Richard Lloyd Jones: We've been seduced by them and horrified by them, encouraged to tune out with them and spurn them violently as instruments of the devil. We've seen them reduce users to living in hovels and elevate dealers to palatial mansions. Legal or illegal, they're being used and abused in record numbers in our so-called evolving society. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the inversion driving substance abuse.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Well, this is some topic to consider, let me tell you. Drug abuse is a monumental topic because there are so many aspects to consider. For one thing, there's the personal aspect. Probably all of us have some direct experience with it, from our favorite uncle with a drinking problem to horror stories of close friends and family members destroying lives, families with out-of-control substance abuse problems.
There's the social aspect, of course, of modern life being so bereft of meaning and purpose and spiritual value. There's the psychopathic aspect, which is always present when astronomical prophets are involved. But there is some comfort to be offered in the work of Brazilian-Austrian psychoanalyst and social scientist Norberto Keppe, whose work we will be discussing in great detail at our International Conference of Analytical Trilogy, Keppe's Science, September 24th to 27th, 2008, in San Diego.
You just need to write me for info on that conference, rich at richjonesvoice.com, or check out our site, www.wcatus.org. Shakespeare said, How far that little candle throws his beams, so shines a good deed in a weary world. That is a perfect description of Norberto Keppe's work, reaching to the core of our difficulties and offering a strong hand up and out and into our true position as beautiful, good, and true beings in a loving universe.
But first, we have some problems to see in order to get there, right? Sofie Bergqvist is a teacher here at our International Society of Analytical Trilogy. She has been developing deep work in the roots of substance abuse for our September conference, and I wanted to invite her on the program today. Sophie, I don't want to get into the numbers game, you know, how many people have drug abuse problems around the world, what are the statistics, all that kind of thing.
I want to get right into an analysis of how Keppe's science gets to the problem and offers hope for a solution. What's the difference between how Keppe sees this problem of substance abuse and how everybody else sees it?
Sofie Bergqvist: Well, I think that most people immediately think, and what is most common to hear also in these terms, is that the person uses these substances, psychoactive substances, to escape.
To escape from problems, to escape from this consciousness that he or she has, and also escaping from the guilt feelings, which he actually starts having also because of the drugs. It's a vicious circle because of this drug abuse, the guilt feelings increase, and he needs more of these substances to escape also from the situation that he has put himself into. So this is, I think, what most people associate substance abuse with.
But in Dr. Kempi's work, there is also something. This is true, of course. Of course, people use these substances as they use many, many other things to escape from consciousness. And what I remember when I was like 16 or 17 years old, I remember a lecture I watched in Stockholm with Cesar Soós, who works with the science of Dr. Norberto Cappi. And I remember even today, I don't even remember the topic of the lecture, but I remember when he started talking about smoking.
And he said that we have to see what does the person associate the cigarette with? What is the cigarette for the person who is smoking? What do you associate a cigarette with? And he mentioned a person who answered pleasure. So he said, we have to see then that the person smokes, he destroys himself, and he feels a pleasure in destroying himself. And I remember even today that he said this.
And I said, so the person has a pleasure, it's an active decision to actually destroy yourself. And then I started studying more of Dr. Roberto Chiapas' work, and I found out more about this discovery of inversion. Let
Richard: me come to a point first before you talk about inversion, because you piqued something in my interest when you talked about this, that we have an active desire.
And in your paper that you're developing for our conference in San Diego on this subject, you used a quote from one of Dr. Keppe's books, The Origin of Illness. Dr. Keppe says, our fundamental human problem lies in our censorship of any consciousness of envy. Which is why psychotherapy is the process that can break down our resistance towards seeing our bad feelings and destructive attitudes.
So when you talk about this active thing, I just want to clarify for people, it's not something that people wake up in the morning and go, let me see, how can I destroy myself today? It's not active in that sense, but it is conscious to us. We've just inconscientized it or hidden from it. Talk a little bit about how Dr. Keppe sees that and how you see that in understanding his work.
