Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Think of the greatest among us and a pattern will emerge. For those who've done something truly valuable in life, one characteristic stands out. Somehow, in some way, they've been interested in doing something for others. I'm not talking about the preening and PR initiatives that drive some accomplishment, of course. The self-promotion behind Academy Award lobbying or magazine cover stories proposed by highly paid publicists.
But the true contribution of photo-op shy individuals and groups that truly makes the world a better place. For underlying all of this type of accomplishment must be a high degree of selflessness, of forgetting oneself in the service to the good of others. And we all know people like that who put aside their own glory a little to come to the aid of a greater purpose, even if they receive a little personal recognition in the process.
Eric Fromm considered the main condition for the achievement of love to be overcoming our narcissism. And it's this we'd like to dive into today. Narcissism, shame, and the inverted sense of freedom. Today, on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Well, wonderful to have you along with us. If you like what we're doing and what you're hearing, let us know, okay?
And do pass on the information to friends. Your extensive contact list is what we want to access. Of course, that's how we grow, after all, because for sure we don't get any support or recognition from mainstream or traditional sources. And our programs are important, I think, so that brings it down to you and the grassroots marketing that is really what I'm interested in.
Our Thinking with Somebody Else's Head programs are available individually as podcast downloads. That's something that's happened, I don't know, something like 250,000 times or something, or if you want a little more of a dose of Norberto Keppe's Science of Analytical Trilogy, that's available on our Stop Radio Network. That streams 24-7 through iTunes. It's in the News Talk section of the radio station's part of iTunes, where they're the Stop Radio Network.
You know, we've talked about many things in our coming up on 200 programs now, from leadership to drugs to God and everything in between, arts and hippies and the trilateral. Norberto Keppe's work is that broad and allows an analysis of a universe of topics. Incorporating the knowledge present in the science of psychosociopathology provides a profound perspective to be brought to any area of human endeavor.
That's something that's pretty invaluable for journalists and doctors and parents and teachers, and of course activists and politicians. There is much more to understand about how we human beings in our society work, and it's a great privilege to play a small part in spreading that consciousness here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Norberto Keppe considers narcissism part of the trio of neuroses that cause so many problems for the human being in our society.
That trio is envy, arrogance, and narcissism, and they wreak havoc wherever they're out of control. Most of us have to curb them a little bit just to survive in our families and social environments, and that's very, very good. But what happens when they surge out of control, like happened with this Norwegian psycho, Anders Behring Breivik, who admitted to killing 77 people, you know that story very well, and recently went to prison for 21 years.
He had traveled so far in his arrogance that he actually believed he was purifying his homeland through this vicious act. So you can see it gets pretty out of control and pretty fast. We can see that a lot throughout our society, actually. And when we're placed outside the usual social restrictions to this envy, arrogance, and narcissism, we can get a little intoxicated with the freedom, which Keppe attests is the freedom to unleash our craziness.
This is actually what happens to the powerful in many cases, highlighting another of Keppe's premises, that we are being driven in society by the most pathological among us, the pathological in power. Well, these are conditions that need to be considered and understood. That's what we're going to start to do today. Narcissism, shame, and the inverted sense of freedom when Thinking with Somebody Else's Head returns on the Stop Radio Network.
Essential listening for activists, leaders of the 99%, and change agents worldwide.
Back in 1986, Norberto Keppe wrote a book that predicted the worldwide economic crisis we're facing today. Liberation of the People critiques the pathology of power that lies at the base of our inverted social system and points the way out.
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Now, back to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Stop Radio Network. This is
Richard: our program, Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. We are on the Stop Radio Network. I'm Richie Lloyd-Jones. And, you know, we receive e-mails relatively frequently, not as frequently as I would like.
We also have on our site now a place where you can leave voicemail messages. So this is very kind of cool. But I received an e-mail from a friend of Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco is here again. Hello, Cláudia. Hello, dear
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Jones. Hello, dear listeners. A friend
Richard: of mine wrote, a guy who does a lot of work in advertising and marketing, was very interesting in our thoughts on shame as a marketing technique.
Because, you know, like shame of dandruff or bad breath or these kind of things. After what
Susan: we normally talk about, it seems mundane.
Richard: But the weight, yes, our weight, and how the kind of shame about these things is manipulated by marketing to sell products. It's not really talking about the philosophy of the universal man here. But, okay, this is like a legitimate thought.
