Richard Lloyd Jones: It's so terrible as to seem surreal. To survivors and families of victims, it must feel as if they'll never overcome it. It jolts all of us out of our normal lives and rams us face to face with a reality we seldom have to face. Thank God. We're swamped with opinions from every possible angle, but precious little understanding. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, making sense of Virginia Tech.
Benjamin Franklin said that the tragedy of life is that we get old too soon and wise too late. There are 32 people from Virginia Tech who will not have the luxury now of becoming either older or wiser. That opportunity was snatched away April 16th by an obviously demented and troubled young man. In Unforgiven, his bleak but wonderful film about morality and death and murder, Clint Eastwood says, It's a terrible thing to kill a man.
You take away all he has and all he's ever going to be. We are really reminded of that now. But how do we make sense of this? For make sense we must, because this horror that many in the U.S. Are living through is a daily fact of life for millions around our troubled globe. And if we want to contribute to stopping this, and I believe we must contribute in some way, to stopping this enormous, humanly caused death and destruction, we must begin to try to face the causes of it.
St. Augustine was courageous when he said that he had the same tendencies inside him of the worst criminals. I mention this not to suggest that we are the same as the Virginia Tech killer, but that we must begin to see our part in the greater panorama of human destruction on our planet. After all, people are suffering in Afghanistan and Baghdad and Somalia and Rwanda, as well as Virginia.
Furthermore, Virginia is an anomaly. Those others are ongoing. I believe that it is this understanding of our human destruction that we have an opportunity to become more conscious of now. So that we can take big steps not to healing but to resolving the problems in the human soul that cause us to create such a destructive society. Today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head a profound conversation with Dr.
Cláudia Pacheco, vice president of the International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo, Brazil, about how we can understand Virginia Tech. Cláudia, how are you analyzing this terrible situation?
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: I have read all these comments you sent me by email. And I have read also some comments that went on on TV and on newspapers. And it seems that they have three focuses, main focuses, on the guy himself, Chou Chung-hui, what he did, why he did it, and on the people who were the victims, the families of the victims.
And there is also one focus in why socially speaking this is happening more and more each day. It's like a social problem which is going on. It must be addressed. So we have threefold focuses then. And I see that the main focus of what happened to this boy is that he manifested what we have been speaking many times here, Jones, which is a common denominator in all human beings.
And that it can become very dangerous if we don't, if we are not aware of this problem in our inner selves, which is this huge envy he manifested when he shot all these people and the comments he made. I was like pressed. You gave me no other chance. I had to do it because you were so... And the comments he made were as if those people lived an incredible life of fun and richness and out of
Richard: his
Cláudia: own unhappiness.
Richard: He made reference to like their Mercedes-Benzes and their jewelry and their cognac and these kind of things. But explain for us envy a little bit, Connie, because although we've talked about it, this is still a very misunderstood concept. And Keppe's explanation is very comprehensive.
Cláudia: I want to bring some excerpts of Keppe's comments because his book, Origin of Illness, is very illustrative in this situation.
Because he continued, he gave more depth for the studies that Freud started and then Melanie Klein continued. And then Keppe put it even in more focus and sharp way of analyzing it.
Richard: Much more complete.
Cláudia: Much more complete. Because the way he puts envy is like the person or the envious person does not reject the bad things he gets from people. He's not complaining about really what is negative on people.
For instance, this guy, this Cho, he was not really mad against what was wrong in the United States, but he was really mad at the happiness or the fulfillment or enjoyment he saw in his companions, in his fellow man.
Richard: The success he perceived,
Cláudia: right? Yes, he saw all those adolescents being happy and playful and enjoying life, so he was mad at this.
And this was not a problem caused by his colleagues, but it was something that even his family admitted. He had, since he was a young, very young child, he was always isolated. And isolation is a very strong sign of envy because people cannot live with the consciousness of other people's qualities and happiness. They can't stand it. It's like Akepi says, he rejects the good and not the evil that he received from other people because he doesn't want to be grateful to what he gets.
