Richard Lloyd Jones: We've been in the dark about ourselves for a long time. But writers and thinkers from Homer to Schopenhauer have always known there was something powerful going on below the surface of our demeanor. There's daggers in men's smiles, as Shakespeare put it. But with the help of a brilliant Brazilian psychoanalyst, the way is now becoming clear. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, hope for a troubled world.
Norberto R. Keppe has been plying his trade for half a century or so, and it's a difficult trade indeed, developing a theoretical, philosophical base to understand and a therapeutic methodology to treat the human psyche. That vast, murky part of us that lurks in the shadows has been perceived but never really brought out finally into the lights. Freud caught a whiff of it in his early reading of Schopenhauer in his Erdi studies with the great hypnotist and neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.
The subject fascinated him sufficiently to dedicate his life's work to developing a methodology to treat what we couldn't see, and worse, didn't want to see, all that much. Humankind's greatest artists depicted kingdoms being lost and lives being destroyed by the machinations of this unexplored netherworld. And those dark, unfathomable passions lay deep inside us as well, we ordinary humans suspected in our quiet moments when we were alone with our thoughts.
The problem was, Freud and Jung and Krappelin and the other founding fathers of psychology didn't get it quite right. And that left a void in understanding, and a hodgepodge of theories and opinions that have often conflicted. Certainly they've confused us and led some of us to discredit psychology. We've had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world's getting worse, as James Hillman and Michael Ventura titled in their critical analysis 15 years ago.
But that's only because they haven't read Keppe's work yet. Norberto Keppe has discovered some answers for us. For example, that we are not unconscious at all, but conscious of much more than we realize. There is great hope in Keppe's Science of Analytical Trilogy, which we'll explore today with his close associate, Dr. Cláudia Pacheco. But first, to remind you of our International Conference of Analytical Trilogy, Keppe Science, coming up very soon, September 24th to 27th in San Diego.
You can get more information on that. It'll be an excellent conference, an excellent opportunity for you to understand more of Norberto Keppe's profound work and the great solutions it offers us for many of our problems in our society today. Check out the website www.wcatus.org. And now our program with Cláudia Pacheco. I would like Cláudia in this podcast to address Dr.
Keppe's science because we talk in the podcast in general terms about various themes, but we haven't really approached the theme of Dr. Keppe's work, which is so expansive, so beautiful. And now we have this World Conference of Analytical Trilogy coming up in San Diego very shortly. And I really want people to get a sense of what has Keppe done here? How would you define his science?
How would you illustrate this for people? Richard,
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: you're making the most difficult question for any person to answer. Yes. What is Keppe's work. I can tell you from my heart, from my reason, from my experience, I have been following his work for almost 40 years. And what I have seen since the beginning was an extremely ethical, honest wish to help the suffering of human being.
Not only the physical suffering, because he worked in the hospital of the University of São Paulo, not only seeing how little help medicine, traditional medicine, could do for the patients that were inside the hospital, but also to help the psychological pain, the spiritual pain that he saw in humanity.
And I have been following his efforts to achieve a method, a scientific, practical method to help humanity and even to change society. You
Richard: said on the weekend in a very interesting teleclass you said that from his psychoanalytical methodology he wanted to study the cause of human and social suffering and how to correct it. And then you said, and what did he find at the core of our problematic?
"He found an enormous theomania."
Cláudia: "Yes." "In reality, he started with the traditional schools of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. He was invited because of this enormous capacity to heal and help people that everybody saw this in his practice in the Hospital das Clínicas. People invited him to go to Vienna and to study more in depth the traditional schools of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Freudian, Kleinian, Wilfrid Bien, Viktor Frankl, Igor Caruso, the most important schools of psychotherapy, even psychosynthesis."
The creator, Asagioli, creator of psychosynthesis, was always asking Keppe, come to Florence, to my institute and work with me because I find your your work remarkable. But then after studying all these theories he found out that the practice the method of psychoanalytical method was was good. It was incredible. Freud was a genius, but the theories were not good. He found out that he not he could not help psychotic neurotic people through the Oedipus complex or through these sexual theories of neurosis.
So he needed to find out a way to be more helpful. And he went to get some tools from philosophy, metaphysics, the old Greeks, and from his theological concepts as well, but mostly from his clinical practice. He attended dozens, hundreds of clients, and he started to research and see, but what is really inside of human beings, inside of us, that is hindering us to be in fullness?
What is hindering the human being to be healthy, to be happy? As we see in the American Constitution, we have the right of the pursuit of happiness. This is incredible. So if we have this even in the Constitution of the United States, it's something that should be even official in our lives. Not only a hidden wish inside of us.
