Richard Lloyd Jones: Our program is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, your host on our journey into the extraordinary science elaborated by Brazilian-Austrian psychoanalyst and social scientist Norberto Keppe. This is a scientific orientation that holds many answers to our myriad problems on Earth today.
We strive every week to explain the human condition and the society we've created in ways that clarify and illuminate.
And we can do this because of the synthesizing work Norberto Keppe has done to complete the mapping of the human psyche begun at the end of the 19th century. And questions and comments are always welcomed, of course, at joneshealingatgmail.com. Love you to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, too.
One of the situations we consider a lot is how inverted our society has become from its true values.
And we'd like to look at that today. Specifically at how an inverted society really messes with our heads. Depression and society, today, on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Oh, it can be so easy to get depressed today. Good heavens, war, teetering on the brink of ecological disaster, an economy that's elevated like, what, six people into control of the world's wealth? Even a Columbine-like shooting at a school in Brazil, a first down here.
Hard to think of all this as evolutionary progress. We're all reeling, or we should be if we have any ethical structure remaining in us. The leading-edge psychology emerging from the International Society of Analytical Trilogy goes much deeper and further into understanding this than anything else around today. And I'd like to focus that big time, that big Analytical Trilogy lens on depression in our society today.
Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco joins me for an extensive and expansive look at many aspects of depression in our society. Cláudia, I had a lot of very powerful experiences when I first started studying Norberto Keppe's work and embarking on the process of my own psychoanalysis. One of them was to begin to see how prominent was the process of inversion in my and everyone else's life, how we gave values to all sorts of secondary things and almost no value to the essential things of life.
In that light, one day you said to me and some others about how important anxiety and depression and those so-called negative feelings were. Well, let's launch off from that today. How can those things be helpful?
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: 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 richness in my life. So I must feel guilt.
Richard: Yeah. You know, when I first came to Brazil, I was very struck by this idea of guilt feelings because, you know,
Cláudia: 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.
And 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, killing a lot of people and then committing suicide. And
Richard: people say, I don't know where it came from.
You seem 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 feelings. 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, Les Miserables 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. 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: Yeah, this is kind of like a metaphysical basis of your work in Analytical Trilogy, Cláudia. What is the essence of man? And we have to have that as a starting point, don't we? So how to help listeners understand where Analytical Trilogy is coming from here?
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, no, no. So you distinguish when people are deceiving you. Of course, of course. So you know what truth is. It's the same 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.
Richard: And 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 five to nine. Nine to five. Nine to five. Like working to make other people richer and richer and the fewer and fewer people richer and more and more people starving and dying and poor.
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. Yeah,
Richard: that really strikes at the heart of what our work is all about, doesn't it? Cláudia, let's circle back a little bit more specifically to depression here for a moment. How does treatment of depression differ at the International Society of Analytical Trilogy?
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 very common. Very
Cláudia: 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. Very important to
Richard: stress that this psychoanalysis in Keppe's clinic, 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
Cláudia: themselves.
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 um disanimated state of life formula would be to give for others to lead a Meaningful life. And
Cláudia: 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.
Richard: There's more therapy to come. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Positive World Radio Network. We're back in a moment.
The program is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Positive World Radio Network. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Now once again our website is healing through consciousness.com. In fact you're going to find a lot of discussion, a lot of articles, videos, audio about this various, these various themes that we're discussing here in our program, specifically today on depression, our social health, the pathology of power, how our economic inverted economic system is creating so many of our problems as we've been talking about in our first block.
Our email, you're always welcome to email us, joneshealing at gmail.com. Around the world, we're seeing this problem with society. People are desperate, people don't understand, and they don't know how to analyze it. They don't know what's going on. Statistics I have from 2009, Cláudia, says 18.8 million American adults in the United States, 10% of the population are suffering from a depressive disorder, twice as many women as men too.
And our society is not helping us to feel any less depressed. So what is going on here? Let's look at this scientifically. Help us to understand this better if you could.
Cláudia: What's going on? So depression is a phenomenon that is present in humanity since we have heard about any society or any human being living in the planet. In the first times where Greeks treated mental and emotional pathologies as they call pathos, which are passions or emotions.
In Greek, the translation is pathos.