And he doesn't even admit that there are qualities and good things that other people are giving and benefiting him with. Like, he wouldn't even admit how much goodness he received when he went to the United States, when he studied in the school and from his friends or from his colleagues. Teachers. Teachers. So he was so envious that he was not even admitting that they were very good for him.
So I'm not saying that there are no problems for immigrants or even for Americans or even for any one of us. We have many social problems to confront. But the thing is, as Keppe puts, the thing is that generally people do not complain against what is wrong. They attack the good that they have because they don't want to be grateful and because they don't want to admit that other people deserve gratefulness because he receives good things.
Richard: Of course, well, he's alive, for one thing, and he has an opportunity to study in a good school. But, you know, Cláudia, it's interesting because the way the media is talking about it now, they're portraying him as a victim of something, and they paint it as the fact that people laughed at him when he couldn't speak. But what you're talking about is that his rejection of what's good is what we need to try to see here.
Cláudia: And when people left, he took it as an excuse, for instance, for his hate, for his anger. And generally, people that are too envious, as this boy was, they adopt a very strange, weird kind of behavior. In adolescence, they don't spare this kind of comments. It's true. They are really open. So when a person is too envious, they adopt very, very weird behaviors.
They are rejective. They don't speak. They don't communicate. They make bad faces when people are laughing and enjoying. They cry very often when they are, women cry very much when they are too envious. And so there was already like abnormal behavior in himself. And the way he manifested.
Richard: And then the whole megalomania, I'm dying like Jesus for
Cláudia: all of the oppressed people for centuries to come, this kind of megalomania.
How is that tied into envy, as you see it, Cláudia? Because as Keppe explains, the envious person does this projective identification. This was a huge master discovery, fantastic discovery that Melanie Klein did, this Austrian psychoanalyst. And she realized that if you envy another person, and this starts when we are very small towards our mother, if we envy the goodness, all the good that we receive from someone, and this can be later on, later stages of life, can be a teacher, can be a boyfriend or her husband.
If I envy too much and if I don't, I'm not grateful, I will put, I will... ...object onto the object that I envy, the envied object, all the negativity and the ill intentions, the anger I have in myself. So this is called projective identification, where I see the envied object, the good person that brings me goodness, when I see in that person all the bad I have in myself.
So I start blaming that person for all the unhappiness I have in my life. So instead of seeing a benefactor, I start seeing in that person an evil danger, a dangerous person, a person who must be attacked, a person to whom I have to defend myself. And I see me as good and the other as bad. And so megalomania here plays a very important role because then he started to see in his friends or his colleagues all the negative, evil part of himself.
And in himself, he saw all the good that he got from many people around him that for sure he must have gotten
Richard: for sure I mean for sure just
Cláudia: from his parents alone who were working in a laundry I understand or very humble people providing for him. Yes giving him so much sacrificing themselves so much to afford him a better life. And he blow up everything because of his envy very ungrateful towards his parents too.
Richard: And also he um teachers tried to help him along the way. They could have maybe done more, but there were some teachers who tried to help him. And also he was sending some letters, some emails to girls, and they were very disturbed about it. And they talked to officials, but they refused to press charges. They could have pressed charges in terms of being sort of stalked, but they didn't.
So he received many opportunities, I think, to improve, to get better. And he, as you say, projected all of the ill intentions he get inside himself, on to all these other people.
Cláudia: Yes, and these ill intentions, Jones, they are not only directed to other people, but it's directed to the envious himself. So I destroy my own happiness, my own talents, my life, everything I have, as he did.
He destroyed others, and then he blew up his head, or I don't know what he did. Yeah, shot
Richard: himself in the head. What can you say to people who are in a lot of shock in the United States, there's a lot of trauma going on whenever something like this happens. What could you say to sort of help us to understand? Yeah, so
Cláudia: this is the second perspective of the case, the situation.
