Richard Lloyd Jones: It flows inexorably underneath the American personality. Look on the bright side, on the sunny side of the street. Let a smile be your umbrella. That positive can-do spirit has accomplished much. Why then do we have so much depression? While there is much value in the positive attitude, the whole story is a little more complex. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the perils of positive thinking.
Well, first a confession. I'm an optimist, a glass is half full kind of guy. I've always liked to see the good things in others and in life. When I was doing a lot of seminar and workshop leading a number of years ago with my good friend Dennis Hilton's company out in Vancouver, I used to use a favorite story. Two shoe salesmen were visiting a village where few people wore shoes.
One wires back to his head office. It's no use selling here. I'm coming home. No one wears shoes. The other fellow wires back to his head office, incredible opportunities here, send lots of product, no one wears shoes. All right, it's kind of corny, but I love the attitude of the second guy, and I still do. But since coming to study and work here at Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo, Brazil, I've come to look at this aspect of positive thinking in a new light, perhaps more accurately, in a more sophisticated light.
Nowadays, with all the emphasis on cognitive therapy and behavior modification and even the power of affirmations, there can be a tendency to think that having better lives is simply a matter of progressive reprogramming of our attitudes and behaviors. The current popularity of the secret and what the bleep do we know propagate this notion further. I can accomplish whatever I want, giving the idea that through our thoughts or ideas we can change the world.
But Austrian-Brazilian psychoanalyst Norberto Keppe is quick to remind us of a philosophical point. Our being, who we are, follows action, not thinking. In other words, we are what we do, not what we think. It's our doing that governs our being. What complicates all this, of course, is that we often do unconsciously. I do things I didn't think I wanted to do. That's the problem in life, isn't it?
Keppe has managed to map out the human psychic life. Over 50 years of clinical experience on three continents, over 40 books on the subject, exhaustive study of all the foundational pillars of philosophical, theological, psychological thought. It is expansive work, I can assure you. I've been studying it extensively for seven years, and I can truly say I feel I've penetrated only a few centimeters below the surface of this.
But we will be exposing Keppe's work extensively at our World Conference of Analytical Trilogy, September 24th to 27th, 2008, in San Diego. More information on that at our website, www.wcatus.org. Including there, we'll be unveiling the new Keppe motor, a free energy motor that Keppe has developed from his work in the new physics.
But let's penetrate the human psyche a little more today. Keppe's book, The Origin of Illness, really lays out his psychological perspective. If you'd like to get more information about that book, you can write me at rich at richjonesvoice.com. Salma Genzani is a psychoanalyst at Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy. She joins me today to throw some light on the shadows cast by the sunny-side-up philosophy of positive thinking.
Salma, I grew up in North America. I was totally absorbed in the American culture, of course, American philosophy. So I'm very accustomed to thinking that thinking positively is the best thing in the world. We actually have these sayings in English. It's not a problem, it's an opportunity. And when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And we've lived our lives on these kinds of popular sayings.
And so what to say about this philosophy? Because it appears on the surface to be so positive. How do we talk about that, even begin to talk about that?
Yes, and I believe it's very important that we see the world and our lives from a positive point of view. For sure, it's important to have positive thoughts during our day. But the point that we would like to focus here is not to contradict Mr.
Norman Vincent Peale, because he was brilliant when he was talking about the power of the positive thinking. In the time he was talking about this, like believe in yourself, you can do things, you can build a new world, you can do things to make your life better. For sure we all can. But the thing that we would like to show is that the human being is against what he has of goodness inside himself, and he is totally unconscious of this.
We originally have our interior life, our essence, which is beautiful, true, which is good, and we fight against it many times, and we don't perceive what we are doing. Yes,
Richard: I think this question of the psychological life is not well understood yet. And I was just thinking back to what it must have been like for Freud and Jung and some of these guys.
They must have, you know, Freud maybe when when somebody came to meet him at a party and the person said to him it's really terrible to meet you as he shook his hand,
and Freud must have
Richard: said oh that's interesting. Why would a person say it was terrible. He didn't mean consciously that it was terrible. There must be something behind this, this psychological life, and this is what we're trying to get to as we explore this question of positive thinking.
