Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I've been in Brazil going on 24 years using Norberto Keppe's psychotherapeutic methodology in education and communications and also as a psychoanalyst at Keppe's school. The positive results available to anyone who studies with us and accepts the consciousness that comes through our classes and therapy sessions are noteworthy. From overcoming learning blocks, to resolving long-standing or acute personal or professional conflicts, to curing from medical conditions, Keppe's on to something.
Where Freud initiated psychoanalysis with the idea that neurosis was caused by cultural and moral values, and Jung wanted to integrate our shadow side into our personality, and Alfred Adler helped clients with their feelings of inferiority, Keppe has reached conclusions about the human problematic with his great discovery of inversion, the final frontier of the human psyche and the way to finally understanding ourselves and resolving our greatest problems.
Inversion in everyday life, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. There are a lot of ways to learn more about Keppe's game-changing science of Analytical Trilogy. Books on Amazon, individual psychoanalysis sessions, our free reading groups, courses and workshops, international congresses, rich at richjonesvoice.com. That's my email if you'd like more information. Our podcast today is edited from a conversation I had recently with Susan Berkley, who's editing a book on Keppe's fundamental discovery of inversion and its manifestations in All Areas of Human Endeavor, a very important book being worked on now.
Susan's conversation with me will be part of that book, and it's the subject of our podcast today. So
we're working on a project about Dr. Keppe's fundamental discovery of inversion. And so these interviews are to help people deepen their understanding of Keppe's discovery of inversion in 1977, which is a really key addition to the psychoanalytical canon.
Let
Richard: me just pick up on something you said about psychology. "The reason this discovery of inversion is so important, I think before Keppe, all of the psychoanalytical science was based on the idea that man, human beings, are born with like a death instinct, like an impulse for death and an impulse for life, and that there was this balance in the universe between the forces of creation and the forces of destruction.
And what Keppe did when he made this primal discovery, principal discovery, fundamental discovery of inversion, was he corrected all that, and saw that the human being is not by nature against life. We don't have this impulse for death balancing out our impulse for life, but that the human being is full of life, full of consciousness, full of health, but we have attitudes against that, attitudes against that."
So this inverted idea that we're in this balance between good and evil, between health and sickness, between sanity and insanity, between consciousness and unconsciousness, that's all corrected in Kepley's work. So now we see, Susan, that instead of saying that the human being is naturally acting towards his own demise, we can now say that the person is, without being aware of it, acting against that in an inverted way.
And if we can see
that, we can treat it. And so what people say is, oh, that explains it. And then they leave it at that, right? You know, oh, he's got a death wish. And then that's the end of the conversation. Yeah. So that I think is in itself, something that's uniquely North American, it keeps us shallow and superficial, because we are so exteriorized.
So let's see if we can talk a little bit about that and help people understand what that means.
Because we take how we are for granted being you know from north america um and really Keppe's work is all about our inner life. What lies beneath the surface being a psychoanalyst and a psychologist and a deep thinker and philosopher. Let's why do you think what happened like how do we get so externalized here in north america and we have many philosophers that have we're practical people which is a good thing actually very good yeah uh
Richard: i think it was william james who said uh "what works is what's right." And so we have built into our north american personality this idea that as long as we do we're going to be okay and uh what that doesn't take into account is that we might have a crazy idea about what we're doing.
We might have like a wrong idea. So we could be acting, acting, acting and achieving totally crazy results because of that.
Because if we're
inverted, we're moving farther and farther away from
Richard: the truth. Exactly. But because we have this what works, this positive thinking, you know, like if life gives me lemons, I'll make lemonade. Made because of that bias we have in our philosophy of life. We think that any mistake we make is just that it's a mistake. It wasn't intentional. I didn't intend that.
And so when there's a mistake that happens in our lives, we automatically look for some external reason for that because it can't be me because I don't have bad intentions. And if I see bad intentions, that's bad for me. That's a negative thing. So I have this built-in resistance to seeing the problem as me. So, but the problem exists, so the problem must be you, or it must be the boss, or it must be my parents.
You know, anybody who does modern psychotherapy, at some point, they inevitably wind up blaming their parents.
You know, I'm like this because my father was like this, or my mother didn't treat me well, or I wasn't breastfed, or, you know, I was traumatized in some way. So we have this resistance to seeing the problem as being inside me. And so this is why we exteriorize, we put the problem outside.
