Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Freud believed we were often influenced by memories, traumas, and instincts we had repressed, but they influence our behaviors anyway. He got there by studying hypnosis, analyzing dreams, and paying attention to those slips of the tongue that reveal what we try to keep hidden. No mortal can keep a secret, Freud maintained.
If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. That's poetic language. And the idea has weaved its way into our modern psyche. All of us have used that excuse along the way. Man, I was completely unconscious. What was I thinking? The great Brazilian psychoanalyst Norberto Keppe has advanced Freud significantly with his concept of inconscientization.
It's not that we're naturally full of hidden indecent desires and animal instincts. For Keppe, we banish from our consciousness what we don't want to admit. That means we know what's going on, but we deny what we know, and that has serious consequences. The perils of living unconsciously today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Our podcasts are available all over the place, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and on our very own Stop Radio Network.
But I think we need to get them out to more people. Keppe and Pacheco's Science of Analytical Trilogy is what we talk about on these programs. And I think this is the most advanced science of human beings and their society in the world today. So please, spread our work out to your friends and contacts through your social media, etc. Okay? Susan Berkley and I conduct a free weekly reading group for any interested in learning more.
If you're interested in that, rich at richjonesvoice.com, I'll give you more information. Today's podcast is edited from one of those reading groups.
Susan Berkley: So rich tell us about this reading. You first.
Richard: I have some news. I have some news. Tell us. We've managed to publish revealing the power of consciousness on amazon. All new cover. So it's available print on demand now on amazon.
It's a great book. It's uh and we're doing a lot of readings from it because it's very practical. There's lots of, although it's, Kepley's work has this sort of philosophical, even theological perspective, which can get kind of like theoretical. There's lots of examples in this book, and that helps to really ground it. And so it makes it really an interesting read, I think.
So I picked another chapter from, we've been reading a couple of things from there recently, so I just carried on a little bit with another reading. I took a few excerpts from things, and I thought this would be a great consideration for our class today. This idea of censorship, we think of that, always we think of that as an external thing, a movie censor or something like that.
The idea of that we censor our consciousness, that we create this kind of censorship inside us is maybe a kind of a new idea or certainly maybe a different idea to what we normally think of. We think about censoring as an external thing. People are censoring what we can say. Well, we certainly see that today. My gosh, this idea of being canceled and being politically correct.
And all of this language that's being policed these days in Quebec, in Canada, they have a kind of language police that goes around to make sure there's no English on the store signs. It has all got to be French. And, you know, there's this kind of thing going on. We see that socially. But the idea that we have this internal censorship is a new idea, I think, or certainly a variation on an idea.
And if we do that, this is what creates our unconscious, as Keppe defines it, right? We have the idea from Freud that the unconscious is something that occurs naturally, that you naturally have unconscious intentions. Of course, we have things that are underneath our conscious, our breathing, digestion, all of those things are occurring without our knowing it. So there's a natural sort of process, physical processes that take place without our consciousness.
Thank God. I mean, imagine if we had to control our blood circulation with our mind, we'd be dead in a couple of hours. But this idea that we censor consciousness of things, this is what makes us inconscientized and this is the unconscious for Keppe. It's something that we don't want to see. So that's why this chapter is called censorship and the struggle against consciousness.
That we want to make ourselves inconscientized. So we actually ignore the consciousness that we have. Sometimes we ignore the consciousness that we have and uh and and do the do exactly
Susan: the opposite of what we know we should do. And then we later we go what was i think what did i do that for. And then it gets worse because we take pleasure in that.
And
Richard: it's
Susan: a dissident attitude because that consciousness, that awareness, that intuition comes from a higher source. You can call it the Holy Spirit. You can call it a higher power, whatever it is. But that's when you get down to it is what's really serious, because it's so good for us to see our dissidence, because that Holy Spirit, that energy is always there for us.
It never judges us. It never goes away. It forgives us. And we can take more advantage of it in our life by going through this process, Rich. Yeah.
Richard: Yeah. So this is a really important aspect. And maybe as we're reading this, you guys will experience something of what this means. And maybe you'll start to have some resistance to that. Let's just be aware that that can happen, this kind of struggle against consciousness.
We don't want to know. Yeah. Because when we start to deal with these things, we start to recognize that the problem of the human being is not that we don't know. There are things we don't know, of course, but our big problem is not this. Our big problem is that we reject what we know. We go against what we know. We do the opposite of what we should do.
Right.
Susan: That's the issue.