Richard: We have
Cláudia: the right to be happy.
Richard: We need to be happy. This is
Cláudia: the nature of human beings. But
Richard: you said that he found something. He clarified
Cláudia: something. What was it? Because the other theories weren't working. What did he discover? "He discovered through the metaphysical studies that we get sick because we deny the goodness, beauty, and truth that we were endowed by our creator or by birth, if you can say that.
So evil is the deny or the absence of good. So, illness is the absence of health as well."
And neurosis, psychosis, organic illnesses are the denial of a healthy and happy human being. So, what is wrong inside of us? What is wrong? So, through the old German thinkers and psychiatrists and all these studies and through the practice with his clients, He started to realize that we suffer from an inversion, like we see everything upside down. We created like a black and white thing.
So the white world, the white reality, the white life would be the true life, beautiful, truthful and good life. But we live in upside down, like we live in a shadow. We live, we are a shadow beings. We have a shadow inside of us that we do everything in opposition to what is good, beautiful, and truthful. And this is not easy to explain in a podcast or in a few classes or even in a course.
But we can see that we adopt an attitude against everything that comes from God or comes from a supposed creator, the reason of our lives.
This was confirmed in the practice through schizophrenic patients, epileptic patients, paranoid people, neurotic people, people suffering from organic diseases that deep down. Unconsciously, they were totally against the very source of life. And if we don't focus, if we don't see the spiritual cause, which is the deepest cause of all, the first major cause, which is
Richard: an opposition, an aversion to our Creator, to the reason we are here.
So
Cláudia: if we don't address this, we cannot go any far in
Richard: our psychotherapy. We can't really solve any problem. No, no, no. In philosophy, this is the difference between essence and existence, that the essence of everything by itself, as it was created, as it was originally formed, is beautiful, good, and true. And then, therefore, anything that's not good and beautiful and true is something that we are perverting, we are distorting in some way.
Cláudia: So he has a philosophical basis in this, doesn't he? Yes, he has a philosophical basis because we distorted our ideas, our understanding, Our rational thoughts are not rational anymore. They are led by emotions, which are negative emotions, envious emotions, depressive. So we destroyed everything in our, like in our brains even, Richard. But you know something which I find incredible in Keppe's work was this unification.
Unification between or among psychopathology, which also is linked to organic pathology. So, organic pathology, psychopathology, sociopathology, and spiritual pathology. The understanding of these levels are the same. It is the very same root that is present in the organic diseases, psychological diseases, social diseases, socioeconomic diseases, and spiritual diseases. If we see in the arrogance and megalomania of the psychotic people, we can find a very big similarity of those so-called angels of light that denied their very nature and they have fallen to a schizophrenic state, as Keppe calls them, schizophrenic spirits.
Keppe would say that the angels that have fallen in the tradition of the theological tradition, the Judeo-Christian and even Islamic tradition of those so-called fallen angels, that because of the envy of their creator, they wanted to create another world, another universe, where they would be the ones, the gods, and they became like angels of darkness inside of a tremendous suffering and pain.
Melanie Klein already compared the envy that she found in the psychotic cases with Lucifer and his followers. Melanie Klein, a very famous, well-known psychoanalyst that started her work in Vienna and finished in London. So, she already compared the psychotic behavior with the fallen angels behavior, which denied their own essence, their beautiful, enlightened essence, and they became angels of darkness. So the schizophrenic behavior is very much similar.
So
Richard: we're doing the same thing you're making this suggestion now in
Cláudia: degrees. We are
Richard: we have this rejection against
Cláudia: our essence. So then every human problem is basically a problem of the soul, a theological. Absolutely, we have the same kind of pathology. So the denial of the true reality truth, beauty goodness is present in all sick behavior. This may be spiritual, this may be psychological, this may be social, this may be whatever.
Behavior is is one very essence and this is a metaphysical concept which is linked to theological concept. And now capi unified all of this in a very coherent theory which is created by his own efforts and discoveries, which is a very solid thing, that because of our theomania, because we want to be the creators of our reality, we do not accept life as it is.
We want to adapt life to our deliriums, to our ideas, to our envy, to our crazy thoughts.
We want to be the gods in our lives, egotistic, envious, aggressive, inverted, destructive, self-destructive, and even suicidal, if not homicidal. We are all in this sort of pre-hell, because we deny our very nature, and we cannot address seriously a psychotherapy if we don't address the very core, very first cause of the problematic, which is the spiritual.
Richard: And this is beautiful because Keppe has not only developed a theory about this, he's developed a methodology to treat it.