Sofie: Well, in terms of inversion, when he discovered inversion in 1977, he immediately also started to discover the inversions in many, many, many other fields, like physics, economy, biology, medicine. And he started feeling and seeing and analyzing deeply the inversions in all of these fields. And and what's interesting, for example, in the terms of inversion, and what he mentions a lot, is the will.
So he wrote a book called Liberation from the Will. And this book, it totally changes this kind of view that we have today. We have this totally will dominated society, right? You should do what you want. You have to think about what you want. What do you feel like doing? You have to think of yourself. And people are totally lost in this idea that I have to satisfy all of my desire.
If not, I'm going to be unhappy in my life. In
Richard: in your paper you quote from this book Liberation from the Will. Yeah, because we and we need to talk a lot about this today, because the will has really never been analyzed in the history of philosophy, certainly in psychology never, only Norberto Keppe is doing this. And so so it's a very important subject.
In Dr. Keppe's book, you have a quote from there saying, the will is man's biggest enemy. Wow.
Sofie: What is he talking about there? Yeah, oh my God, really. Well, he says also in this book, he explains very deeply the question of the will. And he speaks about actually two kinds of will. He says we have deeply inside an ethical will, some natural will, which follows the natural laws, which wants good things and wants us to be healthy.
And the problem is that we think that this is the only will we have, to grow in life, to develop, to be good people, to learn things. And he shows very clearly in this book that we have another pathological will. It's a desire, and it's extremely strong in all of us, and it wants the opposite. It's inverted. He even says in this same quote that if you think that this statement is a little bit strange, is because you have still not understood the question of inversion.
So if you start understanding the question of this wrong perception of reality, then you can also start seeing that actually you fight every day with this will that you have, this inverted will.
Richard: Let's use some examples to explain this, Sophie, because I think
Sofie: theoretically we can sort of, oh, that's an interesting idea, the will is inverted, I never thought about that, but my will is inverted?
How are you going to prove that to me? Um waking up in the morning, you hear the alarm clock ringing. The desire that you have in that moment is probably not to wake up in a good mood and immediately go to your work. You have to fight with your desire to stay in bed. And you have to fight with your desire even to to study, to go to school.
You know that you have these books to study. I know that tomorrow I have a big day and I have to do this, but my family is watching a comedy on TV. And oh my god, I'd like to see that comedy. And I have these books to study. And you have this inner fighting with yourself. What you're going to do in this moment?
And you have to frustrate this inverted will a lot if you really are going to do the right thing in your life, with studies, with work, with healthy food, treating yourself well, sleeping in the right time. We feel like we are very limited, and we feel a lot of sacrifice when we have to do the right thing all the
Richard: time. That's true.
You can even have an experience when you're very very busy doing lots of new and creative and wonderful things. You can find yourself being complaining about that. Sure, you know this is something that happens a lot to people. But is this inverted will like um layered over top of this correct will that Dr Keppe was talking about? What is this? Where or is it a perversion of this correct will?
How do you see this?
Sofie: In the book, he speaks about the liberation from the will and from the free will. So he also enters this very big philosophical topic of the free will of the human being. And we... Associated free will with liberty, right? It's the possibility of choosing. You can choose. And he shows in this book, in a philosophical way and very deeply, that actually we use our free will only when we don't want to do the right thing.
Because when we do the right thing, we are actually just accepting our place in the universe. We are just doing what God wanted us to do and what is good for me, what is good for the others. And I'm just following the natural order. And I don't need to use any of my own wills. I'm just doing what I should do. But if I really don't want to do that, I use my free will to say no.
I'm not going to do that. And this kind of sensation of power, of saying no to good things, you can see extremely clearly, especially in young people, in teenagers. It's this revolted time when you're supposed to say no to all the good advices from your parents. And your parents are trying to have you do the right thing and be with the right kind of friends and really take care of your school and do some sports.
And they are so worried, and they're giving a lot of good advices and really trying to help a lot. And for the teenager, it's a big terror to have to do exactly this. It's like it's it's feeling like a sacrifice of being submissive, of being limited. I'm not being restricted. Yes, I'm being myself. I'm
Richard: I'm grown up now. Leave me alone. And the sensation of liberty and power is to say no and do exactly the opposite.