A case like this, Jones, brings a lot of consciousness. It's like a mirror, a huge mirror of what happens in our own lives, in our, maybe sometimes in a lesser degree, agree, but envy and projection is manifested in all lives. All of us have more or less a tendency to fight and to blame good people for our problems. We start with our parents, and then we get as excuses their mistakes, because there is no one that do not have some kind of negative behavior or bad habit.
But in reality, we all fight people that are beneficial to us. And that's the way we put our lives downhill, that we destroy, we corrupt, we enter in decadence because we are the ones who are envious and reject the good that we have and that we get from life. So Keppe puts in his book, Origin of Illness, we don't have any problems in being unhappy we look for unhappiness we build our unhappiness we fantasize a lot of unhappiness thoughts all the time and negative feelings.
But we really have a hard time to deal with happiness and the goodness in life. How can this
Richard: understanding of envy help us to understand more than this situation Cláudia that people in the United States are trying to cope with this, the families of the people who were killed, the fellow students of these people. How can envy or this understanding of envy?
Cláudia: They should perceive that this is the perception of the destruction we do in our lives and that everybody does in society. We are destroying our planet. We are perceiving a lot of wrong things, very bad things going on around us. And many times, many people support this kind of thing. If we think about the wars that are going on in Iraq or other places, this is totally envious kind of behavior.
We should never have the right to kill anyone. So blowing up people inside a university in the United States is the same problem as blowing up people in any other place. Even with the excuse of being in a war. War is a manifestation of envy, a social envy. It's a huge manifestation of envy. How so, Cláudia? Because, well, there is this problem among countries.
So a country can be envious at another country. Like you can be envious because a government wants to take the oil of other country that has oil or a country can be or a government can be envious at another country that has beautiful beaches and a good weather and beautiful nature. So they go there and destroy it. And there is this thing of competition, and competition is always based on envy.
Always based on envy. And sometimes, well, terrorism is a form of huge envy because then you attack innocent people and the good people have and not the bad.
Richard: Osama bin Laden would be then a very envious person by your definition.
Cláudia: You might be, sure. And
Richard: the situation of war, the situation of destruction of the planet is a mirror. Actually, let's put it this way.
This destruction of these students, killing of these students, is like an explosion for us to show us what we're all doing inside
Cláudia: the planet. Yes. So it's a trailer of what is going on. And people, like, sometimes even hypocritically, they say, oh, look what is happening, oh, gosh. But there is this every day in our newspapers, TVs, this kind of scenes. Seeing people being, like, blowing
Richard: up cars and killing 200, 550.
Every day you see this happening. Not to mention all the children who are dying. Many
Cláudia: innocent victims, civils, children dying, and even you can see even more evil kind of behavior when you see people dying out of hunger, and you don't avoid that.
Richard: Yeah, so this can be consciousness for us that we need to change drastically.
Cláudia: Yes, and then here comes the third approach, which is the socioeconomic one.
And I have read this article that you sent me, written by Mike Adams, a journalist. He says here, we should not only regulate guns, the selling of guns, but we should always regulate antidepressant-induced violence in America. He says here, the shootings will not stop until the pills are banned. Well, I don't think the shooting will stop when the pills are banned, But he sees here that there is a connection between this abnormal behavior, this mass killings behavior, and the antidepressive drugs.
And I would not only blame the antidepressive, but many, many drugs, because all medical drugs cause a change in our vibration, our DNA vibration. If you take an aspirin your body will have a change and your psychic also will have a change a diminished perception. You can see that you become sometimes dizzy sleepy when you take any any pills. And there was a study that was done by CIA in the 60s there was a project called blue bird project and they wanted to see the combination between drugs not only psychiatric but any drug psychotropics any and mind control.
So you could induce people to do very abnormal behaviors when you gave them drugs and you suggested them through direct or indirect orders or suggestions to do something that you could induce them to do very abnormal things that they would not do under normal circumstances. And we see more and more every day all over the world people having abnormally violent behaviors. And this is very Much connected to this mind control, this suggestions that are given through media, through movies, through indirect propaganda, in order to induce violence in the world.