Cláudia: Yes, it's a dialectic Kepian method of psychotherapy to interiorize the person, to bring us to see, to look inside of our inner selves and to find there the causes of the suffering. But not only the causes, the obstacles, the blockings that we put, the blockages that we put, but mainly to find behind this inversion and behind the envy an enormous source of sanity, of accomplishment, of happiness, of light, which is the divine nature of ourselves.
So we should be more divine in order to be healthier. We should live our divine nature, not only in churches on Sundays or Saturdays or in our religious practices or before we go to bed or in the morning when we wake up and say a prayer for those who do this. But we should live in a very divine society with divine laws, divine activities.
And what is this? This is everything that would be beautiful, aesthetics everywhere, beauty everywhere, in actions, in architecture, in arts, in the way we deal with people, in the way we live, very beautiful.
Richard: In business.
Cláudia: In business. Why not? In business.
Richard: In media.
Cláudia: In media, everywhere. Beauty. Truth. Be truthful. Be honest. And with fair laws. Fair laws in society. So everybody would have enough, in abundance, what they need in order to survive with dignity.
And with goodness, everybody being merciful, being fair, being friends.
And so we would finally live in a very highly developed, scientifically even developed society.
Richard: Yeah, this is not just in a utopia. This is our nature. This is what
Cláudia: we should be doing. Yes. This
Richard: is beautiful.
Cláudia: And I find in an American constitution a very, an incredible foundation for Keppe's work. Because in America, at least those who wrote the first laws of this constitution, who wrote the first principles, they spoke about the very right of this pursuit of happiness.
And the happiness we find inside of ourselves, behind, hidden behind our theomania, our envy, our inversion. So it is there. It is still there. It's a matter of becoming more conscious, using this methodology to create more consciousness for humanity so we can just recover. It's not something that needs to be developed to be like still discovered.
It's something to be recovered and it is inside of ourselves Dr.
Richard: Keppe said in his book I just want to read this because I think it's so beautiful it's philosophical and deep he said "the purpose of my work of Analytical Trilogy, Dr. Keppe speaking is to lead the human being to the goodness for which he was created by helping him conscientize the evil he has chosen which arises out of his envy of the goodness he has always received and that he will continue to receive even though he rejects it."
Cláudia: "You are right."
Richard: "Oh, it's beautiful.
Cláudia: It's beautiful. It's beautiful. And it's not a utopia, as you said, Richard, because the people who we attended in psychotherapy, not only Keppe, myself, and his psychoanalysts, people were healed of such a great diversity of illnesses, tumors, cancers, high blood pressure, migraines, diabetes."
Organically speaking, an enormous quantity of allergies, ulcers, many, many, many kinds of illnesses can be cured just through the conscientization, through this method that uses just the word, just a dialogue. Keppian dialectic that we could compare mostly with the Christian dialectic. But not only this, but people, when they perceive their blockages, their censorships, their envy, they stop sabotaging their lives. And they start progressing economically.
They start progressing in their relationships. So the the resonance with goodness in their lives bring more things to them, opportunities, more money, more enjoyment, good friends, opportunity to grow, and people do not destroy the goodness that they get from life anymore. So they they start enjoying life much better. And after this, they start thinking, why not to bring this to all society?
What if we would expand this to society? So that's why we want to summon all people that have a goodwill and that they agree with this right to pursue happiness in their lives to gather us, to join us in this conference in San Diego in September 24 to 28. This is an opportunity to
Richard: see Dr. Keppe's work in its practical application in all sorts of area of human function.
The way you're talking, we can see that it's not just about psychotherapy for me, but it's about treating things in society, problems in families, problems between people who work together, problems in my own internal health, in my own state,
Cláudia: peace of mind, addictions, education processes, media, which I work in. How to use our freedom, how to be really democratic, how to resolve the problem of war and not only war among countries, which is horrible, but war inside our homes, our offices.
Understanding what is projection about? What does Keppe understand about envy? What does Keppe understand about resisting goodness? What does Keppe understand about projective identification, projective idealization? So all these themes are going to be addressed in this conference and in your podcasts have been addressed already, but we will do that there. And we are doing this all the time in our center in São Paulo and we want more people to be able to enjoy this science.
So there are not only bad news, horrible news that the world is ending, but there is this help coming from the scientific society which is very much linked to also to theology. This is a personal impression jones that this is a way god is using to help humanity in this so critical time to bring them to bring us to a better place.
We were always supposed to be.
Richard: Keppe's Analytical Trilogy is a beautiful science, and it's what our World Conference of Analytical Trilogy will explore. Write me for more information, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Happy to help you in any way I can. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
