Used to be there were two possibilities: either you were telling the truth, or you were lying. But Freud introduced a third option: you think you’re telling the truth, but you’re not. You’re just not conscious of it.
Norberto Keppe has a deeper thought: you actually are conscious of your lie, but you’ve hidden that consciousness from view.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, Escape From Consciousness Island.
Well, when you start to enter a discussion on the aspect of consciousness, you start to enter a pretty cerebral, theoretical world. I don’t want to go there. But I do want to till the field somewhat because there is a point of view about consciousness that’s not well spread yet through academic and lay circles in human society.
Norberto Keppe, the creator of Analytical Trilogy, is proposing something quite revolutionary: the essence of man is consciousness. Plato and the early Greeks talked about this actually, about how we are born with universal knowledge and ideas. This seems to have been borne out by recent research out of Yale University showing that very young babies have the concept of good and bad in them before they’ve had a chance to learn it. Check out the study conducted by Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center published in the Nature journal in November, 2007.
Socrates worked almost exclusively with this by engaging in dialogues with fellow citizens. He based himself on certain moral principles that could be seen as universal truths, and so any diversion from these in practice or thinking would demonstrate inconsistency or even sickness. Jesus’ teachings, of course, are our best examples of this. He was always exhorting us to look to the truth within for our guidance.
Aristotle started the deterioration from this superior idea by suggesting that knowledge came only from the senses, from experience, and this opened the door to thinkers like Descartes to further deteriorate our philosophy of life by suggesting that universal values were relative.
Keppe is returning us to the superior view in his assertion that we are conscious, we have knowledge. Keppe writes that the universals are concepts from God’s mind implanted in our structure. But being a psychoanalyst, he has noticed that we have attitudes of denying what we know. And he’s explored how and why we do that extensively in his vast and important work, which is also what we explore every week in this program.
All of Keppe’s fascinating perspectives will be applied to an analysis of many areas of human endeavor in our 19th International Congress of Analytical Trilogy, July 4-6, 2008 here in Brazil. Critique and solutions through the eyes of psycho-socio pathology. Write me at rich@richjonesvoice.com for more information.
Today, Cesar Soos joins me again to look at our human pathological tendency to escape from consciousness, which Keppe asserts is our only sickness.