Lola Hoffmann
Encyclopedia
Lola Hoffmann (born in Riga
Riga
Riga is the capital and largest city of Latvia. With 702,891 inhabitants Riga is the largest city of the Baltic states, one of the largest cities in Northern Europe and home to more than one third of Latvia's population. The city is an important seaport and a major industrial, commercial,...

, Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...

 on March 19, 1904; died in Santiago
Santiago, Chile
Santiago , also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile, and the center of its largest conurbation . It is located in the country's central valley, at an elevation of above mean sea level...

, Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...

 on April 30, 1988) was a physiologist, psychiatrist
Psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...

 and guide to self development and transformation.

First years

Lola (Helena) was born into a well-to-do, German-speaking family of Jewish origin, which professed the Lutheran religion. The family environment, which was warm and intellectual, had a strong influence on her personal development. When she was 15, her family moved to Freiburg, in Breisgau (Germany) because her father, as a member of the movement led by Alexander Kerenski
Alexander Kerensky
Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky was a major political leader before and during the Russian Revolutions of 1917.Kerensky served as the second Prime Minister of the Russian Provisional Government until Vladimir Lenin was elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets following the October Revolution...

, was being persecuted by the Bolsheviks, who had occupied Latvia following the First World War
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

.

Freiburg, Germany

Lola enrolled in the School of Medicine of Freiburg and remained there when her family decided to return to Riga. Her life changed dramatically, she joined a group of Baltic students, made new friends and devoted herself to her studies. At this time Freiburg was bristling with intellectual activity. Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...

 and Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

 were among the philosophers at University of Freiburg
University of Freiburg
The University of Freiburg , sometimes referred to in English as the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, is a public research university located in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.The university was founded in 1457 by the Habsburg dynasty as the...

, as were Richard Wilhelm
Richard Wilhelm
Richard Wilhelm was a German sinologist, as well as theologian and missionary. He is best remembered for his translations of philosophical works from Chinese into German that in turn have been translated into other major languages of the world, including English...

 and Carl Gustav Jung
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...

. She went to their lectures without imagining that these same men would become so important in her life thirty years later.

Once she finished her thesis on the suprarenal glands of rats, she left Freiburg and moved to Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, where she became an assistant to Paul Trendelenburg, the main specialist in hormones. In Berlin she was exposed to the cultural upheaval of those years: she attended the premiere of The Rite of Spring
The Rite of Spring
The Rite of Spring, original French title Le sacre du printemps , is a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky; choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky; and concept, set design and costumes by Nicholas Roerich...

of Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....

, The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera is a musical by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, in collaboration with translator Elisabeth Hauptmann and set designer Caspar Neher. It was adapted from an 18th-century English ballad opera, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and offers a Marxist critique...

of Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...

, and was drawn to Dadaism, the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...

 movement and the painter Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...

.

While conducting research, she met a Chilean doctor, Franz Hoffmann, who was doing post-doctoral work there in Physiology. They worked together and fell in love. When it came time for Franz to return to Chile in 1931, they decided that she would accompany him.

In retrospect, this decision most likely saved her life and the lives of her immediate family—her parents and her brothers and sisters—who also came to Chile in 1934 with her. Had they remained in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, their fate might well have been one of detention and death in the Nazi concentration camps
Nazi concentration camps
Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps set up in Germany were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime...

.

Santiago, Chile

During her first year in Chile she dedicated herself to learning Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 and to immersing herself in Chilean culture
Culture of Chile
The culture of Chile is one of a relatively homogeneous society where historically its geographical isolation and remoteness has played a key role...

. She dedicated herself to becoming familiar with the geography and the people of Chile. Once she felt confident with the language, she set to work: first, at the Bacteriological Institute, and in 1938, as her husband's assistant at the newly founded Institute of Physiology of the University of Chile. They did research together, published papers together and traveled together. She worked in the Institute of Physiology from 1938 to 1951, but was never paid for her work. She explained that professors were not allowed to hire relatives, let alone wives, and in any case, it was quite strange to see a woman slicing up animals.

The Crisis

After more than 20 years of experimental work in physiology, at 46 years of age, Lola started losing enthusiasm for her work, eventually falling into depression. She relates that during this time she had a dream to which she gave great import and which little by little helped her to take account of her life and assess her needs.