Wow, this is interesting, because this link then with this uh strong will, free will against goodness, this has to show up very clearly in the abuse of drugs, alcohol. This It has to
Sofie: be like a fundamental aspect of it, doesn't it? And that's probably also why addictions normally start in the teens. It's a very, very vulnerable time, and it's a time of choice, and it's many times the time of your life that you decide what's going to happen in your future life.
Richard: Dr. Keppe says in his book, Liberation from the Wheel, he says, the first recommendation would be not to believe in one's own desire. Yeah. And he says, I can affirm that the human being uses his will to trouble his own life. So we need to have more doubt about ourselves. And I know we're going to be talking to a lot of Americans in this program, and I know that that's going to go directly against.
It's going to sound very negative.
Sofie: In Sweden, too, you're supposed to do. But I think that we have to, because we, too, we know what happens when we yield to this kind of forbidden fruits. We have this big desire of doing something that actually somewhere I know that I shouldn't do this. And when I have done it, I feel so bad. And the opposite is also true in a positive sense, because when I frustrate myself and I do something positive and I really do something good for me and good for the others, I do a good action, I feel so good afterwards.
It's this big relief that I did what I should do. What
Richard: is psychologically then behind this inverted will? What are the psychological basis of this? Where does it come from, Sophia?
Sofie: It's envy, basically. It's envy which leads to this kind of inversion.
Richard: Envy in a much different definition of this word than it is
Sofie: normally. Yeah, it's a definition of Dr. Keppe, that envy in the sense of wanting to destroy, this sensation of not accepting good things, not giving value to what really has value in life, this beautiful life that we have, all of our talents, all this health that we have.
Even it's an interesting also example from last week, a girl in my class, actually, she was smoking and somebody wanted to tell her about this. She's a young, very beautiful girl and somebody wanted to say to her, but look, you're such a beautiful young girl. Why do you need that? And don't you know what's going to happen to your face and to everything?
And she got so angry and she said, look, this is my health, this is my body and this is my life. So you can be quiet and then I and I felt and I and I noticed that this is not true actually because my health is not only mine my body is not only mine this body it's it's like Dr. Keppe also says this body is a gift.
This body and this health that I have, I didn't create this, and I have to take care of it as I need to take care of the planet or about my mental health or about the others. And I don't have the right to destroy this. It's not mine in that sense. When people say you no, this is my life, this is my body, I do what I want with this.
But it's not really true, not in a metaphysical sense in the work of Dr. Keppe.
Richard: Dr. Keppe talks a lot about the phases of development in the psyche, and this might be helpful for people to understand more when we're analyzing why we get sort of stuck in these immature ways of being. And the first phase that he talks about psychologically, actually I think Freud talked about it before Dr.
Keppe, but Dr. Keppe has really expanded his view. Is this oral phase that we have from the time we're
Sofie: from zero to two years of age. Yeah, we
Richard: want to put everything in our mouths. What's the what is this phase? How do we understand this? And what's its link to substance abuse, to alcohol and drugs?
Sofie: And Dr Kept imagining, he says that actually drug abuse and alcohol too and cigarettes, it's a continuation.
It's the same desire that the little baby has of taking everything in the mouth. This pleasure that the baby shows manifest when he's breastfeeding or when he's he's taking something in his mouth. And that see the cigarette is a kind of a continuation. It's a substitute for this breastfeeding or for the soother. Do you say yeah,
Richard: there's this soother that he puts in his mouth to calm him down, calm
Sofie: him down.
And this satisfaction that the baby shows is the same when the the person in a stressful situation needs to go out and have a cigarette. This relief of taking something in the mouth. This is also one of the reasons why the cigarette many times to stop. The person needs to substitute it by food or by a chewing gum. He needs something in the mouth.
And Dr. Kepes says that this also proves that people who are substance abusers are very attached to this first phase of life. The mentality is very similar to a little baby of one or two years old, actually. And it means that this sensorial pleasure, it's put in the first place. It's more important than other values in life. And the person wants to get as much as possible of sensations and happiness from this sensorial pleasure.