Richard: And so you can see that's why it's more serious, because if it's just something that's unconscious, I didn't know any better than, OK, well, then I'm evolving and I'll get better as I know more. And that gives us kind of a kind of fake relief because I'm not responsible. But if I am responsible, if actually the problem is not that I don't know, but that I act against what I know, then the problem is more serious.
And we need to pay attention to that and not just brush it off, as we often do. You'll see people do, in movies you'll see this, people do really crazy things. And the other people say, oh, it's okay, you didn't know any better, you did the best you could. And we understand, try to encourage people. But this can be very, very destructive because it helps the person avoid seeing what was really going on below the surface, which was an inconscientized intention, and if we don't see that, then we're very, very vulnerable to doing
Susan: it again.
Exactly. So Dr. Pacheco says, there's a lot we don't know about our pathology. Pathology is the attempt we make to stay unconscious, to live unconsciously. This is a struggle that we have going on all the time. And if we pay attention when we're in a time of inner struggle, we'll see that we can even argue mentally with people and situations for hours.
This inner fighting is something we can perceive a lot in most people.
Richard: Yeah. So, well, you guys might have experienced that. You have a problem with someone and then you start to obsess about it. And you try to leave it behind, but it comes up again and again. And at some points you can't even, it just is there all the time. That may happen.
I don't know if you've had that experience. Maybe we've all gone through periods of that. But this phrase here, pathology is the attempt we make to stay unconscious, to live unconsciously. So we create our pathology by not wanting to see what's going on. So not wanting to see the fact that we are just normal, created human beings, that we're the same as everybody else.
If we don't want to see that, we'll generate a pathology of arrogance or narcissism or alienation or something like that. We'll create that as an attempt to stay unconscious of the truth, right? Instead of seeing the truth, I want to create another reality in a way. And that gets very extreme in situations like schizophrenia, where the person actually does create an alternative reality and then lives in that alternative reality as if it's real.
That's very pathological and very sick. But we all do that to some degree by creating these Thank
Susan: you.
Richard: Psychoanalytics.
Susan: And I go, wait a minute, it's like I have to slap myself and just to get out of it because it is very toxic for us.
Richard: Yes. And it's very seductive because it's very pleasurable in a way to, you know, to milk something, to go over and over and over again and see how I was, how I was, how injustice was done to me and how could this happen?
We you know kids can be like that you know someday they'll be sorry you know this thing we're kids. So it's something that happens a lot and we can we do this even as adults. Yeah
Susan: i wish i'd said it this way next time i'm going to say it like that.
Richard: Yeah it's terrible if you're going to uh people who are like seriously mentally ill you'll find a lot of this.
They found this at the very beginning days of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, the early genius guys in Germany and Austria at the beginning of the late 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, they discovered a huge link between megalomania and mental disease. You know, you don't find any garbage collectors in the mental institutions, right? It's all Napoleon and Cleopatra, Jesus Christ and Cleopatra.
You don't you don't find people who think they're nobody in those places. So the of course, there are many mental diseases. I'm not talking about all of them, but in many cases, there's a huge megalomania that goes on. The huge narcissism. That's a big part of mental illness. Yeah. And so in this sense, all of us have to be careful of that, because who can't be selfish?
Who can't be narcissistic at times, who can't be totally self-centered. And when we are that way, we don't see reality. I have a good friend of mine who identifies everything in relationship to himself, right? So if he's walking down the street and he says good morning to somebody and the other person responds good morning, he'll say, I like that person. That person's a good person because he responded to me.
And I'm not sure about that person. I tried to talk to them the other day, and they didn't want to talk with me. So I don't have a good feeling about that. It's all about how it relates to me. And so all of us can have moments or degrees of this going on in our lives. In this sense, we have to be very careful to pay attention, because this is our pathology, to stay unconscious, to live unconsciously, to not see reality.
Yeah
Susan: it's called auto reference. It's an actual thing in the annals of of psychotherapy. That's that's a symptom of a severe problem you know. And and you
Richard: know you know what it's like. You're working on a project with somebody and of course people need to communicate with you. But people think that their message is the most important thing in the world. The only thing you've got going on in your life is to answer my messages.
It's like this kind of mentality. I find myself even if I'm working on a project really intensely, and I've got a colleague here that I'm working with, and I say, I need an answer now, they don't respond to me. I need this answer now. This is a big narcissistic thing that all of us can get into. We all have this difficulty.
Susan: Yeah.