Richard: Pathos, I guess we would say in English. Yes,
Cláudia: pathos, yes. So we know that this is a problem in humanity since we are here in this earth. Eventually they started to try to see the deeper causes or the roots of the problem of depression, and in the late 19th century or in the middle of 19th century, in the late 18th century, scientists started to understand that there were mental, emotional, psychological disorders that should be seen and studied as an object of science, something that was only foreseen or approached by theology and philosophy.
Richard: As hysterical problems or something like this, right? They
Cláudia: were taken as problems seen in philosophy as the meaning of life and what are like rational discussions and theoretical discussions about the presence of human beings in this planet. Mostly the existentialists, the existential philosophers, they treated this emptiness, this feeling of emptiness in life and anguish and anxiety and the lack of meaning. Why are we here?
What we are here for? What is the meaning of life? So all these discussions come from the early ages and all of them naturally oriented by philosophy and theology. Only in the 19th century the psychiatrists started to study the mental disorders, so they started to classify them not anymore as possessions or only like demonological
Richard: demons, right? Possession by some force
Cláudia: spiritual problems But they started to see this.
This was Charcot, for instance, in France, and some Germans like Kraepelin, Kretschmer, Breuer, and others. And so they started to, especially the German psychiatrists in the late 19th century, They started to see the syndrome of depression as a mental disorder, a mental sickness. Emotional sickness.
Richard: Not as a philosophical, existential
Cláudia: thing. Not only, but also something like a disease, an illness. As paranoia, as schizophrenia, paraphernia, and other diseases or mental illnesses.
Kretschmer, for instance, he studied some tendencies, some constitutional tendencies of human beings, individuals. He spoke about the schizoid type, constitutional type. He spoke about the cycloid type, constitutional type. The schizoid, if the schizoid type would develop a psychosis, he would become a schizophrenic. A cycloid type, which would be more a social person, generally called picnic type, generally fat and not that much tall, very sociable, but superficial.
This kind of cycloid or picnic type if he would develop a kind of more serious illness he would become a maniac depressive psychotic person. The athletic constitutional type the third type the third type would become if he would become psychotic he would tend to be epileptic and the schizoid generally thin and tall and isolated, dreamer, very intellectual, then would become the schizoparanoid or schizophrenic.
Richard: So you're talking about three types now, Cláudia, just to clarify for people who aren't familiar with this terminology. The schizoid type, if they have a crisis, a psychological crisis, they can tend to become schizophrenic. Or schizoparanoid. Or schizoparanoid. Okay, that's important to know. The cycloid, more manic depressive. We're talking about the extremes of their pathology now. The athletic type, more epileptic, if you
Cláudia: have.
Okay. This is a Kretschmer's classification, and it's very interesting because he considered this as constitutional types. Now, presently, we understand that if you have a tendency to isolate yourself, then you will develop a body, a format, a constitutional format, according to your psychological tendencies and not the other way around. So the body comes as a consequence, the format of the body. Like the picnic and fat, a little more fat kind of cycloid kind would develop like this format of body with a generally...
Richard: A bit of a pot belly.
Cláudia: Yeah, and talkative and social. So he will develop this kind of personality, sociable and sometimes superficial, talkative person would become, have the tendency to be fatter and more, yeah, the
Richard: body will follow.
Cláudia: And the same thing as athletic type.
Richard: Here again, we see Dr. Kempi's disinversion. Yeah. We have
Cláudia: the idea that the body creates the personality and not the personality creates the body.
Exactly that. Then a very, very serious scientist, a lady called Melanie Klein, she also bent herself to study, towards the study of these positions, like the schizoparanoid position and the maniac depressive position as some of the natural constitutional phases of development of a child, an individual. She saw that from birth to two years, more or less, or mostly in the six first months, the child would have a very schizoparanoid position.
Later, the child would have this maniac depressive position. And if she would not be able to overcome these inner conflicts that are natural in the early ages, then neurosis and psychosis would install themselves in the person. Like it's like being held or stuck in one of those two phases, the schizoparanoid and the maniac depressive.
Richard: Do we need to define these types, Cláudia?
Would that be helpful at all? Schizoid, cycloid, athletic?
