Richard Lloyd Jones: 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 an even deeper thought. You actually are conscious of your lie, but you've hidden that consciousness from view. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm 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 too much, but I do want to till the field somewhat because there's 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're 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. You can check out that 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. Socrates 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, 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, in fact, relative. Keppe is returning us to the superior position. We are conscious. We have knowledge. According to Keppe, the universals are concepts from God's mind implanted in the human structure.
But he, being a psychoanalyst, has noticed that we have attitudes of denying these universals what we know, and he's explored how and why we do that extensively in his vast and important work. All of his fascinating perspectives, by the way, will be applied to an analysis of many areas of human endeavor in our 19th International Congress on Analytical Trilogy, July 4th to 6th, 2008, here in Brazil.
Critique and Solutions Through the Eyes of Psycho-Socio-Pathology. You can write me at rich at richjonesvoice.com if you'd like any more information on that very interesting and exciting Congress. Today on our program, Cesar Soós joins me again to look at the pathological tendency we have to escape from consciousness, which Keppe asserts is our only sickness. Cesar, if we're conscious, but we seek to avoid that, what's the consequence for us?
Cesar Soós: Stress, Richard, comes from this very fact of running away from the consciousness of what we are. Some people, they use money to escape from that, which is very common. Some others, they will escape through the work excessively. Some others will escape doing too much like leisure. Leisure time, taking a lot of time for themselves. Or drinking or drugs. Or watching TV. The problem is not the thing outside of us, but it's what we do with these things.
You can use money, which is a good thing, for bad purposes, if you want. To escape from
Richard: the consciousness of your problems. Suppose you have a problem and you have to face it. If you have a lot of money, you can use that money to alienate yourself from that thing you must see. And why are we so afraid to see the reality,
Cesar: the truth of who we are?
The basic foundation of this, Richard, is the theomania. Theo comes from Greek, means God, and mania, mania of being a God. Of course, nobody will say, I want to be a God, but this is an unconscious pathology. And how does it show? It shows all the time you don't want to see your mistakes. So, for example, if you are a very perfectionist person, like you see yourself perfect, but you know you are not perfect.
Deep inside, you know you have problems. So all the time when you have to face yourself exactly the way you are, your reality, you start to sweat, you start to tremble, you get problems of all sorts.
Because of this, you want to see yourself perfect, but you know you are not perfect. Again,
Richard: let's stress that this is not really a conscious thing, but I think it's very important to see that shy people have this same difficulty. If they go forward and express themselves, they're going to see themselves as they are. Maybe their idea will not be accepted like they think it should be.
Maybe other people will judge them. Maybe they'll judge themselves. And so they avoid situations where they have to present themselves. This is an attitude caused from the idea, as you're saying, the person wants to be a perfect person. Or at least wants to be what he sees in his head. It may be not a perfect person, but wants to be this image of what he sees in his head.
Cesar: This is what is inversion. Inversion is exactly that, Richard.
In this example, we can see clearly. When you get the example of a shy person, this person thinks about himself, that he's shy because he cannot express himself, the others will attack him. He always puts himself as a victim, But he never thinks that he does not expose himself because he does not want to expose his faults, his difficulties. So it will be very clear for him, not for the others, that he's incapable or that he has difficulties with something.
Richard: Yes, I remember Dr. Keppe talking about this one time as saying that when you take action in anything, you have to see reality. This is really true because we teach languages here at our school, and we see this with people who are starting to study a language. They have this idea about themselves in other areas of their life. Maybe they're quite proficient in other areas of their lives, or they're quite intelligent in other areas of their lives, or they're quite successful in other areas of their lives.
And when they come to study a language for the first time, they have to sound like a little baby. They have to experience the uncomfortableness of not being what they might be in their professional lives. And this is very, very uncomfortable. And so they try to avoid this consciousness by resisting speaking the language. Yes,
Cesar: I teach French in this school, you know, and I had one student that he was a medical doctor, a surgeon, extremely intelligent, and he couldn't learn French.
It was very difficult for him to pronounce the first basic phrases in French. And then together with him in the same class, there was a 10-year-old boy who could learn very fast, much faster than him. And all the time the boy spoke something in French, he got like stuck.
Richard: The doctor did, not the
Cesar: boy. The doctor did it. You know, he's stuck and very angry with that.
Anguished and angry at the same time. And when I asked him what did he think about this, and he said, "no, teacher, everybody tells me that I am depressed, that I do not have self-esteem." And then I said to him that it was the opposite. Being intelligent the way he was, he didn't learn French because he didn't want to see that other people know more than him, that he doesn't have that same ability to learn languages as others.
So that's why he didn't pronounce a word, because he didn't want to have this conscience.
Richard: This is very interesting because Dr. Keppe says in The Origin of Illness that our greatest problem is not that we have problems, but that we don't want to see the problems. Exactly that. And this leads to what in our individual lives first, then we'll go to society.
We don't want to see the problems that we have because of our inversion.
We think that seeing the problem means we have the problem, when actually we have the problem even if we don't see it. So it's much better to see it than not to see it. So how do we avoid this? How do you see this in our everyday personal lives? We
Cesar: have developed a lot of escape mechanisms from this consciousness of our errors.