This is absolutely clear. That has been used. And a few courageous scientists are denouncing this. And you can and you do combine psychiatric drugs with that.
Richard: Boy, there's a lot of evidence to support this now. This is written from 2006. 29 people have been killed and 62 wounded by school shooters taking violence and suicide-inducing psychiatric drugs. A guy on Prozac, one of the Columbine shooters on Luvox, a kid on Prozac this latest story I'm not sure what drug he was on.
But there is something to say that the side effects of these things not to mention the Unabomber was under psychiatric treatment another guy was on Prozac John Hinckley Jr. Was doing something Mark David Chapman
Cláudia: these are the ones who were publicized but we see in our homes this occurring every day this happening every day. I will not say that a drug will create kind of, for instance, an envious behavior, but it can and it does release that because you stay without ethical control.
These drugs have the function of the alcohol, too, to lower down your notion, your conscious, rational mind. So you will manifest with no limits, no repression, your envious tendencies, hateful, envious tendencies.
Richard: Come to the fore more frequently or more easily
Cláudia: absolutely less control.
Richard: And they talk a lot about people hearing voices yes I don't know if we want to get into this now.
But there was a story from England I think kid young kid shot his grandparents killed his grandparents and he was 12 12 years old he heard kill kill in his head like a like an echo in a cave what's happening
Cláudia: here. So we have many studies on this kind of voices phenomena hearing voices. The voices can be heard outside your head or inside your head. Their inner voices or outer voices. These voices can be and they are generally delirious voices and very often they tell you.
They command you to do things that you would never do in your normal state. So there are some lines of psychology that are considering that these voices, in reality, they cannot only come from the unconscious life of the person, which is very frequent, because our unconscious is full of bad intentions. But also they might be in resonance with other beings' orders. And here some spiritists, they consider that these voices can come from evil spirits or they could come from other people's telepathy or like in energetic resonance.
You probably have heard about this phenomenon of resonance in shows where those musicians play this heavy
Richard: metal music with this kind of suggestions,
Cláudia: subliminal suggestions. And then you see hundreds of youngsters behaving like crazy, violent.
Richard: Just after the Rolling Stones released Sympathy to the Devil, there were three or four people killed at a concert of theirs, you know, it's very, there's a resonance there for
Cláudia: sure.
So resonance occurs, and you cannot say for sure if this resonance is only among human beings, living human beings, or even with spirits. What
Richard: could you say from your psychotherapeutic perspective that might alleviate the grief that many people are feeling in light of this terrible incident?
Cláudia: We should see that we are doing much worse with our lives and we are doing much worse with our planet.
We are doing much more evil, much more destruction. And the evil and destruction we are performing directly or indirectly when we omit ourselves, when we think this is not my problem, this is not my business, this is the business of the powerful people or the governments, if we see what we are doing against society, humanity, artistic, cultural, patrimony, if we see all this huge destructivity, we can see that it's much worse what we are doing to our lives.
And this consciousness is very important it's incredibly important and this consciousness must increase till the point that we face something must change yeah
Richard: we cannot be victims of this situation. We have to see that we are doing the same thing in our own lives every day.
Cláudia: Yes I think
Richard: this is a very beautiful way to put it that um we have much more possibilities to do good things to help others to create a better planet and we're not doing that.
Cláudia: And we are not only being aggressive when we shoot people when when we are attacking physically attacking people but we are very aggressive if we say oh this is not my business I'll take care of my life. So when we omit ourselves or if
Richard: we support these leaders by saying oh well as long as I can put gasoline in my car and put food on my table everything's
Cláudia: okay I'm not going to worry about what's going on outside.
Being unconscious and irresponsible because this is a choice. We have made a choice when we choose not to act, not to do. It's an important choice.
Richard: In coping with this horrible event, let's try to understand Dr. Keppe's words. Alienation is the avoidance of seeing in order to avoid life. We all have much to see. Email me with your thoughts. Rich at richjonesvoice.com Thanks for listening.