Cláudia: Well, in general terms, the schizoparanoid, they tend to be the beta type, like aggressive controllers, controlling people, aggressive, sadistic, and they tend to be projective
Richard: and
Cláudia: externalize their emotions, blaming other people for their problems. Now the depressive
position is the opposite. When the person tends to see many guilts in themselves, but not only that, but they have the aggression oriented toward themselves or their lives, so a more masochistic kind of position.
So if they are angry against someone,
Cláudia: instead of hitting or screaming or yelling or accusing externally, verbally, that person, they tend to produce or to create a depression. They become sad, they become revolted, but they swallow all these emotions and they tend to become sicknesses and to turn against oneself. So this would be the second position. Would that be a
Richard: little bit passive-aggressive at times too?
Sometimes. They take
Cláudia: attacks but in a passive way, right? Yes. And the athletic? Well, Melanie Klein didn't speak about athletics. She spoke about more mature kind of situation that possibly the child that would be emotionally well resolved, if we can say this in English, so they would adopt then a more balanced and sociable kind of constructive kind of personality. Then we see the work of the psychiatrists, the modern psychiatrists that tend to see depression as a chemical imbalance only in the brain, like a lacking of serotonin, mostly.
So they medicate the depressive people with antidepressive medicines, only that. But Keppe has another version and another vision. He has a more integral vision. He sees depression as a result of an emotional attitude of denial, denial of life, denial of one's essence, denial of consciousness. Speaking in short, like in very practical words, if you see that your ideas, your fantasies about the world, about other people, about yourself, do not correspond to reality, you may have two kind of reactions.
One would be to attack this consciousness, to hate this consciousness, to become aggressive, to blame other people. And so this schizoparanoid behavior, aggressive behavior, is very common and very sadistic, very common nowadays too. But there is another form of reacting, which is becoming depressed. So if you do not agree, if you see your wishes or your intentions not being fulfilled, or if you have to see your pathologies, your problems, your errors, your lack of capacities or your limits, your mistakes, so if you are not the ruler, the controller or the god of your own life, you may become depressed against to depress the consciousness of what you do not accept.
So depression is a reactive attitude against consciousness. Okay,
Richard: let's come back and talk about that in a minute. We'll continue with our program, Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Positive World Radio Network. We're talking about depression and all of its manifestations, especially through the eyes of Norberto Keppe's Analytical Trilogy, which will give us a totally different scientific view of this very common malady that's affecting us today.
Back in just a moment, don't go away. It's Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, of course, on the Positive World Radio Network. Doing something I think that really will will touch a lot of people Cláudia because you're talking about those two Two reactions to reality, to seeing something. One being the tendency to attack. This would be like if somebody brings a problem to me, I will tend to want to blame that person or blame some external situation for the reason that I have that problem.
A person who's more in the the manic depressive phase would tend to uh attack, get depressed as you said, get depressed, get down, think i can't do it, i'll never be any good. These are very oversimplified ways of seeing it. How can you help us deepen in that understanding? Because this is a like a fundamental aspect to
Cláudia: know. So as i said, these are two positions or two possibilities of reacting against consciousness.
So in both positions, the person has a very deep arrogance or a deep narcissistic, we could name it even theomaniac, because we see that we are not that perfect, that God-like people that can be whatever we want to be, we wish to be, and not always life is in accordance to what we plan. And then we can react, as I said, in just two positions.
The healthier attitude would be a more humble and admitting our limits, admitting we are human beings, admitting to deal with our mistakes, and then feeling relaxed, feeling like, okay so accepting the consciousness of one's limits. And this can preserve a degree of happiness and well-being in life that is necessary to produce serotonin, which is also as we we said before our body follows the mind, our body follows the emotions and are the other way around.
So our brain follows our ideas and emotions. And in order to have a healthy, balanced, chemical brain or chemical neurotransmissors, we need to have balanced ideas and balanced feelings. It's a consequence. Now, we should also consider the social and environmental situation that can bring depression to us. And here Keppe brings the sociopathology and the sociotherapy to the scene. Not only we individuals want to be powerful and want to be godlike and we are arrogant and do not accept who we are and just human beings, but also the people in power created a total crazy unbalanced society where only those values can dominate society.
