Richard Lloyd Jones: The Australian government says that all of us will be affected by it at some time in our lives. By 2020, it's estimated it'll be the second largest killer after heart disease. Ominously, preschoolers are the fastest growing market for medication to treat it. Cases are rising fast, and we're pretty much baffled about how to treat it. Until now. Today, on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, in the aftermath of Virginia Tech, let's take another look at depression.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. First, some housekeeping. I'd like to let you know I still have copies of Dr. Norberto Keppe's book, Liberation of the People, the Pathology of Power, to give away. If you've been listening regularly to this podcast, you'll know that this program is totally based on this Austrian-Brazilian psychoanalyst's extraordinary work. If you're tuning in for the first time, you're in for a treat.
Keppe has developed a perspective of the human psyche and the society that's been created from it that can allow us to understand what's gone so wrong in all areas of human function, from education to health to science to politics. It's a phenomenal and essential body of work for us to study and implement. And his book, Liberation of the People, is an excellent start in understanding his expansive vision.
Just email me at rich at richjonesvoice.com if you'd like a copy, and I'll make sure you get one. Now, depression. Anyone who's suffered its debilitating effects knows how paralyzing it can be. It makes everything more difficult, work, relationships, creativity. At its worst, it can even make getting up in the morning or going to the corner store to buy some milk seemingly impossible.
Let's understand it better.
Dr. Cláudia Pacheco wrote an extraordinary book in the early 1980s that was a pioneering look at exploring the link between our psyches and our health. She's a frequent contributor to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head because she's been working closely at Keppe's side for well over 20 years. Cláudia, where should we start in trying to understand depression better?
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Maybe, Richard, I should give even some concepts, like what our school of psychoanalysis, which is integral psychoanalysis, that Dr.
Keppe founded. And according to his writings, there is a difference between the neurotic fantasy, as he calls fantasy, and between imagination in a true and real and healthy way. So we can daydream about something real and we could and we do daydream about fantastic things in terms of neurotic things. Keppe considers the true reality as beauty, truth and goodness.
So everything that was created or is in nature or by itself, that has an essence, is by itself originally good, beautiful and truthful. It can be and it is distorted by human pathology or sociopathology.
Richard: In my work with Keppe here at his institute in Brazil, it's obvious that his intent has never been to create a new science from nothing, but to correct the erroneous aspects of the body of wisdom already accumulated to this day, while retaining and unifying the correct elements and adding what was necessary from his clinical studies in human psychopathology.
Keppe talks about this a lot in his book called Sociopathology, which he wrote while he was in France. He says here, quote, "The artistic world is the reality, which society does not understand properly because of its fantasy. Only the aesthetic is capable of putting the human being in touch with reality."
When we're at the theater or the opera and we like the show, we're transported to the world which should be in reality, escaping a little from all the fantasy in which we're forced to live. End of quote. This is very strong and very powerful, I think, Cláudia. Would you take a moment for us to describe the relevance of this view of reality and fantasy in a more practical way.
Cláudia: Like, for instance, a true and real economy does not exist yet. What we see going on in the world is what Keppe would call a pseudo-economy based on fantastic ideas. Fantastic in terms of being a fantasy that are based on unreal principles like you make money from money and not that richness come from work, good, beautiful, necessary, useful work.
Richard: And Keppe talks a lot about the idea of speculation being a complete fantasy.
Cláudia: Complete fantasy.
And for millions of people, this is the only true reality of their lives.
Richard: But according to his concept, scientific
Cláudia: concepts, we are inverted. And the true life, the true reality is not what we think. The true reality would be much closer what Walt Disney imagined or he tried to put in practice. A world of beauty, of love, of romance, like those movies, those old movies of Hollywood.
Presently, people might say, oh, they were too fantasy. Idealistic. Idealistic, outside of reality. This is an unexistent world. Keppe would say this is the true world that should exist. And if it's not like this, it's because of human psychopathology. So when we discover our psychopathology better, and when we start stopping destroying beauty, goodness, and truth, the world would become much more connected to this concept of arts, aesthetics.
So we
Richard: were closer to this reality you're talking about 50, 60 years ago than we are today. Yes. And so we're very alienated from this reality. How do we do that?
Cláudia: And you know what happens, Richard? The more we get disconnected from this true reality, the more depressed we become. We feel like life has no reason. We have this feeling sad for no reason, having no motivation to do anything.