And, you know, with Dr. Keppe's work, we can always draw a bigger circle and try to understand these things in a bigger way. So how I wrote him a long email about sort of how we are manipulated or can be manipulated by our various pathologies, our feelings of not being good enough, our narcissism, those kinds of things. So I thought it would be wonderful to have you comment a little bit on this and we can talk about this in a in a bigger way.
Well,
Cláudia: you told me that you would have some practical examples of how commerce, consumerism, sell products out of our pathology. Because this started with Freud, right? Sure. And Mr. Bernays, his nephew, did a profound research on this area. And he studied all the weak points of our personalities. So people could take advantage from this. And I'm sad to understand that even Dr.
Keppe's discoveries were useful for these evil guys because Dr. Keppe went very deep, deep down in the weak points of the soul, the souls, to become conscious of people so they could be stronger, have a stronger ego and a better accomplishment and be healthier and more balanced. But I understand that they have been using this as much as they can as weak points.
And what are our weak points? Well,
Richard: we have many of those. We
Cláudia: have many. So narcissism is one of our weak points. Together with megalomania and what Keppe says here in his book.
Richard: Envy, right? Envy, I think, is the other one. Megalomania envy yeah
Cláudia: megalomania envy and narcissism or we could say theomania also because narcissism is a form of adoring oneself so much that One would think ourselves as being God-like or something.
But this is, like, again, something that works in two directions. Because all pathologies, they work in two directions. And what would be the direction, the two-fold directions of narcissism? The more you idealize yourself, the more you hate your condition. Because we are not gods. We are human beings. With lots
Richard: of human characteristics by the way.
Cláudia: And a lot of flaws and a lot of things that do not fit in our delusional prospect of ourselves.
So for instance there is this eating problem. The cause of this is narcissism which is bulimia and anorexia, anorexia, so anorexia and bulimia are problems very much related to narcissism. Because people when they look to the mirrors, when they see their pictures, they compare themselves with this delusional image they created out of their narcissism. And so they really attack, they really attack what they see in themselves and they start developing habits that there are totally pathological.
Narcissism can also be the source of suicidal attitudes, because narcissistic people think that they are the reference and the center of the world. Everything for them revolves
Richard: around them.
Cláudia: The world they see in relation to them. If they are accepted. If they are not accepted. If they are being valued or not. If they are in accordance to what they expect them to be in relation to society. If they are successful. If their success is good enough for them. If people are paying attention to them or not. If people are rejecting them or not.
So things happen because of them. Like if someone wakes up in a bad temper, so they think those are doing things against them. They are hating them, or they are being hated, they are being rejected, they, they, they, they, or one, one, me, me, me, me. So narcissism was already, this concept was already developed by Freud. Very, very beautiful manuscript Freud did about narcissism.
And he says this starts in the childhood when the child is like a king inside the house. And they
Richard: become like a dictatorship. You can see this in the groceries.
Cláudia: He's a dictator inside the house, so they are
Richard: the owners. They are the owners of the family. And so the king, they sit in their small chairs
Cláudia: and they rule all the lives of all the people that live in that house.
So this attitude, if the person does not develop to a more mature age, they can become like a torture for their partners, their...
Richard: This is interesting. You're talking about this. I was speaking of this in a small way. I see this in the English class. People who don't want to speak because they're afraid to confront their image of themselves. Because when we speak, learning a new language especially, we all sound like we're six years old.
I mean, we make mistakes and basic mistakes in grammar and we have to go through this process. I had to go through this process in Portuguese. You know and so there's this this fear to confront the image of ourselves. And also interesting we're speaking about this on this day because this is the anniversary, the birthday of a friend of ours who committed suicide.
And uh today is the anniversary of that and um not that she committed suicide on this day but this is her birthday today. So I was thinking about her because there is a lot was a lot of, as you're speaking now, I could see narcissism, a lot of problems there of course in this person, not wanting to confront images of herself, not wanting to face the reality of who she was from the time she was very young, and finally culminating, I think it was the third or fourth attempt to commit suicide, you know, starting from when she was very young.
And so uh this and also
Cláudia: the idea of the person who commits suicide is that if they die they will punish the world, or they will punish their partners, their spouses, their children, those who they think created some sort of suffering. It's like a vengeance. It's
Richard: like a
Cláudia: vindicative
Richard: approach. It's a hard word to say, vindicative, yes.
Cláudia: Yeah, so I'll kill myself, so I'll hurt that
Richard: person.
Every child has this.