Not that to have positive thoughts is a bad thing, but that there's something else going on that we don't perceive very well.
For example, as you mentioned, so Freud was the first guy who noticed that we act by our unconscious attitudes and intentions. And there is a lot of appearance, mask in our daily lives that we don't perceive what we are doing.
So what we do, we hide in ourselves the things we don't like to see about ourselves. And this is our sickness, this attitude of making unconscious, of hiding the bad intentions we have, the bad feelings, because we see it like something negative to know about them. And we show in Analytical Trilogy that to know about the negative part we all have is very useful also to have health.
This
Richard: is very good that we're talking about this because a friend of ours recently received some critiques of an entry on her blog. In her blog, she was raising the question of starting to see our problems, starting to look at our envy and some of the intentions that weren't so good that we have in this inconscientized part of ourselves. She was trying to explore this necessity to see our problems as a step in the process of getting better.
And some of the people commenting on her blog saw it as negative. How can you help us to understand that focusing on difficulties, focusing on this part we don't see, is not negative at all?
Yes, because you mentioned, Dr. Keppe, as you said before, our psychological life, it's what we have of more divine, of more elevated. And we, like human beings, we have a very big negative tendency against consciousness.
We are enemies of consciousness. And it's interesting to see this because consciousness is what makes us be closer to what is divine in ourselves. And because we don't accept this nature. So what happens? We see that we make this confusion that seeing problems is having problems. So we don't like to have consciousness of the problems we have because we believe they're living alienated without perceiving them, we don't have them, and if we see and we talk about them and if we deal with them then we have the problems.
And it's not like this, it's the opposite. So for example if a person doesn't perceive how arrogant she is, it's the way, the quicker way for her to lose all friends, not to develop in work, because only humble people can learn and can develop. And
Richard: I think what happens then, if we don't see this problem, we have this arrogance or this tendency to be depressed or whatever it is that is our problem.
If we don't see that in ourselves, when problems start to manifest in our lives, we're going to blame something outside us, aren't we?
Oh, yes, sure. We project. Yes. We always try to see us as victims of other people, of situations, of the world we live in.
Richard: And I've seen it this way in the language school where I teach Selma that if people don't have contact with this inner part of themselves, with their difficulties to learn the language, with their resistances to learning, with their problems, their shame, their embarrassment when they speak, or their perfectionism, if they don't have contact with those aspects, they're going to have difficulties to learn.
Because that's what stops them from learning. And they're immediately going to suggest that the problem is the English, or the French, or the Spanish, whatever they're learning. So they don't resolve the problem. It becomes much more difficult for them, actually.
So in this case, it's very useful if you ask them, what would you associate English, the English language, for example? And usually the Brazilian people would say development, openness, something bigger.
And then it's the opportunity to show the person that she inside have an attitude of going against what is development in her life, what is important, what will open doors to her. It's a psychological attitude reflecting in this question of learning a language, and then you help your students a lot, right?
Richard: We've done a lot of this kind of work and the degree to which the person accepts this interiorization as we call it in Dr.
Keppe's work The degree to which they accept that is the degree to which they develop almost
100%, you know. But what is this thing that's going on inside
Richard: us that causes us to be against our own development, against our own progress, that we don't perceive very well in ourselves?
Yeah, it's the question of envy. There is important to mention it because we have this attitude as we are not the creators of our inner life, of ourselves.
So we don't accept it very well. We try not to see in order to justify, well, I didn't ask to be born. And we go against this and against what is best in our lives.
Richard: And this is something that Dr. Keppe's work shines a lot of light on, this attitude we have to be against. But let me come at this question a little bit differently now, Salma.
Dr. Keppe sees the unconscious very differently from Freud. You alluded to this. Freud saw the unconscious as a natural instance in the human being. Nothing we could do about it. We're victims of it. Nothing we can do to change it. That's just the way it is. We have to learn to cope with it. But Keppe sees it very differently. He sees what he calls an inconscientized part of ourselves as an intention we have to hide our bad feelings and ideas.
So this sheds new light on the necessity to see our problems, since if we don't see them, they stay hidden and worsen our life. Because the problem is not something that comes from the outside. It's not something that comes from the natural world. It's something that we are creating and then making ourselves unconscious of. How do you see that? How can you help
us understand?