This is really a serious problem because through Keppe's work, so Keppe has his key principles, among them, illness is the denial of health, right?
That we are basically essentially sane and healthy in our inner life. Of course, we've fallen, we have many flaws, even in our DNA, that we're already born scathed in some way. You know, everybody has illnesses and problems. We were born with those into a sick society also. But at our core, we are healthy. And so otherwise, we couldn't return, we could never heal from anything, because we return to this point of insanity.
So in order to do so, we have to increase our tolerance and awareness of what's going on inside ourselves. So we can get to see the problem to be able to solve it and become aware of it. And then it's even naturally self-correcting, right? Because some people really feel a problem that they have. We also have a built-in sense of, most of us anyway, a built-in sense of ethics that will cause us to want to correct that problem, Rich.
Richard: Yeah, I think you're making the crucial point. Let me try to use an example to illustrate this. I had a student here years ago who we were talking in the classroom, what are the little things in life that irritate you? And we do this in a language class, if you can believe it, because this psychological part is the most important part when people are learning something new.
It's the resistance to learning.
It's the embarrassment we feel. It's the narcissism we have. It's the shyness that we put. These kinds of psychological, emotional problems are what impede our learning. So we ask a lot of these kind of questions just to have people have some contact with what's going on inside them so that they can better deal with the frustrations of learning something new or the difficulties that inevitably appear.
So I said, "what are the little things that irritate you?" And one guy said, "you know, I hate it when people cut me off in traffic. This happens a lot. We have a really crazy traffic here in São Paulo." So nobody likes this, right? Somebody cuts you off in traffic. But I could see he was quite fiery about that. So I said, "what is it about that that irritates you?" And he says, "well, the guy's getting there faster than me."
And so then it hit me. He sees cutting somebody off in traffic as an advantage. That person will get to his destination faster. It's an advantage. So in an inverted way, he sees this negative behavior, this dangerous driving, he sees in some way as an advantage. So I told him that, and he sort of said, "well, okay, anyway," it didn't go any further.
But a couple of weeks later, I took the whole class over to the shopping center across the street for pizza. I thought we'll have a pizza night together, and we'll talk about, we'll do everything in English, you know. And so the pizza was a little bit slow arriving. So he stood up and said in a very loud voice in the restaurant, "hey, where's our pizza?" Like that.
And then sat down with a big smile on his face. So you can see here's a guy who thinks that aggressive behavior brings a good result.
So somebody driving in traffic aggressively brings a good result. Even though he wouldn't do that, somewhere inside him, he has the same attitude as that person. And that's why it irritates him.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: So this is the process of
Richard: interiorization. Now that helps him in learning to recognize that when he feels frustration about something, it won't be the external thing that's causing frustration, the grammar or the vocabulary or the inability to express himself.
It'll be this frustration internally with himself. It's an internal problem, not an external problem. If we can help him to see that, it'll help him to learn faster. Yeah.
And it helps anybody to calm down when they go through this process. And it's not just a matter of calming down. It's extremely powerful. People get healed of serious illnesses through this process of interiorization.
And the reason is consciousness. We all have consciousness and we're imbued with that. And that awareness helps everything in life, helps our health, helps obviously our relationships and all of that. But the problem is the avoiding seeing the barriers we put. It's called censorship in the psychological life rich. And that's that's where the danger comes. So when you were not so much
Richard: not so much the problem is it susan it's the not wanting to see the problem that's
the problem.
Yeah exactly that's putting it succinctly. So when you were speaking about that gentleman i thought about another idea that we have which is nice guys finish last you know that's a common saying but it bears some thought and i think we should talk about that. We had assertiveness training was really big here. Thank goodness it kind of petered out.
But I think a lot of us, nobody wants to be a patsy, you know, politeness seems to have gone, civility is on the decline, people complain, you know. So where does that come from?
Richard: Because somehow we have this inverted idea that if I'm aggressive, I'm going to get a good result. This is the basis of all inversion, right? We don't act invertedly because we're ignorant, we act invertedly because we think somehow that behavior is going to get me a good action.