So we feel tired, sad, irritable, lazy, unmotivated, and apathetic. Because the life, the way we have to live, has nothing to do with the true essence of life that we were created for.
Richard: And this makes us depressed.
Cláudia: It makes us depressed. And so this philosophy of life of consumerism giving much more value to sensorial and material things what you have and not what you are what you do what you live for your ideals this causes enormous depression you know something jones you you may be confronted by even by a war and have no clinical depression if you have a reason to fight for, if you have an ideal to fight for.
Richard: Viktor Frankl talked about that, didn't he?
Cláudia: He did. He was in concentration camp and he wrote a book about the meaning of life that sometimes even suffering has a meaning. So it's a matter of having a truth and beautiful meaning to live for. And this is engraved in our inner essence, in our lives, in our genes. We have this engraved in us.
So if we have an empty superficial materialistic life, we must be depressed. So this is not even a disease. Please, this is a defense of our organism, psychophysical organism, that it's like a cry. You are living a wrong way of life.
Richard: I absolutely love this aspect of Keppe's work and its scientific solidity in showing us the essence of human existence and that this is something incredible.
It's not based on random evolution from the mud, but on something magnificent and glorious.
And that that is inside us. So depression, as Cláudia described, comes from denying that reality. What are the consequences of this, Cláudia?
Cláudia: So more and more people try to cover up depression. Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, Internet, video games, and more and more, pharmaceutical companies, they make huge profits. Out of our depression. So a crazy inverted society, people get depressed and then they say people are getting depressed.
They have this clinical bipolar manifestation. So you have even to prevent it, taking pills, taking psychotropic medication. And this causes even worse and worse situation and results. When you take this antidepressant, it cuts off even more your connection to your inner life. So consciousness. And your sense of ethics and balance and morals fades away. So you do things coming from your unconscious life that you would never do if you were sober.
So sometimes feeling sad is very important. It's necessary. It's healthy. Feeling guilty is important. If we do something to destroy our lives or the lives of other people, if we destroy a friendship, if I destroy nature, if I destroy my chances or something good that I received, that I got from my parents, from my teachers, from anyone. If I destroy that, if I attack, if I'm aggressive, I must feel guilty because it's a destruction of a richness in my life.
So I must feel guilt. Yeah,
Richard: you know, when I first came to Brazil, I was very struck by this idea of
Cláudia: guilt feelings because, you know, in our North American culture, we're
Richard: encouraged not to feel guilt. You should don't feel guilt. You need to forgive yourself for everything. But this idea of guilt feelings comes from Keppe's wonderful work, the fact that we have a natural essence that's good, true, and beautiful.
And so when we go against that, we're going to feel guilty because we've gone against something that we are. And that really struck me when I came here, Cláudia.
Cláudia: And you know, Jones, that the feelings of guilt are one of these symptoms that they call clinical depression. So they used to ask people, do you feel guilty or do you have strong feelings of guilt, intense feelings of guilt, nervousness, helplessness, hopelessness, worthlessness, anxiety?
These are all symptoms that, like fever in the body, are showing that something is going wrong in the way you are living your life, in your attitudes, in your values, in the way you are using the life you got. In fever, you know, Johns, if you cover up fever without knowing the cause and treating the cause, you can die. So this is the same thing.
If you cover up these feelings with antidepressant pills, you can commit suicide very easily.
Like in a sudden, in a moment, you can commit suicide. Or you can do what this guy did, killing a lot of people and then committing suicide.
Richard: And people say I don't know where it came from, he seemed like such a nice guy. Well I don't know about this Korean guy, but the uh normally this happens. People say I don't know where it came from, he seemed like such a normal nice person.
Because we're covering up these feelings, right.
Cláudia: And they say that nowadays this kind of symptoms can appear in lower age, lower and lower ages. Why? Because children are led to live lives disconnected from their inner essence. So they are led to stay in front of the computer hours and hours, having their brains destroyed by the computer. And they don't have anything to do, they don't have any connections with the true values and the true.
They don't go anymore to theaters, to this incredible and valuable heritage of culture that was left behind. These incredible authors, even like Shakespeare, as you mentioned, Le Miserable from this French author, Victor Hugo, and Tolstoy, and all these geniuses of literature, they were left behind. And this is the expression of this inner contact with our inner life, which is very important. And our inner life is plenty of positive and sometimes feelings of sadness, of guilt, that are necessary and healthy to be felt.