Food, too, or drinking or drugs, whatever, but it's a sensorial pleasure.
Richard: You know what I'm struck with as you're speaking, Sophie, is how much of ourselves we don't understand. We don't see. This is not like a really conscious thing for us. It's something that we've hidden from our view. And Dr. Keppe's work, I think when people are looking at it for the first time, they can think, well, why are you being so negative?
Why are you seeing only the problems? But
Sofie: what Dr. Keppe is trying to do is to make us conscious of the way we're blocking the truth of ourselves. Like underneath all of these neuroses and problems and pathologies and envies and inversions is a beautiful essence of life that's the same as life anywhere in the universe. And we're blocking that, restricting it, and we don't perceive it.
Yeah, yes. We are kind of exchanging the highest beauties and values of life for something very secondary or very small.
Richard: So we have a big addiction to this sensorial life.
Sofie: Maybe you could talk a bit about that. In his book, The Origin of Sanity, he speaks very much about this kind of inversion. It's another kind of inversion, right? And it's manifested in the sense that we automatically, we have a facility to exchange the real psychological happiness, this inner happiness that we might feel and we can feel.
Actually, we have everything to feel this happiness any moment. We want, actually. And this inner knowledge and satisfaction and harmony. And we try to find this in sensorial elements. So we are kind of mixing up and confused between what's real happiness and what is a sensorial pleasure. Because eating something is a pleasure, it's fantastic, but it's not gonna make me happy. When the chocolate is finished, the satisfaction is finished.
So you said that uh it's the same with food or it can be. We kind of think that having something or eating something is going to feel some emptiness that I'm feeling inside, and I'm looking in the wrong direction. He says it's interiorizing, going into yourself, the spiritual values, the good action in your life. This is what really gives pleasure. It's not only the sensorial things.
Richard: Yeah, Dr. Keppe says in this book, you quoted the origin of sanity, that the seed of human illness lies in our excessively sensorial conduct, which puts us on a lower plane in regard to our dignity. To the truth of ourselves, right? So
Sofie: as we're looking at these problems, we do this a lot in the in the podcast, trying to show, trying to conscientize people that we have this part
Richard: of ourselves that we're not seeing.
Humanity is just not seeing it. We everybody knows we should stop destroying the planet. Everybody knows they should stop smoking. Everybody knows we should feed people, educate people, but we don't do it. We've got something deeper that we're not perceiving. And I think my passion in this program is to try to help people understand this in a deeper way. Because
Sofie: it's interesting, too, because when you speak to people who have managed to stop or get out from some kind of addiction, you see that there is this moment of consciousness.
It's practically always a moment of consciousness of what they are really doing to themselves and also a strong will somewhere or desire to be better, to do better with myself, with the others, to change. There is this good action together with a moment of consciousness in some way. So this consciousness of the problem in itself is totally fundamental. Yeah,
Richard: so if we're, I was just thinking about people who are listening now who are either facing an addiction themselves or dealing with somebody in their family who has this problem, and that's probably, all of us can see that in some way in our families, in our friends.
What do you do? How do you try to help somebody? What can people do, Sophie, to really help people who are facing this? In
Sofie: integral psychoanalysis, one thing that you can see very clearly in a family, for example, when there is a family problem in relation to whatever it is, or let's say alcohol, somebody in the family has a problem with alcohol, there is also most of the time a family pact involved, where people also have difficulties to deal with this problem.
They either they they censor too much or they demand too much or they omit or they don't know how to do. They get involved psychologically. They get down to there is a difficulty in the family to deal with the problem. And everybody has the tendency to see the problem only in this person because substance abuse, smoking, for example, is very visible. If a person is smoking, you see what he's doing and you know and you show the statistics.
Look what happens. 300% greater risk of having a heart attack. Don't you see what you're doing to yourself? And we have a very easy way of seeing the problem in that person because he manifests it so clearly. And we don't see that we might have, and we have for sure, different aspects of self-destructivity or pathologies that might not appear so much. I was for example talking to another girl this week.