Cláudia: When I contract cancer, then they'll be sorry. Every kid thinks this in their head, right? And what about these cultures that have a lot of suicide? Japanese cultures are known for this, right? So is the same thing? The same attitude, the same attitude, narcissistic. They have to be the best, the number one. And because they suffer so much for one of their bad qualities or some normal quality, they suffer so much.
They reject so much. They feel they are rejected by others in the same intensity. And this is not true. Everybody are not just giving a damn for your problems. Who cares if you have a nose like this or if you have a pimp in some place or if you're… A
Richard: pimple somewhere. Oh,
Cláudia: my God. Who's caring if you are bald or not, if you're… Sometimes people care if you have a bad breath.
Bad breath, yeah. Of course, you have to take care of that. But who cares if you are overweight or underweight or if you are using a clothing that is on the top? Maybe some other narcissistic people, they are happy because they can maybe see themselves above you. This is envy being accomplished. Envy, envy, envy. But just right after a short moment, those envious people will find other ones that will cause their suffering.
So who cares? In the end, everybody's just being egotistic. Only people who are really interested in other people, in doing good for others, they have a chance to relax a little bit. You know something, I have here Dr. Keppe's book, The Divine Kingdom, where he develops this concept of narcissism. Imagine a book of a scientist that speaks about narcissism and that this is like the king or the top of all infirmities.
This is one chapter of the Divine Kingdom book. So, you know, this is so amazing how he can be so scientific in a book that is so theological in the concept. So this is beautiful. This is extraordinary. Let's read here. The narcissism is
Richard: the king of all infirmities. And he says, he gives
Cláudia: an example of a session of an American patient, client, that does analysis by phone.
We have many people calling in and doing analysis by phone or by Skype. And one of those said to him, it looks like in the United States, my people is like fed by narcissism, meaning that since they are born, they are, how do you say this? Inserted, inserted inside. Yeah,
Richard: they have this thing coming from outside. They are like, they have this pushed inside themselves.
They're immersed inside this
Cláudia: world of narcissism. It's like fed by narcissism in the environment. And Dr. Kepes asked, how so? And the person said, since I was a child, since an American is a child, he listens, he hears everybody or listens to everybody saying, our country is the best. Our country is the number one. And you are a special star in the universe.
So you have to, since you are born to have this idea, you are a special star in the universe just because you are an American and you are born in the United States, which is the number one. So imagine the big weight in the shoulders of these children. So they start becoming anxious. You must be number one. You must compete. You must be the best.
So they start eating more. They start getting nervous. So they need more like those devices that they have plenty, plenty, these technological things, these… These tools, these toys. How do you say these tools?
Richard: Yeah, we call them toys. They're like
Cláudia: technological toys. Yeah, essas coisinhas ali, esqueci
Richard: agora o nome, estou ficando… Yeah,
Cláudia: toys. Okay, so you have this place and Internet games and all of them speak about or they lead children to be the number one.
Number one, to compete to be the best, and to kill others, to eliminate others, just to be the only one. The strongest, the best. So this creates anxiety, people start drinking more, start eating more, they become more anxious, they become overweight, and when they realize they are overweight, they become more anxious, so they need to eat more and take drugs. And so they go to school.
They can't pay attention. So they can't get knowledge inside. They can't learn. They have learning difficulties. They
Richard: see the world only as revolving around them. So
Cláudia: this is hell. We're
Richard: back in just a moment. I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. To explore narcissism. And all of its manifestations. A very interesting and important subject for us. Back in just a moment. I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
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Now, back to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Stop Radio Network.
You can find us there in the News Talk section of iTunes radio stations.
Just scroll down until you see Stop Radio Network, and then you can listen to us 24-7. I was fascinated by what you were saying, Cláudia, at the close of our show there, giving some very good examples of exactly the situation we face today. You know, they've been doing a lot of research on this. They've been doing this kind of research called a personality inventory in the United States for a number of years.
And what they've discovered is that from 2002 to 2007, the last statistics that I could find, college students on this narcissistic personality inventory, their statistics are rising twice as fast as previous studies. So narcissism seems to be growing. This is for sure.
Cláudia: You see this too, don't you? The ones to blame are those, as you said, the people in power that use narcissism as a source of profits.
So if you want to be the number one, so use my makeup. So if you want to be the number one, you should use the hair products we sell. Buy this car. Buy this car. Do this. Do that. Buy, buy, buy. And go to academies, to gyms, and pay for doctors who do these plastic surgeries and these Botox things and all those things that are used in the beginning.