Richard: Keppe's contention is that we have not entered a truly psychological phase yet. Everything that happens to us is interpreted from a social point of view. Out of our wish to see the cause of all our difficulties in factors unrelated to psychological life, to our interior states. We deny contact with what's going on, and this strong censorship causes us to project the source of our problems outside, into society or bacteria or to physical imbalance divorced from our psyche.
Describe this difference between the current state of psychology and how Keppe sees it, Cláudia.
Cláudia: So, in terms of psychopathology, Jones, the tendency of the schools of psychotherapy and psychiatry, they see all the causes, the etiology of pathology, of the symptoms, coming from cultural, social, biological sources. Now, Keppe created a psychoanalysis that is the first one to see and to analyze and to treat psychologically, looking inside our inner life, the causes of our psychological problems.
So if we are going to treat depression as a biological disease, we are doing a biological therapy, not a psychotherapy. It would be the same thing as if you have an eczema or infection, if you would like to consider the physiological aspect of it and just see it as a philosophical problem, for instance. You understand?
So it's the first focus given to the psychological inner life of the individual in psychoanalysis. Even Freud, when he considered the unconscious life, he saw it as a source of the energy of the cells and instincts coming from nature. He never considered neurosis linked to metaphysical aspects, things like free choice, good and evil, hate and love. So doing these choices is the expression of our freedom.
But on the other hand, it's also the possibility of being sick, neurotic and psychotic and a psychopath. Because if we choose evil and if we don't want to see it, we have to pay the consequences. One
Richard: thing that helps me to understand this, when I think of the difference between Freud and Keppe, Freud believed that we had this unconscious that was a natural instance in the human being.
And that it was composed of bad intentions, indecent
Cláudia: desires.
Yeah, more sexual related.
Richard: Indecent desires, right, and animal instincts. Yeah. And that our neurosis comes from the fact that we want to act out on those things, because that's our nature, but society, the great censoring device, doesn't permit us to. So our little ego is in between this unconscious id and the superego, constantly being restricted and stressed, and we don't know what to do.
I love Keppe's idea here that we have back of all of this. We have an essence that's pure, beautiful, good, truthful, as you've talked about many times in this podcast, that it's something given to us by God that's pure and perfect and beautiful. Our neurosis then doesn't come from an unconsciousness that we have from God, but from an inverted will that we want to destroy.
And our neurosis comes from going against the essence of what we are through our inverted will.
Cláudia: "Yeah, but this inverted will is not really conscious to us. And you don't necessarily need to be a theist in order to understand Keppe's ideas. Many atheists understand and do analysis with him because considering even the philosophical aspect or scientific aspect of it, If you analyze our genes and the functioning of a cell, you will see that all the instincts are for life, not for death.
So, our genetic structure is all to preserve and to adapt to life and to the environment. There are flaws in this psychogenetic structure. But they are flaws. They are like some garbages that were artificially added to this structure. Our pathology, as Keppe considers, is an artificial thing in our structure. It's not natural. That's why we don't feel comfortable with it.
Richard: Like when we feel sick, Cláudia, we say something's wrong."
"It's not right. We don't say, oh, today I'm sick. That's normal. Yesterday I wasn't. Tomorrow I won't be. But it's back to feeling like crap on Thursday. We don't have this kind of dialectical question. When we feel sick, we feel wrong. Something's bad. Something's not correct." This is a philosophical base that runs all through this podcast and Norberto Keppe's work. Talk a little bit more about how you see this, Cláudia.
Cláudia: The other day a person was discussing with me this thing of truth is relative. What is truth? And then I asked him, but do you feel pleased when people lie to you? And he said oh no. So you, you distinguish when people are deceiving you. Of course, of course. So you know what truth is. It's the same in every, in any area.
You feel much more comfortable if you are feeling love, if you are loved, if you have a good self-esteem, a high self-esteem, and if you don't destroy and reject yourself.
You know that pain, for instance, is not natural. Otherwise, you would feel very comfortable with pain. And neuroses and psychoses and even hate, anger, they are similar. They are an artificial thing in our personality that makes us feel painful inside, like depression. It's an inner pain which is not natural. And we must see what is going wrong that my nature is giving me a sign, uh-oh, you are doing something wrong against your life.