She's a woman, she's already divorced and she's still talking badly about her husband because he smokes. I can't believe it, I can't believe. And he has been sick and he has had a heart attack and he continues smoking. And she's very very identified with this problem. And I said to her, but can't you see that you are very identified, that you see in him this self-destructive attitude that he insists on this and he doesn't change, but you have this problem too.
That's why you get so involved. And she got quiet for a while and she said, well I have a problem with working, because I need to work and I don't. And every day I wake up and I say to myself I need to go and find a new job. I need to stand on my own. I can't just live on the money from my ex-husband.
I need to do something with my life and I don't. I have been like this for years and I continue with this. So it's another way. You have people have different pathologies and different ways of stopping themselves or creating trouble in their lives, like Dr Capi wrote about the will. But when a person is using alcohol or drugs or cigarettes, so clear, it's so visible, so it's very easy that other people see the problem only in this person.
Richard: Okay, so uh this is a fantastic experience of interiorization. And in our pre-interview you were talking about how if a person doesn't have this interiorized aspect of what they're really doing, they will not take steps
Sofie: to get better. So this is important for us to see in our families, our friends, that they're giving us a lot of consciousness. But let's talk in practical terms too.
Yeah, because I was thinking that in general, for example, I know at the clinic here of Dr. Roberto Chiappi, if somebody has a problem in the family, what can we do more than treating ourselves first? So if I see somebody in my family suffering from this kind of problem, I see that he's destroying himself. I need to treat myself first to see what I can do in a better way to solve or to help him, or what I can do even for me to feel better in all of the situations, so that I don't go together down with this person and to be stronger psychologically to know how to deal with this person.
And because what happens is that many times the person with the substance abuse denies. Everybody knows that. So there is a very strong denial and unfortunately there is no way to treat somebody who is denying his own problem or who doesn't want to be better. So you can't force a person to stop destroying himself. And the only thing you can do if the person is not willing to help himself yet is to start analyzing yourself, your own aspects, how you can be stronger psychologically and to deal better with the situation.
And many times we have seen at the clinic that this helps a lot in a way or another. Many times I have for example a case that happened last year, a woman who came in for it, for she wanted to do sessions of analysis, psychoanalysis, because her husband is a period alcoholic. Period. Sometimes he drinks a lot and it creates many problems.
He lost his job because of this and and he's been drinking for many many years and he doesn't think he has a problem and he refuses to do any kind of treatment. So she came for analysis because she's, she was feeling so bad. And after some time she started feeling better with herself and more harmonic in her life, stronger in herself. And all of a sudden she came back and she said you know what, my husband hasn't been drinking for two months.
I don't know what happened. He doesn't know either.
Richard: This is the question of resonance, isn't it? I think there's a something
Sofie: of resonance that people, because we all have this spark inside us of beauty, goodness, truth, it's all there, it's there in all of us, that we, if we are at some moment quiet enough, interiorized enough, we will resonate with what's true in the world and not what's wrong with the world.
And we will rise to that situation. So this is very good advice, I think. What
Richard: can we do is to try to get our lives in order. We need to enter this question now, Sophie, because we need to talk about the social aspect of this. We were talking a lot about what's going on inside the person. But we have a society that's very sick.
We have completely unequal states between first world, third world. We have lots of people dying because they don't have the adequate means of survival. And that's being caused by our socioeconomic system. So what's the link between our society and drug abuse, substance abuse? How do we see that?
Sofie: Well, there are many sociopathological aspects. You have very clear ones like the peer pressure at school.
Where everybody has to show off in front of the address and normally doing bad things. And you have, for example, in problematic environments, like sometimes in families where you see the parents having problem without, it's very easy, everybody knows that there is this kind of psychogenetic aspect, which is also related to the social aspect. And we have also a society today which kind of provokes our inversion a lot.