Like the smoker who thinks that by smoking, I cure my stress or I deal with my stress, right? The inverted idea is that by being generous and being kind, I'm going to get taken advantage of. I'm going to be like seen as the patsy of the group, but I'm not going to get anywhere. The only way I can get somewhere is by being aggressive, assertive, competitive.
Then I'll get somewhere. And this is the inversion because the truth of the human being, the essence, the natural essence of human beings is cooperative, is kind, generous. Generosity is the natural spirit of life. You see that everywhere. Life is one of the most generous things that we can imagine. You plant an apple tree and you have tons of apples i mean it's nothing just
one one here's your apple for the season.
That's
Richard: right that's all i'm gonna do i'm tired of giving so much for others i need time for myself so i gotta get back
to my roots. Yeah
Richard: i gotta i gotta be me this this whole life the nature of life is that way. So when we act in a way that's against that nature of life, we're acting against ourselves. And this is why we cause such stress for ourselves, because to be aggressive is against our nature.
Yeah,
well, and of course, it causes all kinds of health effects, like high blood pressure, you know, dangers of strokes, and not to mention, you become a pariah, nobody likes you, you know lots and lots of problems at work and among friends and all of that. But let's let's take a look you know dr Keppe has spoken so generously and and i want to say the word exhaustively about this problem of inversion and and he recently well he did a tell on his tv show which he's done many many hundreds of episodes he he boiled it down to saying that there are really three main consequences of inversion.
So let's talk about these rich and see if we can speak about them in light of some of the issues we have here in North America. I'll give you the overview first. The first consequence is an exaggerated sense of megalomania, right?
Which he calls theomania. That's number one. Number two, the second consequence of inversion is alienation or what Keppe calls in-conscientization and the third is delusions and deliriums you know, even psychoses and neuroses. So how about it, should we take a look at each of these three and see if we can help
Richard: people understand how this works. If you think about megalomania right, it's the sense of self-importance is exaggerated like I'm more than I really am and so in an inverted way what that means is we put ourselves into a position that's not real.
I think i'm better than i am or i think i'm more special than i really am that i deserve more than others. You can see how this is an inverted idea because i'm putting myself in a situation where I'm putting myself above others. And when I'm above others, I can't learn.
How can I learn anything from you if I'm better than you? There's nothing you can teach me because I'm already up there. And how can I learn anything new? I'm uncoachable in the sports terminology, right? I'm better than the coach. I'm better than the game. I'm better than anyone who ever lived. And what this generates is an enormous internal pressure because if I'm so special the moment I'm called on to perform I'm going to feel an enormous amount of pressure because I'm the best in the world but suddenly I have to test myself against somebody else or in some kind of situation I'm being evaluated in some way or I have to perform in some way.
I have I'm going to be I'm going to be judged and so immediately I'm going to put enormous pressure on because I'm the best, but oh, wait a minute. Maybe I'm not so great.
It'll cause all this self-doubt. It causes this incredible insecurity that comes up. Also, the other thing we can say about megalomania is this generates a lot of this sense of the imposter, this imposter syndrome that we hear a lot about because the person thinks that they're better than they are. But deep inside, they know that that's not completely true. They may be good at their job, professional at their job, but they know that they're not the greatest thing in the world.
So this is going to create a pressure inside. And the idea is going to be that when I have to perform, maybe people will recognize that I'm not what I think I am, or I'm not what I say I am. This is the sense of being an imposter that people feel. So it comes actually not from a feeling of insecurity, but a feeling of being too high, having too high expectations, expecting too much and demanding too much and thinking that i'm higher than i really am
and that terror of seeing how you really are where you have to learn and maybe you're kind of mediocre you're not as great as you think you are.
But we also have here in north america so much praise we're we're a we're a nation of a north american continent i suppose of praise and i see that when i i'm out and about and I see parents reacting with their children. Good boy, Bobby. Come on, Bobby. Oh, good. You put the book on the table. Great, Bobby. That's fantastic. Let's go, buddy.
Right? Praise, praise, praise, praise, praise, which seems to exacerbate this problem of megalomania, doesn't it? It's very bad for somebody. Yeah,
Richard: because it's built into that, Susan, is this terror of seeing mistakes and of pointing out mistakes. If I point out the mistakes to my kid, I'm going to traumatize him for the rest of his life, and then I'm going to be the subject of all the psychoanalysis he needs to do for the next 50 years to try to resolve the trauma that I gave to him.