A very materialistic oriented society. Very materialistic, very arrogant society which creates an anti-human environment, anti-human energetic fields. So everything that you see around you is not suitable to our human nature because we are mostly psychological beings. We are mostly angelical beings, if you can name it like this. We are mostly vibrational beings and not physical beings. Our physical manifestation is just a small part of our beings.
So food, sex, material things are just 10% of what we need. 90% are spiritual needs. And in our society, they are not fulfilled. At all. At all. 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.
This
Richard: 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. But
Richard: according to his concept, scientific concepts,
Cláudia: 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.
Richard: So we 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: 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 empathetic. 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 may be confronted 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. This is a defense of our organism, psychophysical organism, that it's like a cry. You are living a wrong way of life. So we become incredibly unsatisfied and anguished.
And so this depression can even be considered as natural, as a natural consequence of this totally upside-down, inverted structure of society, institutions, philosophy of life. As Germans say, Weltanschauung, the cosmovision of humanity, the values. So if you want to do something, what do you do? You turn on TV, what do you see in there? Food advertisements and material advertisements and money and a car.
How can you buy a car? How can you buy a clothes? How can you eat something or drink or consume drugs and smoke and alcohol and power, money, prestige? And then all the violence and all the blood and all the violence which feeds our anal sadistic. Positions and desires. So this is totally against human nature. Not at all satisfying to us. So all this depression has a reason.
Has an inner reason and has an outer reason. And in order to correct, we should never ever think about even changing food. Like today I saw in Yahoo site that they are finding finally a good kind of diet in order to correct depression. What is this? So if materialism, if sensorialism, oral attachment is one of the causes of depression, They say here that you can buy watermelon, for instance, or some nuts are good for depression.
So this is totally crazy, an upside-down stupid society. Like only in Latin America, we think that 24 million people have a severe form of depression, are psychotic. And they give these antidepressant things since the children are small now, too many children. And as soon as you give a drug, a psychotropic, any drug that is meant to change the chemistry of the brain, interfere in the brain, you break down the natural balance of your neurons and your neurotransmitters. And almost all of the cases can never go back to natural state.
They become addicted and they reinforce the imbalance more and more and more.
Richard: You're talking about Ritalin, Prozac,
Cláudia: these terrible things. All of this, all, all, all. Even what they call not harmful or less harmful. No, all of them, all of them. And I remember even, Richard, a time ago, 30 years ago, I guess, people influenced by Freud thinking that sexual desires, unfulfilled desires and satisfied desires could lead to depression, could lead to anguish.
And now that everybody has total freedom to perform anything that they want of the sexual life, anguish and depression even increased enormously. So when humanity and scientists will realize that they are totally upside down, sex, food, physical aspects, sensorial aspects, material aspects are a consequence. They are not to be avoided, they are not to be denied, but they are natural consequences. In human beings, we are not animals, we are human beings.
It's
Richard: so incredible because we keep coming up against this wall in every area. We see this in nuclear energy. We see this in destruction of the planet. We keep reaching the limit, and then we try to go back immediately to fixing it physically.
Cláudia: Yeah, and only Keppe gives the solutions and explanations so far. Some people are trying to follow his orientations, but very slowly, because the major medias, they serve the powerful pharmaceutical companies and medical industry.
So I'm sad to say this, but you that are listening to our program should be critical enough to try to start understanding that you're being deceived so far by the economic powerful.
Richard: Truer words were never spoken, Cláudia. Thanks a lot. You know, there are many places you can go to confirm this. Right here on the Positive World Radio Network, actually. Amy Goodman is now broadcasting her excellent Democracy Now!
Program available right here. Also, We're Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is proudly hosted. And one of the founders of the Positive World Radio Network, Alan Hollander, has been writing and broadcasting for a number of years now about ethics and business. His new program, Zentropolis Radio, will explore that soon. I just want to get these plugs up because I want to let you know that there are lots of people around who are talking about all of this that we mention in our program and not necessarily with the same scientific point of view.
And maybe that's where Thinking with Somebody Else's Head can come in and really provide the missing link for all of us. So we've got lots more to consider. We are not done here on our program.
Richard Lloyd Jones with you.
