Richard Lloyd Jones: From the Psychosomatic Department of the Kepi and Pacheco Colleges, this is Episode 3 of the Healing Through Cautiousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. It's been very interesting to live through this pandemic time, don't you think? In the face of a real worldwide challenge, it's been illuminating to watch how health has taken a backseat to fear. Panic, I think we could say, has largely driven our political and social responses to infection And this seems to have trumped any reliance on a robust immune response
Which used to be the policy of choice for dealing with infectious disease situations And of course we must always pay attention to the cynical manipulation of this fear To sell medicines and vaccines and other products to protect us from this outside danger In the face of all this, we've shifted from a faith in the robustness of human health and potent immune response to a philosophy of trying to protect the massive human population from exposure, a change from believing in the power of nature to trepidation at the
dominance of disease. This just seems inferior, tantamount to an athlete's misguided response to challenge by playing not to lose, instead of going for it with vigor and conviction. As some progressive health professionals are acknowledging, though, disease doesn't begin outside. The roots of physical disease lie inside. The soul actually gets sick before the body. Welcome to Episode 3 with Dr. Claudia Bernhard Pacheco.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: I would like to mention the need there is in the world to acknowledge the importance of our psychological life.
Psyche in Greek means soul, and our souls were an object of study. So the being is spiritual. And in order to understand being, we have to understand that we are spiritual beings. And all the other manifestations, tangible manifestations, sensitive manifestations, sensorial manifestations, even sometimes material manifestations, are just manifestations of the spirit and the true, true energy. And everything comes from this, is the spirit, which is the essential energy.
You
Richard: say in your new book that this psychological, energetic aspect of us is something that medicine can't touch, and therefore must be treated as something non-material, energetic, spiritual, metaphysical, that involves things like values, philosophy of life, feelings of love, even emotions like envy, the negative aspect of this.
And this treatment involves totally abstract elements such as good and evil, ethics, virtue, addictions, ideals. We could call this science that treats problems at this level metaphysical, or in your new language, psychosociotherapeutic.
Cláudia: Yes, Johns, because Kepi developed the science, which is, I think, the newest science in the world. And it is the most important science. It came from the basis of psychoanalysis, philosophy, social sciences and theology, physics. Kepi had all this background, but he had always in his mind that he wanted to alleviate the suffering of humanity and human beings.
most of all the suffering of our souls and our psychological inner life because it's much more difficult to bear an anguish a state of panic or anxiety or guilty feelings the lack of meaning for life all these anguishes and anxieties that lead people to all crazy attitudes like committing suicide, killing each other, promoting wars.
Richard: Exploiting other people.
Cláudia: Exploiting. Torturing. Being addicted to drugs and destroying ourselves. Everything comes from our psychological inner life. So would we alleviate that through changing only the cultural values
or environmental problems or social laws? Yes, we should change all this too, but the root of everything is the emotional, the psychological life of each one of us.
Richard: Dr. Kepi says exactly this. It's fundamental for us to perceive that the enormous individual and social pathology around us has been created by the choice of human beings.
Cláudia: Yes, and all the structure, all the values of all the laws are inverted, are upside down. So society became a very sick place to live and to be born.
But we must see that society followed psychopathology, the pathology of human mind, human souls.
Richard: Maybe we can move into this connection between psychopathology and sociopathology with this. You talk in your book, Keep an Eye on Your Health, about the importance of consciousness as a tool for the psychosociotherapist to use. And this is one thing I've wondered about for a number of years. When I first came here to Brazil and I started to face through my own analysis my difficulties, my problems, my inversions, my envy, all of these things, the
Cláudia: initial feeling I had was this can't be good for me to see all this stuff.
This has to hurt me somehow because how can I get up in the morning knowing that I'm a complete inverted human being with really bad intentions? How can this be good for me? Yeah, this is the problem because consciousness is within us, either accepting or not. We are born with consciousness and we are born with a good essence, a true essence, a beautiful essence. We have it within us. So the key of CAPI is that if we suppress consciousness, we create a lot of infirmities, even obesity.
It's eating too much. It's a kind of somatizing our psychological drama, which is already in us. You could have a psychological symptom, a neurotic attitude or panic attacks or anxiety. You could have an organic problem. You could have sexual problems. You could have addictions. Something will be wrong in yourself. So if you come to analysis, you will see that there was something previous to analysis that was wrong. when you knew that deep down and you were not able to reach that point.
So analysis should be to dissolve censorship, to dissolve this oppression, the resistance, and see the conflict. And why the conflict? Because you are adopting attitudes against your own well-being and against your own being. So if you do that, it hurts. And if it hurts and you cover up, neurotic symptoms or organic diseases show up.
Richard: This is the essential difference between our psychoanalytic process here in Brazil and that of other schools of psychology. We try to do everything we can to help the person become conscious
of how his attitude is similar to all of the evil tendencies exhibited by humanity as a whole. But the laws of society have been set up to stifle perception. We just put the people in prison or re-execute them. We send them off to war without knowing why they're going, without telling them the truth of what
Cláudia: they're doing. They go to hospitals.
Richard: They go to hospitals.
Cláudia: And when they go to hospitals, they come back with much more problems and much less energy than when they went there.
A lot of diseases come, too. So you know, Jones, if we deny the true source of our well-being in our inner selves, which is being good, doing good, being beautiful, doing beautiful things, being truthful, this is the true source. because then we get in resonance. We plug into, if you want to say, universal energy, this universal essential energy, so we can be fed because we don't provide energy by ourselves. We are fed by external energy, universal energy, essential energy.
We need this energy coming from outside. But in order to really be fed with this energy, we need to be in similar vibration, in resonance with the laws of the universe. And these laws are extremely exact in their purposes. So if you don't follow exactly the laws of ethics, of goodness, of aesthetics, beauty, And if you lie, if you're not really truthful, then this resonance will not work properly.
Richard: You'll be out of resonance somehow.
Cláudia: Out of resonance.
You will get some energy, just enough to continue for a time. If society does not provide any means to the person to get to the true source of satisfaction, which is psychological, which is spiritual. So if people can't be happy in society, how come they can be healthy in their sexual lives as well? Good action is the recipe. Trying to be good and doing good things for yourself and other people, forcing yourself to be good.
Richard: Health, then, is a truly dynamic state of action and feelings and thoughts, not a destination.
Frequently here in Brazil, I listen to conversations where people criticize the government here for not providing sufficient health care for the citizens. A little probing reveals that what they mean by health care is more hospitals. Hospitals? That's for sick care, not health care. Now, of course, we need sufficient, modern, well-equipped hospitals to serve the needs of people who are sick, but health care? Well, that's another thing. Health is a result, a consequence of a process of healthy living.
And perhaps we've moved too far in the direction of seeing this as a strictly physical material process. As we're exploring in this Healing Through Consciousness series, we mustn't neglect the vibrant inner, psychological, even spiritual life of the human being in our desire for health and well-being. Modern medicine, though, too often bypasses that consideration to move us towards strictly physical solutions, and that has had consequences. That's coming up in Episode 4.