Technology doesn't favor our mental health. It's more the opposite like hello a telephone they still exist you can still pick it up and then
Richard: people don't pick up. You can see guys that we're talking about simple little things right but these are these can be examples of something much bigger. And if we just brush it off and say oh well you know i was just stressed or i was you know if we if we make excuses for it we don't have this opportunity to recognize what's going on.
And so we stay in this unconscious world and when we do that living unconsciously. We're not being healthy. We're mentally unstable because of that type of censorship that we have. All right.
Susan: Let me read the next paragraph. But I know that all of us are aware of what our main weak points are because we can see these by ourselves and people give us feedback about them.
Plus, we repeat them a lot. It seems that all of us have a notion of our weak points. The problem is we don't want to focus on these problems or go deeper and see what's behind them. Because if we did that, then we would admit, humble ourselves and correct the problem. We have symptoms and the symptoms show we're imbalanced in some areas, more or less.
And people keep bringing this back and back to us and we keep denying it. So actually, it's not that unconscious to us. Yeah,
Richard: yeah, yeah. So because here, the key thing here is to correct the problem. If we're really honest, we will admit what's really going on because we have the desire to correct it. If we don't have any intention of correcting it, then we will fight to preserve our point of view.
We'll fight to, no, I'm not that lazy. No, no, it wasn't on Tuesday. It was on Wednesday. No, but I'm not like that anymore. No, but I'm getting better. We'll fight to maintain our perspective about ourselves. We'll fight for that. Why? Because we don't want to change. We know that if we're conscious, if we become conscious of something, we have the obligation to try to correct it.
So we don't want to correct it. So we stay in it and we fight to maintain that pathological attitude or behavior. And we're
Susan: cutting ourselves off from our health that way because we can't see ourselves. We have to depend on others to keep us on the straight and narrow, given that you have a good group of friends and colleagues and things like that.
So we're cutting ourselves off in many, many ways. So sometimes Dr. Keppe says in the group analysis when people deny awareness, but you are aware of this. You know this is not true or things like this. Yesterday, one man was being analyzed and he was saying, no, I don't see I have attitudes of aggressiveness with my wife. I don't see I spoil or corrupt my children.
But he sees, he knows, and he keeps fighting against this knowledge inside of himself. He keeps arguing and arguing and finding excuses and explanations. And he spends most of his energy doing this. He knows about all this. Everybody's been bringing it up to him for years now, but he still says, I'm not aware of this. I didn't think about this before. It's new.
This is nothing new. I really think that envy occurs because we try to be unconscious and not because there's something hidden in our unconscious. So hidden, we cannot discover it. Envy is the attempt at being and staying unconscious. Anybody recognize
Richard: that arguing and arguing and finding excuses and no it's not like that and you know you don't understand and what the circumstances were different or in this case i had to or you know something happened.
I wasn't expecting we have a lot of excuses to keep ourselves inconscientized unconscious of what's going on. Also we can preserve it that's the that's the thing about it. We want to maintain this idea about ourselves instead of dealing with the reality of ourselves. And as you'll see, as we go through this text, the reality, seeing the reality is not the bugaboo that we think.
It's not the terrible. It's absolutely necessary because when we do that, we're on the path to correcting, to being better. It gives a lot of relief to admit but fighting like he says that Cláudia said here he's been most of our
Susan: energy doing this. It takes a tremendous psychic toll unbelievable it's it's it's fries your
Richard: nervous system. Well that's the thing uh the more pathological the somebody somebody is the sicker they are in this sense the less they will accept any responsibility to the point of psychopaths who will actually blame the victim.
Yeah for you know well why was that person there they were at the wrong place at the wrong time it's their fault not mine. So it's
Susan: really dangerous
Richard: yes that's
Susan: why recidivism is so bad in the penal system jails don't have the effect
Richard: they should. In the pathological model we see that we have uh an essence an essential nature which is good in its essence right. The the essence of life is good. So we and we come from that so we have goodness as a base. But we have a lot of so we have the center of goodness and truth Beauty.
And then we have a lot of pathology around that, right? Sort of attitudes against that natural essence that we have. This is the difference between Keppe and Freud. Freud would see that that pathology was natural. And Keppe sees, no, that this is attitudinal. This is a person who's actually against their nature, against their spirituality, against who they are. So because we have all this pathology, and that's really ugly, we elaborate these very elaborate masks to cover up the pathology.