Don't go away.
Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. We're on the Positive World Radio Network. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Back to our program here today with Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco. And we've been looking rather intensively at the situation in our society today, which was not so good. But I think it's interesting, Cláudia, just to consider what Dr. Keppe talked about in his book, Sociopathology, I believe, which he wrote sometime in the late 80s, I believe, where Keppe himself considered his work incomplete up to that point because he hadn't addressed this social part that you've been discussing in our previous two or three segments here.
And Keppe thinks that we've lost completely our critical sense and become schizophrenic or sociophrenic, I think is the word he used, that the mental equipment of the human being has been entirely disarranged and resulting in this construction of this erroneous social organization leading us to our own destruction. So I think this is pretty serious. Humanity urgently needs brains, you know, intelligent individuals who can help it to survive through this present and very difficult phase which is dominated almost completely by people in groups who are extremely sick.
There's a terrible lack of intellectual values today. And we have to consider these two parts, right? The psychopathology, which relates to the problems internal to the human being, which have to be analyzed psychologically. And then the sociopathological part, dealing with the social difficulties where we become victims of a sick society, which is the situation we see ourselves in today. So for the most part, really, it's the socioeconomic structure which is the worst monster, causing most of the distress to humanity and leading us to this mental and physical and sociological economic illness.
We can't live in balance if society is imbalanced. And so, as Walter Benjamin said, early in the 20th century, "that we are on a dangerous path and that we are in a general decay inside our humanity, that works of art have declined, that our ethics have declined, our way of seeing the world has declined, our form of education, our means of education has declined, our means of dealing with problems between countries has declined."
In our last little segment, you were talking about how the media serves the medical industry, which is obviously why we're only treating physically and materially in the world today. But we have this kind of a spiritual sickness, I think, today. Martin Luther King said, I've been showing his, with his war in Libya going on, I've been showing some excerpts from Martin Luther King's speech against the Vietnam War.
Listen to what he said in 1967. If we'd followed him, if we'd followed Dr. Keppe in the 80s, we wouldn't be in this situation today. Martin Luther King said, Any country that year after year spends more on the military than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. And
Cláudia: he also said a man who does not have an ideal to die for it's not worth worth living
Richard: wow and we're not hearing any of that in the typical we're hearing a lot of this from Norberto Keppe's work of course and Dr.
Keppe in his book you've given me a chapter to read his book Liberation of the People on the back cover he has pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King two people he considers to be the greatest Americans in history. And I would include Dr. Keppe in that. Although Dr. Keppe is from South America, this book, Liberation of the People, is a real, it's a work of love for democracy, the ideals of America.
And so we were talking in our previous sections about...
Cláudia: Yeah, we're talking about depression,
Richard: right? So we are not depressed because we don't have food, sex, or material goods.
Cláudia: Because, exceptionally, those who have the most are the worst cases of depression. So, this is not the case. And Maslow, when he explained that the degrees of necessity, of
Richard: motivation of human beings, that if you have all the basic...
Fulfilled.
Cláudia: The basic needs. Fulfilled. Satisfied. Then you would get into higher level of motivations that would be spiritual, idealistic, statics, etc. Keppe sees the other way around always. From the top to the bottom. And not from the bottom to the top. Right,
Richard: not an evolution on the way
Cláudia: to... So depression has to do much more with our highly spiritual ideals, not satisfied, not being satisfied.
And here he gives a suggestion in this book.
Richard: This is Liberation of the People, the Pathology of Power. My copy of this book, the pages are falling out. I use it so much. I love this book. This is from a chapter called The Persecution of the Artist, the soul of society. And I'll just read this paragraph here. When Kierkegaard said that life could not be the object of intellectual knowledge, he was attributing value to the realm of affection.
It is my belief that feeling is the very basis of existence. And this includes aesthetics as well, ethics and spirituality. As the Danish philosopher said, for all of our rational concepts are seriously distorted. In other words, art like spirituality is fundamental to modern civilization. If art is not promptly restored to its proper place, mankind will suffer grave consequences,
Cláudia: as we are already suffering.