They look like they improved your face, but later on things get worse,
Susan: and then the problem just increases. So every time you want to cover up a
Richard: flaw, you just create more trouble because then that flaw will increase in the future, eventually. In all areas, all
Cláudia: areas. All areas. You mentioned Edward Bernays and Freud at the beginning, but I just found some other names
Richard: for you that maybe you haven't heard of yet.
A Canadian writer writes for a New Yorker magazine named Malcolm Gladwell, writes articles, extensive articles in New Yorker magazine, and he wrote one on hair dye and the hidden history of post-war America. A fascinating article here. And in it, he explores the origins of the focus group. And it comes from psychoanalysis, Cláudia. There was one agency in the 1940s that was set up trying to sort of provide something that hadn't been provided in marketing before for their clients.
And they imported a number of European intellectuals to drive their research. People like, see if you know any of these names. Paul Lazerfeld was a giant in sociology apparently in the 20th century. I don't know this name. Ernst Dichter from the Psychological Institute in Vienna, and the top one was a woman named Herta Herzog. She was schooled in the Viennese method, Freud's Viennese method.
And what these people did was took all of this psychological psychoanalysis that we're developing. And instead of helping their individual clients to understand the world, they took their advertising clients and tried to help them understand the consumer and how to manipulate it. So there's an enormous history of this, particularly in North America.
Cláudia: What evil inside those so-called scientists. Exactly. You know, Dr.
Keppe wrote in his book, The Decay of the American People and the United States, that everything that was developed in the United States came mostly from Europe, European brains, in the good side and a bad side. All the geniuses were imported by most of them from Europe to America, and there they had the chance to accomplish their good or their evil. And that's unfortunately what we see psychoanalysts doing when they went to the United States because they destroyed even education.
They had a much better form of educating children in the United States before those psychoanalysts came with their ideas, those narcissistic ideas, crazy lunatic ideas that children should not be frustrated in their desires, otherwise they would get neurotic. And that's right the opposite, right the opposite. If we don't frustrate the desires of children, they become severely neurotic adults, severe neurotic monstrous people.
Richard: Yeah, this narcissistic personality disorder stems from there. And when you talk about frustrating the will, it's not a word we like to hear very much in North America. It's so healthy, John. I know.
Cláudia: It's so healthy because our will is upside down and
Richard: destructive.
Cláudia: It's so healthy. You were saying something.
Richard: Just only this, Cláudia. We don't like to think about frustrating ourselves.
We want to take what we can get. And you can see where this has led us to. I want, so I will take. I want your oil, so I will. I don't have any restraint on this inverted will. We're all like this little kid from the movie Home Alone. We're destroying the house that we live in, just trying to get what we want.
And so Dr. Keppe's work in this area is just extraordinarily…
Cláudia: There is another example here that it fits very much with Freud's theory about narcissism being one of the sources of hypochondriac behavior and somatization. People who get too much sick, they tend to be narcissistic. Because Freud said, when you do not direct your libido to other outer objects and you turn your libido to yourself, you create diseases in your body.
That's how he explained it. If we see under an energetic level, if you concentrate your energy too much inwards instead of concentrating your interests and your energy to outer objects, then this energy will keep blocked and concentrated in you, creating mental problems, emotional problems, and physical problems. So hypochondriacs, they tend to have a very narcissistic behavior. So, Keppe says here, one client told him, it seems that the narcissistic person attacks everybody, the family, doctors, and even psychologists.
Why do you think like this? Dr. Keppe asked. And he said, as a doctor, because his patient is a doctor, I see that the hypochondriac... Person has a true adoration towards himself, adores himself. So I'm sick. Everybody must take care of me. My sickness rules the house. So everybody must do what I want because I'm sick. And everybody has to pay attention.
So people enjoy going to hospitals or doctor's offices. So they go there, they pay, and they have their doctors paying full attention to themselves. Oh, what do you have? You have a pain here. You have your, this is aching. So take this little magical pill, and then you will be
Richard: okay. So they go back. For the rest of your life. And then they go back, and then they have this, things worsen with the pills.
So they go back and back and back to the doctors. And they say to their family, I can't talk now. I have to take my pills. And everybody
Cláudia: stays quiet, and if I am sick, nobody goes out, nobody has the right to be happy, nobody has the right to lead their lives normally, and nobody has the right other than just paying attention to me and doing everything that I want to do because I'm sick.
