Meeting Bob Hoffman for the first time
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.
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.
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 avantgarde 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.
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.
___________________
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 avantgarde 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.
Comments
Post a Comment