In the dream she saw herself in the laboratory, cutting opening the sternum
Sternum
The sternum or breastbone is a long flat bony plate shaped like a capital "T" located anteriorly to the heart in the center of the thorax...

 of a dog
Dog
The domestic dog is a domesticated form of the gray wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The dog may have been the first animal to be domesticated, and has been the most widely kept working, hunting, and companion animal in...

; she opened the thorax
Thorax
The thorax is a division of an animal's body that lies between the head and the abdomen.-In tetrapods:...

 of the dog and observed the rhythmical beating of its heart and the inflating and deflating action of the lungs. Unexpectedly, from the interior of the dog the arms of a woman emerged, moving with desperation; then a head protruded and she could see the bloodstained face of her husband’s secretary, Margarita Engel. In her dream she thought she had killed Margarita, who was very dear friend of hers. She thought that she had become a murderer and she vowed not to kill any more animals.

Deeply depressed and having lost interest in everything, her husband proposed a trip to Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

. She accepted. While she was in Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

, Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

, waiting for the departure of the ship, she was drawn to a book, The Psychology of C. G. Jung, by Jolande Jacoby. The title evoked those incomprehensible lectures she had attended in Berlin, and she noticed the coincidence of the surname of the author, Jacoby, with her maiden name. She bought the book and read it during the ocean voyage. That reading proved key in giving her some clues about what was happening with her.

The Change

She interpreted her dream as an analogy of what she was doing with her life: the murder of Margarita Engel was really her own murder. "Engel" in German means "angel"; she was killing her angel. After arriving in Zurich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

, she contacted the author of the book, Yolanda Jacoby. Their talks, along with other experiences, led her to make a decision to abandon physiology and become a psychiatrist.

When she returned to Chile she threw herself into achieving her goal of becoming a psychiatrist. At first she worked alone, annotating and analyzing her dreams. Then she started working at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Chile, where she told the Director, Ignacio Matte Blanco
Ignacio Matte Blanco
Ignacio Matte Blanco was a Chilean psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who developed a rule-based structure for the unconscious which allows us to make sense of the non-logical aspects of thought...

, of her interest in finding links between psychiatry and physiology. In her explorative studies she started practising “autogenic training,” a method of self-hypnosis developed by the German neurologist, Johannes Heinrich Schultz
Johannes Heinrich Schultz
Johannes Heinrich Schultz was a German psychiatrist and an independent psychotherapist. Schultz became world famous for the development of a system of self-hypnosis called autogenic training.- Life :...

. This training consisted of a series of physiological exercises through which a person could achieve a state of consciousness similar to that obtained in exogenous hypnosis. Another neurologist that interested her was Ernst Kretschmer
Ernst Kretschmer
Ernst Kretschmer Prof. Dr. med. Dr. phil. h.c., was a German psychiatrist who researched the human constitution and established a typology...

. Like Schultz, he had rediscovered the value of attaining prehypnotic states for psychiatric therapy.

After 5 years working in the Psychiatric Clinic, she felt the need for more in-depth study. She applied for a fellowship in the Psychiatric Clinic of Tübingen
Tübingen
Tübingen is a traditional university town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, on a ridge between the Neckar and Ammer rivers.-Geography:...

, Germany, where Ernst Kretschmer was the director and where Eugene Bleuler
Eugen Bleuler
Paul Eugen Bleuler was a Swiss psychiatrist most notable for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness and for coining the term "schizophrenia."-Biography:...

, while living in Zurich, was one of the guiding forces. She remained in Tübingen for one year and then moved to Zurich for another year, where she attended the last conferences given by an elderly Jung. The ideas she picked up during these conferences would be key to her later work as a psychoterapist.

After returning to Chile in 1959, she returned to the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Chile, where she joined one of the first trials of group therapy and a controlled group experimentation with LSD and marijuana.

Personal relationships

Her new career necessarily meant that she spent more and more time away from her husband., widening her circle of friends and colleagues. The Chilean sculptor and poet, Totila Albert, helped Lola during her transition, as she made the dramatic break with her former scientific world of physiology and moved into the world of psychiatry. They became close friends and lovers for 17 years, until his death in 1967.

However, Lola did not break off her marriage. She still considered Franz to be her lifemate, but she had become convinced that exclusive pair relationships were a hypocritical custom imposed upon society. She thought that parallel relationships contributed to the proper growth of the couple.

She and Franz continued living together on the same family property on North Pedro de Valdivia Street, but with each one occupying their own house, while staying in constant communication and sharing many meals. Franz also began to explore new worlds—studying anthropology and taking up painting. He, too, had several relationships with other women, but he never really had a stable, long-lasting companion.