One of them, for example, is the alienation. We will escape through pleasure. We will try to use our time to waste our time the maximum possible through games, watching too much television, eating a lot, having too much sex or having too many different partners, even exercising
Richard: too much, going crazy too
Cesar: much. There are many ways to use what is good in themselves to help us escape from that.
To use money in a foolish way, also to spend too much money, you know. And there are many other ways, like one of the worst ways is to get a physical disease.
Human beings, they prefer to be sick physically and blame their sickness instead of seeing what is wrong, and which is the cause of the physical problem. What
Richard: I've noticed with human beings in my own analysis here in Brazil, my own experience with talking with people like you and Dr. Cláudia Pacheco, Dr. Keppe, etc., is that we, human beings, we have this tragic resistance to seeing what's going on inside us.
So we've created all of these escape mechanisms from consciousness. You just use one, I hope we can get into some more here in a minute, not to see the reality of our experience. So for example, a person who eats too much, they believe that they're doing this for a pleasurable reason. It's because they get pleasure from eating like this. But the result of eating too much is they don't feel good in themselves, plus maybe their body's a little fat.
And so then what they do to try to avoid this is they go on a diet. They don't want to see the intention they have with their body. So they go on a diet, thinking that will solve the problem. Of course, diets don't work. So then they try something else. They go and they get way more exercise. They go and they exercise like crazy, exercise like crazy.
But then they stop and they go on an eating binge and they get back to being fat again. So then they think, okay, I've got to do something more drastic. So they start to take drugs to eliminate the hunger. And this, of course, doesn't work or it backfires on them. They have so many side effects that they can't deal with that and they go to something more drastic and they remove part of the stomach.
All of this is to avoid seeing the fact that they have an intention not to care for their body.
And this intention has been inconscientized, as
Cesar: you said. We do not want to take care of our bodies because our body is a reality and if we reject reality we reject our body, we reject our beings. But this is a unconscious attitude and we will try in any way possible to continue with this attitude. We, in social terms, we create wars. In individual terms, like you said, we eat too much or we look for radical sports or whatever.
All kinds of destructive things which Freud called "thanatus instincts, which means death instincts." But these death instincts is just a name, a wrong name, an improper name for an attitude of running away from our reality, from our consciousness. Right. And
Richard: you said that we can have this attitude against our body. I'm assuming we could also have this unconscious death instinct. Freud incorrectly called it an instinct.
We would say more it's an attitude against. We could also have this
Cesar: against our talent too, couldn't we? Especially against our talents, Richard, because how many things do you know you are capable of doing and you don't do? How many people do you know that, for example, when they start to get success in life, they all of a sudden create a big problem or they enter into a big trouble and they cannot take their lives properly again anymore?
So it's very common, for example, with artists. We see this very clear. They get success and all of a sudden they enter in drugs or they find a very horrible relationship and then they enter into ruin. This is
Richard: happening with Britney Spears, Whitney Houston, some of these
Cesar: racetracks. Yes, it's very clear. We have so many ways, or for example, when we study, study, study for a big exam, a very important exam in our lives, that can change our lives, can give a lot of opportunities for us, and that very day we get sick.
Richard: Before we talk about what's behind this unconscious intention, because this is very important, give us some more ways that we escape from consciousness, some of these other escape mechanisms from consciousness, how we don't want to see what's going on inside us.
Cesar: One of these mechanisms is called rationalization. Rationalization is when a person doesn't want to feel things. And in extreme cases, you see the psychopath, for example.
But we are all, we try to rationalize everything in order not to feel our intentions. So we justify all kinds, all of our mistakes. We are ready to justify. Oh, I did that because of something, because of that, because I didn't have this thing, didn't have that. You know, a person who just justifies himself too much, you can be pretty sure this person is a person that doesn't feel himself.
And because of that, he lives in an enormous alienation in relation to his feelings and also sick. He gets very sick.
Richard: Norberto Keppe has a beautiful graphic that he uses on the world's biggest psychopathologies. There are three of them listed here. You've started to talk about the first one, which is that we don't use or we destroy all of the good stuff that exists.
And that can be physical stuff like our planet as we're destroying now, which is a very clear example of this human intention magnified outward by six or seven billion people. We're destroying the planet because of this intention inside us. That's the first one, which we've discussed a little bit. The second one is that we blame all our problems on others. And maybe that's something you could move into now as a way that we have of not wanting to see what's going on inside us.
Cesar: Richard, once I was giving a lecture in Campinas, a city near São Paulo, and I was explaining this phenomenon of projection. And while I was explaining all the problems I have in myself and I do not want to see, I put these problems onto others. And the second thing is that when I get irritated with something in other persons, that thing means something to me.
It represents something that I have inside and I do not want to face. Then all of a sudden a woman from the audience, she raised up her hand and she started to tell her story. And she said to me, "professor, I do not understand exactly what you say because I work for a company and my boss hired his lover. And his lover is inferior to me in the position inside the company.