Pay attention. And
Richard: what are we doing against our lives when we feel this depression, this anxiety, this desire not to live? What's going on there? What is happening with us?
Cláudia: Jones, Keppe always speaks that man is what he does. We are pure action in our essence. So if we are not living a healthy, useful life, doing something for my good and the good of my fellow man, for society, like inventing important instruments to improve our lives, to heal people's diseases and suffering, to make society richer and more progress, and to improve the quality of life and the beauty of our inner and outer life and society.
If we are not living to ideals in a high vibrational level, we feel depressed. And most of us live a totally meaningless life, like jobs that you have to be there from 5 to 9. 9 to 5. 9 to 5. Like working to make other people richer and richer and fewer and fewer people richer and more and more people starving and dying and poorer.
So just living in a society that is so unjust, so unfair, so alienated, so aggressive, you turn on the radio or the TV, you just see violence, violence and more violence. What is the worth of living like this? So I helped to found an association, STOP the Destruction of the World, to see if we can do something, because if things continue the way they are, there is nothing to be done, and there is no worth to continue a society in the direction the society is heading.
Richard: Yeah, we need a big change in a big hurry, actually.
Cláudia: Yeah, and not only to go back to these inverted values, but to change all the values, to disinvert them.
Richard: And, Cláudia, inversion is something we need to understand better, and I will be developing a podcast on that elemental concept soon, so you listening, please stay tuned. Let's circle back to depression for a moment, Cláudia, towards the end of our podcast. Can you give us an example of how you see and treat depression in your Integral Psychoanalysis Clinic here in Brazil?
Cláudia: "I have a clinical example of a patient that came to do analysis because of her depression. And in her sessions of analysis, she said she was tired of only helping other people and not helping herself. That she was always benefiting people. Her life was all to benefit other people. And that in order to be good and to love other people, she should love herself first and do her needs first."
Richard: This is a very common philosophy.
Cláudia: Very common idea. So as long as she was producing for other people, even though she was angry at this possibility because she was very egotistic, she kept some balance and she was able not to fall into a deep depressive state. She was sort of stressed, etc. But then she retired and she decided to live her life for herself and to love herself.
And then what happened is that she got into a deep, profound depression, clinical depression. And she was under severe psychiatric treatment and total isolation. So she was not unhappy before or stressed because she forgot herself in other people's favor. But on the opposite, the only way for her to be fully happy was to continue to keep living a life for the good of others and herself, but being conscious of her egotism.
Because then, if she would become more conscious of this egocentric attitude, she would be able to heal her depression.
And that's what happened when she came to do analysis. She was able to get rid of all the drugs she had and started a new kind of activity.
Richard: Very important to stress that this psychoanalysis in Keppe's clinic that you are one of the lead analysts in is very much based on dialogue with the essence of the person, to help the person see how they're deviating, destroying, staying away from the truth of themselves.
Cláudia: And you know, Richard, this is common to all peoples. This is a universal problem. Depression has the same causes in any country because we see or we attend patients from other countries too. Even some of them call by telephone and they do analysis by telephone with our analysts. And we can up to now see that people suffer here essentially the same kind of problem that other people suffer from other countries.
Richard: So formula for getting better, moving out of depression, moving out of this disanimated state of life, formula would be to give for others, to lead a meaningful life.
Cláudia: And to become conscious of one's negativity, of one's egotism, self-centeredness, of our envy, of our desire to destroy the goodness of other people in our lives, which is envy, in Capri's terms, our laziness. So this inverted thought that doing for others is not beneficial for myself.
So all these inversions must be conscientized and accepted with tolerance. We must be tolerant. We do a lot of mistakes. Some people get depressed only because they do mistakes and they don't want to see them.
Richard: It's very common, actually.
Cláudia: Very common.
Richard: The depression, the anxiety is so high from not wanting to just see mistakes that people just are totally paralyzed in their lives.
Cláudia: And I understand, Jones, that your podcasts are very therapeutic. People who listen to them regularly, they do therapy once a week, at least once a week. They can have new sessions once a week because all these concepts that you are broadcasting, they are very therapeutic. If people understand, if they take in, if they are humble enough to think about it, so they can improve.
They can even heal diseases just listening to your podcast.
Richard: Well, I certainly hope it is that kind of experience for you. For sure, it's a great pleasure to do this podcast every week because it gives us all a chance to find out how much we are really Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