Lola advocated the dismantling of the patriarchal system that dominated society. She felt this was necessary to do in order for men and women to become fulfilled human beings. Totila Albert had influenced in this regard, and she felt indebted to him for this perspective on male-female relationships. She was convinced that the patriarchal system prevented free and fully rewarding relationships.

Totila Albert died in 1967 and a few months later her husband, Franz Hoffman, suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on the right side. Later he became totally paralyzed, and Lola took care of him for the rest of his life, until his death 13 years later in 1981.

Life goes on

At 60 years of age, Lola became increasingly involved in Eastern meditation techniques and philosophy. She began practicing Hatha yoga
Hatha yoga
Hatha yoga , also called hatha vidya , is a system of yoga introduced by Yogi Swatmarama, a Hindu sage of 15th century India, and compiler of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika....

, t'ai chi and psychodance. Although she had attended conferences given by Richard Wilhelm
Richard Wilhelm
Richard Wilhelm was a German sinologist, as well as theologian and missionary. He is best remembered for his translations of philosophical works from Chinese into German that in turn have been translated into other major languages of the world, including English...

 when she was 20 years old, she had not grasped the full significance of his work. But while studying the Jung's Synchronicity Principle, she became increasingly drawn to Wilhelm's ideas. She was enthralled by his German translation of the classic Chinese text, I Ching, the Book of Changes, and she decided to do a Spanish translation of the I Ching
I Ching
The I Ching or "Yì Jīng" , also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts...

. She spent several years on this project, finally finishing in 1971.

Over time she became a well-known and well-loved figure in Chile. Her reputation continued to grow until her death. More than just a therapist, she was considered a master of personal development and realization. She contributed to the formation of a generation of young psychiatrists, many of whom considered themselves her disciples. During the last 14 years of her life, she organized study and experimentation groups that worked with dreams, the I Ching, and symbols.

The Planetary Initiative

Although Lola believed in individual change, most of her life she avoided political action. However, she decided to join the Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose when it came to Chile in 1983. In fact, she was the main speaker at the first session held in Chile. During the final years of her life, she participated in several collective actions and she became a founding member of La Casa de la Paz in 1985.

Encounter with God

When she was 60 years old she began to suffer from glaucoma
Glaucoma
Glaucoma is an eye disorder in which the optic nerve suffers damage, permanently damaging vision in the affected eye and progressing to complete blindness if untreated. It is often, but not always, associated with increased pressure of the fluid in the eye...

. After many operations, her right eye had to be removed. Later glaucoma also developed in her healthy eye, and soon she was almost blind, although she continued to read by using a magnifying glass.

Her last four years were spent in Peñalolén
Peñalolén
Peñalolén is a Chilean commune in Santiago Province, Santiago Metropolitan Region. It was founded on November 15, 1984.-Demographics:...

, a suburb of Santiago, on land belonging to her daughter Adriana. There they build a near exact replica of her house, placing her books on the same shelves as before. All of her possessions—her photos, sculptures and artifacts—were located exactly as they had been in her old house.

Some five years before she died, in 1983, she became gravely ill. She did not recognize anyone; she was delirious; she fought with everyone; she thought she was living with her Russian parents in another time.

She tells the story that one night she was awoken by a hard blow to her body. The pain ran down her spinal column and she bent backwards in an arch. She felt an immense, warm caress massaging her entire body. She went back to sleep, but then experienced a second, even stronger, blow. She felt as if her heart had stopped, then she felt as if she was flying above the planet. She could see herself lying on a bed and she felt the presence of something at her side emanating an ever increasing, overwhelming love. She asked herself if this intense presence could be God. During the course of her life she had questioned the existence of God on many occasions. Suddenly she heard herself asking God, “Do you forgive me?” Then, from deep inside her, all the most important events of her life passed before her, as if they were pearls strung together side by side on a necklace. She understood the meaning of these events and how they had changed her life. She felt complete bliss. When this experience finished, she got up from her bed as if she had never been ill. She was “reborn”.

In her final years she frequently experienced of altered states of consciousness. The last months of her life she was very weak, but continued seeing her patients, students and friends, up until a week before she died. Upon getting up one night, she fell and broke her hip. A few days later, at 84 years of age, she died, leaving behind her many disciples.
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