So inside this idea of praise and we're the best, we're number one, inside all of that is this enormous resistance to seeing any kind of problem in myself or in other people.
And in work groups, it's equally destructive because problems are kept under the table and people are afraid to come forward with them. If you build up a culture of hypocrisy, really, it's hypocrisy, isn't it?
Richard: Sure. And also, you know, if you can't have mistakes, then if you talk about your mistakes, you're a loser. So because you can't have mistakes, you've got to be perfect. You've got to be right. You've got to be correct. You've got to hide the reality from people. This creates an enormous sense that I'm an imposter because in a way I am an imposter because I'm not the greatest thing in the world.
And a lot of the capacity that I have does not come from my own merit.
It doesn't come from me saying I have.
Richard: And that too. And even if I have achieved a lot of success in what I do, at some point, I've had to rely on something that wasn't created by me. Like you and I work with our voice all the time. So we have this natural capacity inside our voice that we've trained and worked with to develop.
But the vocal cords don't come from us. So in effect, we're not responsible for the fact that we have a voice. So we can't take so much credit for what we've done we shouldn't take so much credit for what we've done and that's why you see the greatest athletes or musicians the ones who've really achieved this high level they're very humble people.
They recognize that they've done this with a lot of help from god with a lot of help from circumstances from other people from people who made the instrument from conductors from people who wrote the music from all there's a lot of help that comes into to becoming successful in this world.
And this megalomania that you're talking about this praise over praising one of the worst things you could do by the way with kids is over praise you must always praise for hard work results are the consequence of hard work and dedication not the result of talent. If you praise kids for talent you will find them becoming more insecure because if they have talent, the moment something becomes difficult, they'll question their talent.
Oh, maybe I don't have talent anymore. I thought I had talent yesterday. I thought I had talent, but today, so they question their talent and they get into a big insecurity. So praising for talent, praising for good looks, this is a disaster for kids and also for adults. But what happens in this culture that you're describing so well, Susan, is an enormous alienation.
Because if I don't recognize the problem in myself, then I become alienated from the real problem.
And I'm going to think that the problem is something externally. So I'm alienated from the truth. I don't know myself, and I also don't really know what's going on. And that creates a type of paranoia. Right? Everybody's out to get me. Everybody's looking at me. Why are they persecuting me? What's wrong with me? All of this stuff becomes about me. And I become very alienated by that because then I don't have any contact for what's going on.
I also don't have any strength to deal with real criticism, honest criticism, useful criticism. I don't have any ability to deal with that. So I alienate myself. I stay away from people because in contact with people, I have to see the truth. And this is what happens to those people that just snap. They're always very alienated people because when you're in contact with others, you have to deal with your problems.
So if I don't want to deal with the problems, I'll just alienate myself and stay separate from all
that. And also I might not try to grow and learn anything as we age, you know, that becomes key, you know, because people reach a certain level, they get comfortable because we are to learn anything. You have to see how, what you don't know, right.
To really incorporate taking a musical instrument or a course or whatever you do, you know, it's a bath in what you don't know
Richard: really is a lot of that. Yeah. Anybody knows that it's it's "what you learn after you know it all that counts" as John Wooden said. So we have to be very humble to learn and grow and the great the great athletes know that they watch tapes endlessly of their performance constantly evaluating and the great ones they give a lot of credit to the other great ones they're not they don't put themselves above others they say you know if they lose a game they'll say "well hey don't don't look at me look at that guy he played better he was take your hat off to those guys you know they were they were the better team tonight or he was the better player tonight."
It's a humble position to take with life. And then you can see as we
Cláudia: go further, just to
Richard: take the third point, how this can lead to a big delusion. Because if we don't see reality, then we create a narrative about reality that's simply not true. It could be extremely exaggerated. And then we get into like schizoparanoid personalities. People who create secondary realities because they don't want to live in the true reality.
So they create another life for themselves and live in that as if it's real. And so it becomes very serious. This problem of not seeing our inversions. We we get we can become very mentally sick. And sometimes we go too far. It's very difficult to come
back. Yeah. And people I can hear the people saying right now what do I do about it right rich you know.
So then that gets into the confusion around seeing a
Richard: problem versus having a problem right.