Now, some clients or some people, when we talk about this, they have a question. Should I have to practice some instrument or should I be an
Richard: artist and paint? Should I be like a theater artist or something? A sculptor or something. Whatever,
Cláudia: in order to be in touch with this artistic tendency of humanity. So when Keppe says this, he's saying, when he speaks about aesthetics, he's speaking about something that belongs to our essential structure.
Beauty is the same as ethics in human beings, in our essential energetic structure. Everything that is ethical is beautiful not necessarily morally taken as ethical the true ethics the divine ethics is the same as statics beauty and ethics are the same are synonym. And this is also synonym of harmony, balance, which is the basic component of our psychological and physical health. There is no chance for a person to be healthy if he is not harmonious in his attitudes.
So beauty being a part, a central aspect of our inner structure and also outer, should be outer too. Our body should be all beautiful. So everything we do should manifest beauty and harmony. We should do everything, anything with beauty. Beautiful thoughts, beautiful feelings, beautiful actions, harmonious behaviors and attitudes. So life is beautiful and we should be beautiful if we would like to be healthy.
Now, society should be beautiful too. Society should feed beauty in its structure because beauty brings the sense of justice, of fairness, of what is good, what is evil. And a beautiful person very seldom does some crime. It's not easy for a true artist to perform some act of violence.
Richard: We're talking about beauty much more than a beautiful face, right? You're talking about this inner ethical, aesthetical beauty.
So then we can see in this light, Cláudia, war is such an ugly thing. Anything,
Cláudia: Richard, everything, videotapes, like the film industry, music, violent music without harmony, without aesthetics, without melody, everything is violent. Fashion,
Richard: that's very...
Cláudia: Everything, decadent, ugly. So this is a sign of a sick society. So how come our spirit can be fed without beauty, can feel satisfied without beauty in the world?
So this is a message I would like to bring because God is very much close to beauty and much less in religious wars. God is not in religious wars. God is not in this religious debate and arrogance. I am the righteous one, for instance. This arrogance of the religious people, this has nothing to do with the beauty of God, the harmony of God.
So peoples who claim they are religious, they should live in harmony with each other because harmony is a characteristic of a spiritual, ethical person.
Richard: That's why when we hear, I'm coming back to Martin Luther King, when we hear that, when we read Dr. Keppe's words and these books of his, we feel great peace because there's an inner harmony that's reflected out through the words that they speak.
And if you compare the logic of Martin Luther King, of Norberto Keppe, of Gandhi, of these great human beings, you compare their logic, their intelligence, it's far superior to any power discussion, you know. We're going to Libya to stop the killing. How are we stopping the killing by creating a war? That doesn't make any sense at all. And so when you follow this more logical, rational thing, it's linked to beauty and ethics.
It's a much more complete, why we feel so good when we listen to it, isn't it?
Cláudia: Yes. And when you, Keppe says, When you put together reason and love, the result is harmony and peace. So that's why when we read his books, his texts, even just one short excerpt per day, or one chapter, We feel all our psychological and psychosomatic structure relieved, calm, relaxed, back to normal.
So that's why I suggest you listeners to read Keppe's books and read a chapter per day.
Cláudia: The reading is very therapeutic. Therapeutical,
Richard: yeah. Very therapeutic. Very much
Cláudia: so. So we have to get back to that, Richard. Urgently. Because, for instance, if you are watching a beautiful performance, an artistic performance, if you are reasonably normal, you will enjoy so much, you will be fed so much by this beauty that you will never remember that you are late in your lunchtime.
If you are hungry or if you're tired or if you are sexually stimulated, you will just forget about your body. You will feel not your body anymore. You forget you have a body. You just enter into this transcendence and you can stay there for hours. Hours being all fed by this pure, divine, essential energy. And arts are the most direct way to heaven.
And
Richard: you don't have art in a war zone. No,
Cláudia: it's not beautiful at all. We see beauty being destroyed all the time.
Richard: Isn't that a beautiful consideration? Keppe says that social life will have to adapt to aesthetics before it can become real, suggesting that where we have no aesthetics, we don't have a real society. That gives us a lot to think about, doesn't it?
So on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we believe very strongly in all this. We want to encourage you, too, to think about the world differently. Join us if you can.
Great to have you along. We're back next week on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Positive World Radio Network.
Talk to you next time.