The biggest difference is that Freud saw the unconscious as something coming from nature. We are born with it. Nothing much to do about it. Let's try to know the unconscious, but we are born with it. And Dr. Keppe shows we are born with 100% consciousness in the essence, right? As we should be. We are all consciousness, but then, during our life, we have this attitude of going against, of denying consciousness.
So, an attitude of unconsciousization. It's very different to say that we are born, so we are not victims of our unconscious, but victims of our own attitude of unconscientizing that we have to perceive to minimize. So
Richard: if we see this tendency to go against, this tendency to make ourselves unconscious, if we see that, does that mean we're more conscious?
Yes, exactly.
Richard: And what are the benefits of that?
In all aspects of a person's life, there is development when the person starts to see what happens in her inner life. So if it's a person that has a lot of problems of relationships, that quarrels a lot, that is always annoyed with other people, the fact that she starts seeing this more deeply, the atmosphere where she lives changes completely.
Richard: There's a big movement in the world now to follow the ideas of this program called The Secret.
Perhaps you've seen it, perhaps you've seen the books. They're very popular here in Brazil, and I know North America as well, and all over the world, actually. They talk a lot in that book about how you get what you think about. So in that very well-spread idea, if you think about negative stuff, you'll only attract negatives, and you'll never get past it.
How do you respond to
that? Well, there I see, here is the energetic question. Because if you think negative and you act in the negative way all the time, you are in resonance with these negative vibrations of the world. You vibrate in this low level of energy. While if you think positively, if you are in contact with your consciousness, willing to do good to be more aware of of what happens in the world, you start to vibrate in higher levels of energy, so you resonate with what is elevate.
So it's a question of degree of resonance, right? And it's important to remember that to know problems, to know bad feelings is good. So when we are in contact with your bad feelings, with your problems, you are resonating with higher level of energies. Oh boy, to talk
Richard: about that because I was thinking as I was asking you this last question that we have an inversion, don't we, we think that to see the problem is a bad thing.
Exactly, and dr Keppe says that actually for us to accept to see our problems, even our evil, our bad intentions. This is a really good thing, that seeing the problem is not a bad thing. So there's our inversion.
This is the biggest inversion that we all have, to think that when we see a problem, I have a problem, so that's bad. And this is totally inverted.
If we don't see, we are with problems.
Richard: Do you have any examples of people who have come to you and you're a psychoanalyst, you've been here for a long time now, people who come to you with a real resistance to seeing a problem, something really long-standing that they haven't been able to resolve. But when they did resolve it, big things, big changes happened where somebody has conscientized something deeply and it's had an enormous impact almost instantly in their body, in their life, in their relationship, in their job.
So it's incredible the effects we can see in the bodies of people. So, for example, I have a client. He was not aware even that he had kidney stones, but he used to be worried. He's saying maybe one day in my life I will have this because my father had, my uncle had, my grandparent, and he saw them suffering a lot with this kind of problem.
And he was in the process of analysis and after a weekend of immersion course we had, and he had the big conscientization of his problems of being egoist and closed in himself and very suspicious of people. He had a big conscientization of this kind of problem in his life. When he arrived home on Monday and he went to urinate, he eliminated one big stone, really, naturally and without any pain.
He was astonished of perceiving this. So what happens? How can we explain this? The person in consciousness, when he accepts something important, he discontracts. Because in being against consciousness or, let's say, in our daily lives, when we have sickness, we are in contraction. Sickness, infirmity, physical infirmities are linked to the contraction of the body. And consciousness, when accepted, the person relaxes and this contracts.
And then he eliminated this stone that he didn't know that he had already in his body.
Richard: Did he bring it to you to show you? He
showed, yes, he did. It's a true story. It's a miracle, but it's not a miracle. When you deal with the psychological life, things like this happen every day.
Richard: This is really something. So, you know, when we talk about the perils of positive thinking, we're not talking about the natural state of thinking positively, being happy, being excited about life, being enthusiastic about life.
Those are wonderful qualities, and we need those in our lives. We're talking about this tendency we have to never want to see what's wrong. So what about answering the complaint, Selma, that all this focus on my problems is going to damage my self-esteem? I believe that, you know. When I first started to do my psychoanalysis, I thought, if I start to see my problems, I'm not going to be able to get out of bed in the morning and do what I need to do.
