I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.
It was part of the psychic apparatus defined in Freud‘s Structural Model of the Psyche. Its role was to mediate between the desires of our uncoordinated instinctual tendencies – the ID – and our critical moralizing part called the Super-Ego.
For Freud, our Ego – caught between these two forces, has a heck of a time maintaining equilibrium. It often loses, as we all know when we do something we know we shouldn’t but can’t help, and then have to live with the consequences.
But Keppe has re-defined this battle by proposing that our neurosis comes, not from the fight between our primitive instincts and our censoring personal and social Super-Ego, but from our inverted desires against our good, beautiful and true essence. A dilemma recognized by St. Paul when he lamented, “Why do I do the things I don’t want and fail to do the things I want?”
A question perhaps all of us have asked in different ways. Keppe’s work in this area is essential for all, but lamentably not well divulged. Let’s go some ways towards correcting that.
Our Inverted Contra-Ego, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.