Yeah yeah. You're
a psychoanalyst talk about.
Richard: I'm I know I'm sure your clients say that to you all the time when they get in a consciousness. I say what an american question that is because it's a totally. And because we say that because actually the consciousness of the problem is difficult to see. We don't want to see it. So that's a type of censorship.
What do I do about that? Well, first of all, there's nothing to do about it, because let's say I have an economic problem. I say to you, oh, Susan, I can't continue my training with you because I don't have enough money. And what I'm really saying is I'm now perceiving how I don't have enough money. And working with you is giving me the consciousness to be able to recognize that.
So I'm working with you. I'm starting to recognize the problems that I have in my life, including my problem with money.
And so now what I'm going to do is stop working with you because then I will forget, I'll lose the consciousness that I'm having a problem with money. In other words, I'm going to try to avoid working with you because you're going to bring me consciousness of this problem I have. I'm going to do exactly the wrong thing because the problem I have with money did not start now.
If I've got a problem with money, it's something that started some time ago. So now I'm having consciousness of it, which is excellent because if I have consciousness of it, I can begin to take steps to deal with it. And the first thing I should do is continue my training so I have better ability to deal with the problem of money that I have.
The worst thing I could do is stop my training. But that's what people will do. They'll want to run away from the consciousness that they're having in the training that they're doing.
Thinking that it's the training that's causing the problem. It's not the training that's causing the problem. It's the problem is being recognized now. And that's really good right. It's
really good you know. Another a clear example I think is gym membership right. You know you're out of shape you're overweight you join a
Cláudia: gym and it's you pay by of the month or whatever it
Richard: is.
And you get into it and you start seeing you know you got to show up in those leotards with you know that spare tire hanging over whatever
it is. And it's like make it stop. Why do they always put mirrors in these places you know. But they do and and so therefore that consciousness becomes too much for people.
Richard: They're yeah you know I just can't afford it or whatever they say.
But like you say it's that very consciousness we need more of you know.
Yeah. A client said to me the other day, "Richard, I'm having such consciousness. I've learned a lot and now I'm going to stop analysis." And that's exactly what happened. Just as the person starts to develop, to improve, they stop. They stopped doing what it was that got them there. And what people don't recognize that this is like a inverted idea. That it's almost like I can't stand that much success.
I can't stand that much development. So I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop doing what brought me the development in the first place. And this is a huge problem when we're dealing with with students. We notice this in our language school that just when people start to develop, they stop. They want to stop. They think that now, okay, now I've reached the point and it's almost like they can't tolerate to go further to keep developing.
And so inside that has nothing to do with the language or the voiceover training or whatever it is. It's this sense that the person has that they're against their own development. There's an inverted idea. If I develop too much, it's going to cause me a problem. Almost like
if I love too much, Love causes a problem. Those types of inversions or goodness in
Richard: my life causes a problem.
And again, guys.
I've been good all week, Susan. Now I'm going to go on a binge. Oh, I'm going to treat myself. I've been good all week. Yeah. Oh, people do that all the time. All the time. I deserve a treat. Yeah. I
Richard: deserve to completely destroy what I've been doing all week. Yeah.
However you do that, you know, as people do it, have a drink, eat a candy bar, whatever it is that they do.
Richard: It's incredible. So this sort of inverted attitude against our own development, against our own happiness, is very, very strong.
And Keppe has studied this in terms of studying the human will, which has never really been analyzed in the schools of philosophy and certainly psychology for the last 2,000 years. Nobody's really taken on the will. So the will of the human being, and here's the problem we have in North America, Susan, we think we always have good intentions. And once in a while we make a mistake.
And then when we make a mistake, we say, Oh God, I can't believe I did that. It's not me. That's not me. I don't normally do that. And we try to cover up that. But in fact, the human being is inverted at the level of desire, at the level of will. If you look at the things that you prefer to do, that you most like doing, many times those will be secondary pleasure things.
Traveling. Watching television. Watching movies. Going out with friends.
What wonderful things but not the essential things in life if we want to really develop. And then if you say um uh what are the things that will bring the most development for you. Then it's work. Then it's discipline. It's study. It's, in some cases, sacrifice of things, you know. So you see that the things that we prefer to do many times are linked to pleasure, but the things that really bring happiness are linked to this sense of fulfillment, deeper satisfaction, which means many times overcoming those things of pleasure.