It was very strong in me, I realize now.
Right. So, yes, what we can mention about the person with low self-esteem is that she doesn't perceive how she is rejecting her best qualities in life. She believes that the others don't give value to what she has of goodness, but it's herself who is doing this and projecting onto others. So it's a person for example that can sing beautifully and she doesn't sing, she doesn't want to present herself or anything that one person can do very well but doesn't do because she denies to see the goodness she has.
Another thing linked to this is the question of theomania, because the person because of theomania has a lot of perfectionism, she wants to see everything perfect, so she doesn't except to see any little tiny problem that she might have or that shows up. And then, anything that shows up, she feels with low self-esteem. So the problem is not the self-esteem, it's the perfectionism that she has.
Richard: And the theomania would be, in Dr. Keppe's terminology, the desire to be like a god. Perfect.
Powerful, etc. And also, Rich, our society, which is full of inverted values, has a wrong concept of success. Success in our society is based on glory, money, status, power, etc., which are not real values. The person can have all of this, but as a consequence of a good attitude in life, of being useful and not for itself.
Richard: One of the things Dr. Keppe says about this attitude of being useful, of wanting to be in goodness, he says that the moment you start to enter into goodness, doing something good, you're going to see a lot of problems. Yes. And that to live in goodness, we're obliged to see the problems we have, the ways we act against it. Anybody who accomplishes a lot in their life, they feel they could do more.
So there's always this attitude, too, and this is difficult for us to deal with, and maybe is suggestive of why some people don't want development, because as you start to develop, you have more responsibility, you need to see more problems, you need to deal
with more problems. Yes, so many people prefer to stop. No, here it's enough, it's my limit and I don't want to go further exactly because of this.
Richard: So not wanting to see our problems is evidence of a desire to not develop. That's kind of a strange double negative there. But if we don't want to see our problems, it means that we really don't want to develop because development means seeing the difficulties, the challenges we have, anything like that.
And we don't want to fulfill the role we have in life here, that to produce good things, to fulfill our role in life, that should be to glorify God, to, with our good actions, good performances, etc., our goal is to elevate our energetic level to give glory to the Creator who created us.
He created us for this, not to be said to be an unusual etc. There's a real value
Richard: to in seeing our problems in our society, you know, because we're we're creating a society now that's really very close to destroying our very means of existence, including ourselves, and so to just be optimistic and think that everything's great and fine, this is outside reality, isn't it, this is not seeing the reality that exists.
Not to be negative, but we have to see that there is a serious problem.
Oh yes, there is a serious problem. If we don't see the roots of our problems inside, this inversion, this envy that is destroying not only ourselves, the house we live, our planet, we can never stop this from happening. I love to
Richard: talk about the psychological life. Dr. Keppe says in his new book called The Divine Kingdom.
He says the psychological is the most divine thing that exists in creation. And he says that at the first sentence. And in the next sentence, he said, this is why it's been so disregarded, because we've been against this really divine part of ourselves. And so when we don't want to see our problems, we're avoiding seeing how we are acting against the magnificence that we are, and if we see how we're acting against the magnificence that we are we immediately start to act in the right way.
It's such an important conscientization, isn't it. How can you talk a little bit about this just at the end of our
podcast, because it's important to realize that this essence nature, divine nature that we have is it's so great, it's so huge. Dr. Keppe says in his book Glorification that it's bigger than the universe, the beauty of planets, the beauty of nature.
The divine nature that the human being has is of such a grandiosity that we cannot imagine, and that we use or we accomplish maybe five percent of each maximum. So if we realize what we are missing, we could wake wake up to this reality and lead our lives in a much better way. But to see and to accomplish and to deal with all this beauty, we have to see what is impeding us to get to this essence of our beings, that is our pathology that we are talking about here, our problems.
So we have to see the problems in order to get to the core of existence, which is our divine nature. Always
Richard: in Keppe's work, there's this dialectic. See our blockages to the true essence of ourselves. Not just gloss over them superficially. It's very positive and therapeutic work. Talk to you next time on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