But at the same time, we're covering up our true nature. And we don't have contact with who we really are because we're so far away from that. But the pathway through this, the pathway is not to the essence. It's through the pathology. We have to recognize the pathology. This is the hard part. People want to jump that, like in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
They want to jump right to the spirituality. They don't want to go through all the other stuff. They don't want to see the problem. And the pathway is to recognize the pathology, not because the pathology is real, but because that's the pathway to see who we really are, because that's what's blocking who we really are. So it's a very important process to recognize the mask and then recognize that there's these attitudes we have against our true nature.
And if we recognize those attitudes, we immediately return closer to our true spirituality. So it's through, and if the person is not being honest, there's no way they can get to their spirituality because they won't be honest enough to recognize their problems.
Susan: Let me read one more paragraph here. This is great stuff.
Richard: Symptoms of the door.
Susan: Yeah, now this is very interesting.
Richard: This is really important.
Susan: Yeah. So symptoms, I guess she means of physical or mental illness, are the door that allows us to go deeper and be liberated from this horrible sensation, this horrible prison. Imagine how much effort we need to make to deny and hide things that we know and people keep telling us about every day. We need to make such an enormous effort.
And this attitude of hiding is the symptom of neurosis or even psychosis. Anxiety occurs because of this. Panic attacks happen because of this. So does drinking, overeating, womanizing, menizing, doing, doing, doing things obsessively. All of these arise from the attitudes we try to hide or not admit. And the more arrogant we are, the more symptoms we build in order to hide, becomes very unpleasant when we live with people like this, like this man last night.
These days, he's so fat, he's almost blowing up. He's anguished, aggressive, red like a tomato. He keeps fighting with his new wife as he did with his previous wife, with his brother, his sons, everybody. When he's discussing and arguing and fighting back, defending his reasons, he becomes very unpleasant. And that's how we behave when we want to hide things. This attempt to hide is the psychosis, the neurosis in ourselves, and it leads to the physical diseases we developed.
Richard: It's quite a paragraph, isn't it, Susan?
Susan: It is. And I know this individual, he unfortunately passed on. Yes. He developed a serious case of diabetes that he could never control and passed away. I
Richard: remember the groups when we were analyzing him, and it was very, very difficult, very unpleasant, because anything that was said to him, he would send back like a tennis ball.
Everything he would serve out of me, he'd hit back, you know. Incredible return of serve, as we say. But it was very dishonest because he's not acknowledging the fact that everybody was trying to point out to him, you know. And so you look at this, guys, this drinking, overeating, womanizing, whatever it is, doing, doing things obsessively, all of these patterns we have, these neurotic patterns we have, all of this is to try to hide or not admit the attitudes that we have.
We try to hide away and mostly hide it from ourself because I think most people see. I think most people recognize how we are. I mean, if you work with a person who's lazy, I think everybody recognizes it. He or she may not recognize it, but I think everybody else does. So there's something about this defense, this fighting, fighting, fighting. It's fighting with our own consciousness, right?
It's not fighting with the other people. It's like it's trying to fight and fight and fight to convince himself that he's right, that his point of view or her point of view is correct. And then we see this question of arrogance. If we're arrogant, who's not arrogant about certain things in life? All of us have this challenge, I think. The more arrogant we are, the more we will build up things in order not to see, including surrounding ourselves with inferior people, because then we're not ever forced to face ourselves.
The sales manager who hires all the salespeople who are worse than him or her. The partner we select that's more neurotic than we are, because then we can focus on their problem.
Well, you know, the fascination we have with maybe people's difficult lives, sometimes reality television is like that. As bad as my life is, at least it's not as bad as that. You know, there's a lot of things that go on here where we stop ourselves from seeing how we are. And we have a lot of very sophisticated ways of doing that. And I
Susan: was just thinking about the phenomenon of rubbernecking.
It's in traffic. You know, people can't resist looking at a good car wreck, a good train wreck, and it's compulsive. Pleasure
Richard: that we can take from from negative news i mean everybody knows this right. The news program is 20 minutes of horrible things and then the last couple of minutes of the fireman saving a cat from a tree you know to make it try to make us feel better.
But the the uh the the horrible uh state of our news programming you know if it bleeds it leads and you know all of this kind of stuff um this is well documented you know. And people teenagers are fascinated with horror movies. And you know the the in the hollywood movies the serial killer is always the smartest guy in the room. You know there's a lot of crazy things that go on here there are symptoms of this problem we're talking about now.
So
Susan: i think what she's saying here if we have a symptom a physical symptom as what happened or a
Richard: neurotic symptom right like
Susan: like an anxiety like i was thinking about before i started analysis with dr Keppe i was a sufferer of panic attacks. Now fortunately i didn't get sent or make my way to someone who tried to medicate me. I never took medication for it. I went to gestalt therapy i was hypnotized.