We have a lot of these adverts and commercials on TV stimulating this inversion to use more alcohol, to smoke more. And it plays with our inversion a little bit. It gives us this idea that cigarette is adventure, masculinity, liberty. Many alcohol brands also, they give this impression of pleasure, something sophisticated or some liberty to courage, party. So we have this a lot in society as a big big pressure from everywhere to consume more.
You have pressure everywhere to consume. For example um because of this, this inversion that we have in society, it's a little bit strange if you don't drink, you know. If you don't smoke it's okay today, it's accepted, but if you don't drink you're a little bit strange. Why not? What's strange with you? What's wrong with you? So in a in a social environment it's, it's you're supposed to to drink because that's the the normal for society today.
So we have these social aspects in our social life, and then we have of course when it comes to illicit drugs or drugs in general we have more serious aspects also involved, where we have a huge profit of money being involved, where there of course are lots of interest that more and more people use and consume drugs. We have I think probably the most profitable market in the world and with very covered numbers.
We don't know exactly but many trillions of dollars involved. Yeah this
Richard: is going in right through the banking system into the United States. Now there's the um according to the
Sofie: department of justice in the United States, the U.S. Launders between 500 billion and 1 trillion dollars annually from illegal crime profits. Not all of that is drugs, of course, but that's a lot of money that's coming into the system.
Yes, it's a lot. So
Richard: somebody's making a lot of money on this,
Sofie: right? They say that they think that the final profit of the drug trade in the world is bigger than the GDP of 88% of the countries in the world, and it's, it's much bigger, much much bigger than the export value of all the cereals in the world.
Richard: And of course where people are susceptible is if they feel in the world no hope, if they feel
Sofie: no art, no beauty, there's no opportunity for them.
This is it just makes the the situation rife for doing something to escape from this terrible situation. Yeah it's, yes, it's a fact that in all... Kinds of miserable places, in poor places, in some developing countries, the problem of the people are much more vulnerable for these kind of substance abuses. So there is a very close link between the quality of life you have, where you live, even the neighborhood you live in, the school you go to, and the question of how strong you are to these kind of pleasures.
So
Richard: I think then, Sophie, if we're thinking about how to solve this problem,
Sofie: trying to help people, there is a lot of scope for us as human beings to work hard to create
Richard: a better society, to contribute. This will make an enormous
Sofie: contribution to get off our ass and do something to make the world a better place to live in. Cláudia Pacheco, in her book, in her report that she wrote on drugs in 1990, I think, she claims that there are two levels of treatment of substance abuse.
We have the individual level, but we also have, actually the individual level is 80% or more, but the social aspect needs to be better too. The quality of life, the opportunities just you offer for a better future for people or more culture, more art, more equality, more beauty in life in general. This is fundamental for people to not feel this necessity to take the drugs.
Many people who stop using drugs, they say that they noticed that there were other values in life that are so much more interesting and more beautiful than this pleasure of taking the drug. And when they discover this other value, the spiritual value or the value of real friendship or just of traveling to a place and just enjoy the beauty of the place and the company.
And when they feel and they start feeling this, they notice that they don't need the alcohol anymore. They don't need the drug anymore to have this kind of sensorial pleasure. So it's a in sociopathological aspect there is also the the intention to to numb people's consciousness. This intention actually of it has always been used, for example the revolution, the industrial revolution, when the the establishment used to give opium to the workers for them to kind of to soften a little bit this miserable situation, the conditions where they lived in.
And you can see in any kind of warfare how they always have cigarettes available, alcohol, drugs. There is this intention to kind of soften, to have people accept whatever happens or whatever condition they live in, to numb people's consciousness and to have passive people. So I think even today, this enormous consumption of antidepressants and psychoactive medicines, it's also a way to kind of have people accept difficult situations that we shouldn't actually accept.
We should do something about this world, have a better place, a more beautiful world, more equal, more liberty, more many things. And so there is this aspect too when Cláudia Pacheco says we cannot only blame the young people for using drugs, we also have to see the social life that they have and the world that they live in today. And
Richard: for sure we have to go deeper into our understanding of ourselves and the society we live in.
Right, you'll have a chance to do that in our new teleclass series coming soon, rich at richjonesvoice.com for information. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