In order to work, I have to get out of bed in the morning. In order to study, I have to open a book. I have to get out of Netflix, you know. So this inversion at the level of will, Keppe's discovered. So many, many people would need to recognize we act against our own development many times.
Not consciously, we're not conscious of it, but we act against our own development. And this is very difficult to see for North Americans.
Yeah. And that's why psychoanalysis, our courses on therapy for the world, reading books that deal with this issue are so important, watching programs like this, Rich. Yeah. And I think that this is a movement that we're participating in. It's very exciting, a movement of consciousness.
But, you know, I want to circle back to something you said before about success. And people say all the time, "I'm afraid of success." But you said,
Richard: no, you can't stand success. There's a difference there. Yeah, it's a
really, really inverted.
Richard: Yeah, inverted idea. But we have the idea that we're always striving for success. And if there's something that gets in the way, our procrastination or our laziness or some kind of block that comes up, then that's the impediment that we have to deal with.
So I've got to solve my laziness. I've got to deal with my procrastination. And we developed this 10 steps to solving procrastination, right? You're not really procrastinating. You're just, you've got a cortisol problem in your brain. Okay, so we have this kind of built-in thing, what's going on. But in fact, the human being acts against goodness much more than he thinks. We human beings are much more pathological than we think.
Pathological means we act against our health. We're much more that way than we think. And that's not just in terms of diet and money and things like that. It's also in terms of our own satisfaction, our own fulfillment. We can act against that without recognizing what we do. And that's very difficult for us to see because it doesn't seem rational. Why would I act against my own happiness?
And that's something that's looked at very deeply in the work that you and I do, of course, Susan, with our students. And Dr. Keppe has been doing for 60 or 70 years, trying to help people see that the problem is not in sickness. The problem is in the attitudes, the behaviors we have against health. We act against our health. We act against our own success.
We act against our own relationships and love and own affection. We act against those in an inconscientized way. So if we can increase our tolerance to seeing those things, those attitudes we have, then we can treat them. That's the process
of what we do. Yeah, it is. And, you know, I want to also broaden that when you say we act against our health.
Any if we're angry we're acting we're against and we don't control it we're against our health. If we lie if we gossip right.
Oh it's so so it's that it's also at the level of the seven deadly sins you know. Not to be moralistic
Richard: but those things do affect our psychological and our physical well-being. "Exactly right you said it at the beginning right. Sickness is the kind of distortion of health, the destruction of health. Sickness does not exist as this balance point that we need a little sickness and a little health to be healthy, right?
Nature doesn't work that way. Nature's balance is 100% health. So 100% health. And if I'm sick, then I'm doing something in some way emotionally, psychologically, physically against my health. And that I need to be conscious of that. I'm not a victim of what's happening to me. I'm making choices that make me act against my own health, against my own success, against my own happiness.
And this needs to be explored by each of us."
Richard: Yes, it does. Inversion's a tricky thing because it operates under the surface, causing us problems without us realizing it. The good news is this can be conscientized, Meaning we can shine the light of consciousness on these inverted ideas and behaviors, and that has a very positive impact on our lives. Seeing where we're inverted restores us to natural sanity. That's a big silver lining.
More about Keppe's discoveries in inversion can be found in his book, Glorification, available on Amazon. That's our program, Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Like us, share us, spread our podcast around. See you next time.
About how to stop destroying ourselves and the world.
Cláudia: I remember the book Glorification that Dr.
Keppe wrote.
I was with him many of the nights or days where he got those inspirations from God, and it was a necessity for him to write what he received. So the book was totally written under inspiration. But it's not only a theological book. It's mostly a scientific book. Very therapeutic book, very beautiful by the way, and he used to wake up during the night, two, three in the morning, and he said, "let's go to the top of the mountain." And we were watching the sky in this dark night with no interference, so you could transcend the sky and see heaven through it.
Oh my God, you could adapt the writings that he did with the music of Beethoven, And this would be a trilogy of his writings and the music. It would be heaven.
Richard: Norberto Keppe's Glorification.
We can tell how unbalanced a person is by how much they idealize.
Norberto Keppe. Disinverting the human being and society.