And none of that did anything for me until I got the proper psychoanalysis to realize that a panic attack, and I had it bad. There were times I had it in public. I had to abandon a shopping cart in a supermarket and run outside because I felt like I needed air, things like that, even at work sometimes. We learned that there's something our psyche is trying to show us, our consciousness that you were talking about earlier, Rich, this consciousness, which is always there.
And when I was able to analyze it, I was like, wow, that wasn't so terrible. But in my mind, our reaction against the thing is like, oh, I idealize myself so much. How can I see that I have this desire to not want to work properly or go against something that's good for me? And it shows up ugly it really does and they medicate people and they do whatever people they do to help people with this problem it's it's it is immobilizing whatever
Richard: they do to not help people with this
Susan: that's what i'm saying.
But they don't they don't accept that this would be a better way unfortunately
Richard: no no they they think that they're they're helping people to hide the symptom is what people think is the right thing
Susan: to do. Yeah and what of course it goes deeper and you just get more and more anxious and sicker. Read
Richard: the next paragraph, Susan, because I think this is really important.
Susan: So Cláudia says, let me quote a couple of other things from The Origin of Illness as a way of helping to explain this problem a little more. The big problem of the human being isn't that he has problems. We all have them. From the time we're born until the time we die, We die. All countries have them as well. The big problem surfaces when human beings censor so they don't see the problems.
What is important isn't what traditional psychoanalysis says. It says that it's important not to have problems, and this is wrong. What's important is for the individual to Have consciousness of the problems. He must not censor the consciousness of his problems. So humanity's major problem is a lack of consciousness. Human beings don't want to have consciousness because they believe that if they have consciousness of a problem, then they have the problem.
We believe that if we don't have consciousness of the problem, then we don't have it. That's key, right?
Richard: That's so brilliant. This is such a
Susan: great paragraph. This is Dr. Keppe, by the way. We think that if we have a problem, oh, now we have it. And that's the phenomenon often when a person goes through these therapeutic classes or starts psychoanalysis, they feel they're getting worse because what's happening is their consciousness is expanding.
And that's a great thing. You're actually getting better because now they're aware of things that they were hiding from themselves.
Richard: It doesn't always feel better, but it is better. In fact, it feels like, oh, my God, I came in with one problem. Now I have 10, right? But it's much, much, much healthier. And that's the thing. We think that it's healthy not to show the problems, like to have the mask that everything's cool and everything's okay.
We all have that experience. It's like the guy who looked totally normal, suddenly there's a suicide or something. You know what I mean? It's like, so the problem is not having the problems, the problems we all have, the problem we don't want to recognize that. We censor that, and that is much worse. So in fact, the big problem is not the problem.
The big problem is the censorship of the problem. That's a really, really important to Dr. Keppe's work. Consciousness of errors is good. Evil is not good. But consciousness of evil is very healthy. It's very important because the problem is that we don't want to see. So just by diminishing our censorship, having more tolerance to see our problems, we automatically get stronger.
Susan: And become healthier.
All those stress-related illnesses, which is almost all of them, begin to improve. And that's why there are the records at the clinic, you know, in the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine. And so many people report overcoming these stress-related illnesses and many others as well. And they're able to stop taking medication and, you know, without trying, just by doing this analysis and sometimes not even talking about their symptoms.
Richard: Consciousness of our problems is a recipe for a healthy life. Yeah, that gives us something to hang on to, doesn't it? Therapy for the world is the positioning phrase for our trilogical colleges. And we put that into practice here. Books, radio and TV programs classes in clinical theology conflict management, languages social media channels, reading groups it's a whole world of consciousness and practical applications that can really make a difference.
Rich at richjonesvoice.com my email again for more info. That's our program for today talk to you next time on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head
Richard: The most original, contemporaneous writer in the world today, says the National Scientific Research Center in France.
A genuine contributor to the intellectual treasury of civilization, says former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Gugassian. For these times of uncertainty and conflict comes a work of extraordinary vision, hope, and moral clarity. Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist Norberto Keppe writes with wisdom and authority about the things that really matter. How to heal illness. How inverted science is leading the destruction of nature and what to do about it.
Finding spirituality within. Structuring a truly just society. There are more than 3,000 books published worldwide every day. None are more important than these. The Books of Norberto Keppe. Trilogical science leading us to a new world.
Humankind's greatest problem is thinking that what we don't see won't hurt us. Norberto Cappi. Disinverting the human being and society.