So this is the maximum narcissism
Richard: inside a family.
Cláudia: You just outlined it perfectly. So people, sometimes they have their lives ruined because an espouse is 20 years, 10 years in bed with a sickness. They are enslaved. Children are enslaved. Parents are. I'm not saying that one should leave our parents in an old. Old folks
Richard: home. Old folks home.
Cláudia: Old folks home. So they have Alzheimer's.
So they just throw them in there and forget about them. This is a narcissistic aspect,
Richard: too. When you don't mind with anything else other than you. Yourself. There's another thing. When you talked about the frustration of the will, there's another aspect of Keppe's work that I think is marvelous where he talks about the necessity for us to think less of ourselves if we want to develop.
A key to happiness, he says, is to think less of yourself. And this flies right exactly in the face of what we normally learn growing up is that you have to think a lot of yourself. So what does he mean there, Cláudia? What is he talking about, to think less of ourselves? He means to not consider ourselves in such a high light, but to be more…
Cláudia: Humble.
To be humble. Yeah. Humbleness is a kind of opposite of narcissism. Yes. Humbleness. Yeah. I will give you another example if you want. Fantastic. Another form of application of narcissism. And so narcissism is an attitude that is linked to this fixation in the development in that age, four to six, the genital age, the genital phase of development. So people get fixated there and they stay narcissistic all their lives long.
So when people do this, they have a tremendous difficulty in learning, acquiring knowledge, information, learning skills, learning things at school. So they are so much concentrated in themselves that they don't hear, they don't listen, they cannot pay attention to anything other than themselves. So learning problems are very much related to that. If you learn a language, if you learn mathematics, or if you learn science, music, whatever, it's so difficult for a narcissistic to connect to reality, because they are so much connected to themselves that they cannot get rid of this imprisonment.
They are entangled in their own narcissism that they cannot pay attention. They are not interested in anything else. So they are outside reality. They don't see any, they are not interested. They don't think that they need anything more. They are so sufficient, so beautiful, so complete sometimes. Sometimes they have this attitude of thinking they know so much and they know so well that they don't need anything more.
They don't need learning any learning anymore. As I said, this has two ways, because then they are confronted with reality, and they have to admit they don't know, really, and they know much less than other people know. So they get this isolation where they can see themselves as geniuses. Okay, so I do not do well in this area, but in other areas, I'm a genius.
So they compensate. And in terms of a whole philosophy of a country, like the United States, This was really a condemnation for United States people, because if they follow this narcissism as they did, they went downhill in their capacity, intelligence, creativity, capacity to work. They got uglier, they got fetter, because they lost the sense of reality. And they don't realize what is happening.
So this client, a client said to Dr. Keppe, I see this American lady and how she doesn't realize her country is sinking, how much alienated she is. And he said, it's because she only believes in her own ideas without contact with reality. She's so narcissistic. She just believe in her own thoughts and she's out of touch with reality. And she doesn't realize how decadent everybody is in the United States.
And another example he gives here is a client said, how can a narcissistic person learn anything if she puts herself in the highest level of development? And then Dr. Keppe asked, what are you speaking about? Give more details. And the person said, I saw this meeting in Bali where those people are trying to diminish pollution in the planet, but nobody really got to any place.
And there was this bunch of narcissistic politicians that were totally outside reality, just…
Richard: Mouthing the words, right? Yes.
Cláudia: And pictures and media and so how they show up. But nothing
Richard: with the planet and we are seeing the planet being destroyed and everybody worried in buying a new pair of shoes, a new iPhone 5,
Cláudia: a new iPhone and I have, I want to have, I deserve.
So this is totally upside down world.
Richard: We're all in this sense to varying degrees narcissistic. Then Cláudia, yes, unfortunately,
Cláudia: but at least we see and we try to diminish the consequences because by seeing, we can do a lot about ourselves and the others. So it's not a matter of being impeccable, not having the problem, but accepting to see in order
Richard: to treat.
This that Cláudia said at the end is crucial, isn't it? Not being impeccable or without problems, but having the courage to see the narcissism for what it is so we can treat it. And that helps free up our energy to help others, which is, after all, the main point. Not burying our narcissism away where we don't see it, but exposing it to the light of analysis so it doesn't dominate us.
Well, that's our program for this week. Great to have you along on the Stop Radio Network. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is a production of the International Society of Analytical Trilogy. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