So I am a executive secretary and his lover is a secretary below me. So I am in charge of what all the things she does too."
When she make many mistakes, she gets late to the work, she does many things wrong. And all the time when I try to say to her hey please you have to come here on time and things like that, I am in the middle of my boss and her. So this situation is extremely stressful for me. But if you ask me if I get late to my work or if I do things wrong, I don't do that.
But I get irritated with her. So you are saying that I am irritated with her because I have her problems. I cannot accept that. That's what was the problem she put to me. And then I said to her exactly like this, "hey look, it's not exactly her problems that you do not want to deal inside of you. But it's what you associate to her problems.
That is something that means something for you. What the other person's problems represent inside her." So I asked her, "what do you associate that attitude, her attitude?"
And then she thought a little bit and she said "well she wants to spoil her life, she wants to throw her opportunities away. And she has these opportunities and she doesn't take advantages of that." And by saying that to me, Richard, I explained to her so that is the consciousness you do not want to face, that you throw your opportunities away. You probably have many opportunities in life to be better than you are now and you didn't want to accept to take them.
And then she started to cry, Richard, she started to cry and she said "yes professor this is true. Because during my whole life my parents, they wanted to support me, they wanted me to study much more than I did, they wanted to give me many opportunities even to study abroad and I rejected them. And now that they are dead they cannot support me anymore.
I am here in this job, stuck in this job, and having to face this kind of problems."
This is true.
Richard: Dr. Keppe says, "the human being in general doesn't condemn the evil the other person does, but the consciousness that it brings him." Exactly. There's a consciousness that this woman is having of what she does in her life that she doesn't see in her day-to-day basis, except through the behavior of this other secretary. The
Cesar: others serve as a mirror for us so we
Richard: project our problems and we see our problems in other people it's a very good example the other Third biggest psychopathology, Norberto Keppe, is we don't want to see our bad intentions.
How do we negate this consciousness in our society? I'm thinking of like how we treat criminals. Because
Cesar: we do not want to see problems, Richard, we have this attitude of cutting consciousness away from us. And we always try to avoid the external things. We think that by eliminating those external things from our sight then we will be free of the problem.
And this is not true. When we have criminals in our society we want to lock them into prisons and think, ok, we solved the problem. They are there, they are not here anymore, we can continue with our beautiful society and that's perfect. But by doing that we are just cutting the consciousness of what these criminals bring to us.
Richard: The problems in our society, the problems that we may have as well, but we hold back.
Of
Cesar: course. Everybody knows that if you have a disorganized society, for example, you will have many more criminals, much more criminality. And if we have criminals, like, for example, in the United States, it's very clear to see we have so many serial killers. All the time we are listening to these news on TV, This is a problem which is increasing lately. It's because there is a fundamental pathology in that society that they must see.
You do not solve the problems putting people in the electric chair. Even though the person is a criminal, he did many mistakes, he shouldn't have done, but this is not the way to treat things.
Richard: Schopenhauer wrote that in general social behavior is pure representation. This means that falsehood is the most constant element in society and Dr. Keppe, when he talks about this, he doesn't talk about hypocrisy only.
He talks about how we cover up criminality and our really bad intentions. And because we have these deviant intentions that have been repressed in our consciousness, which appear in terrible things like the crusades or the wars that we have. These are bad intentions that now appear and that are justified, as you talked about before. Other areas are things like the bank interest rates that destroy our social balance completely and make people enslaved to these enormous banks that make record profits every year.
Prisons that only hide the worst crimes. And also this violent psychiatric medication Dr. Keppe talks about, which causes us to avoid the true knowledge of our psychopathology. So we're covering up all of this consciousness, not wanting to see. And we have many institutions in society that show us that. Can you tell me more about how you see those institutions that cover up this consciousness for us that we don't want to see?
Cesar: "Yeah, we have a society based on hospitals, society based on gambling, banks, schools that teach only information. We have like institutions which keeps us away from this consciousness. When we go to a hospital, for example, it's very common today the doctor makes exams on you and he says, okay, you have to make a surgery now to take out this or that organ.
And by doing that you think you are removing the problem from yourself."
But this, but you do not remove the cause. The problem will be settled in another part of your body. So people, they look for doctors mostly because they do not want to see themselves. Let's talk
Richard: just quickly at the end of our program here about the cause of all this, Cesar. What is the reason that we want to avoid this consciousness? Talk a little bit more about why do we avoid trying to see what's the root source of this
Cesar: problem?
The root, Richard, is because we have everything possible to be happy and we do not accept this. This is what is inversion. Inversion is exactly that, to have the good and reject it, to be happy and reject happiness. And this seems to be craziness, isn't it? When you think about this, oh, how come I reject happiness and all of that? But this is true.
This is an unconscious attitude because we are not the creators of our own lives.
You know, we want to be gods of our lives. We want to create a system of laws in which we feel gods in these systems. And because of that, we get sick. So it's
Richard: deep into the human psyche we need to go to understand this paradox. Rather than progressing from out of the mud, our situation is more pathological. We have everything, but refuse it. And then we hide from that consciousness. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Talk to you next week.
