hypnotism, auto suggestion, even bullying as a
way of barging through defense mechanisms. Despite his claims to the contrary, Hoffman made
ample use of the more nasty tricks with complete impunity, always taking the higher ground. (He
was, for example, never angry with anyone, but ‘righteously indignant.”) But when it comes to
actually seeing if his results were lasting, the evidence is scarce or relies very heavily on anecdotal
evidence. Many people say that the experience was powerful, but if they made real changes in
their lives, if they were happier and not living under another despotism, however benevolent, the
majority of those I interviewed had found a sustainable spiritual practice and devoted themselves
to it.
In my own experience of directing people in the Process, I cut as much as I could of the trappings
of the spiritualist church. I found them fraudulent, or at best embarrassing and useless. I dropped
Hoffman’s inflated claims that the Process was all the therapy that anyone needed, that it was
Freud’s missing link. I introduced conversations that allowed clients to explore how their early
emotional programming influences their lives here and now. But listening deeply to 40 individuals
a year began to take too much of a personal toll for a meager income, and I stopped offering the
Process when Hoffman threatened a lawsuit. I certainly had no stomach and no money to face off
in court over his intellectual property.
I have not kept in touch with people that I worked with. But one person, a very articulate and
bright African-American, and his Process were memorable. Early on in the prosecution of Father,
the name Jim Jones kept coming up in our sessions—my client said that Jones was a remarkable
psychic, a healer, a prophet, a seer. I had never heard of Jones and though the People’s Temple
was only a few blocks from where I lived in San Francisco, I felt no desire to “check him out.” I just
kept encouraging my client to examine any transference he might have to Jones. After a few more
weeks and the “prosecution of father,” I noticed that Jones’s name was not coming up. I asked
how he was feeling towards Jones. He replied that Jones was just another fraud preying on the
black community. He left the Peoples’ Temple before the exodus to Guyana and escaped the
horrific aftermath.
Just that result is enough for me.