Richard Lloyd Jones: Normally, when we look at social or individual problems, we see the source of them outside. Too much stress. Too much work. It's my genes or my upbringing. We're not so inclined to take a good look inside us for answers. This is a big mistake, which we'd like to take some steps towards correcting today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today we'll go more deeply into one of the key distinguishing qualities of Norberto Keppe's psychoanalytical methodology.
Interiorization. That's the process of seeing the relationship between our reactions to outside stimulus and the corresponding aspect inside us that's being triggered. This is remarkable stuff, and if accepted, the process can calm us immensely and help us solve long-standing physical, emotional, or even societal issues. Before we get into that, let me personally invite you to mark down these dates on your calendar, March 16th to 23rd, 2008.
Our 19th International Congress on Analytical Trilogy here in Brazil. This will be a chance for you to participate and learn more about Keppe's discoveries in psychopathology and psychology, psychosomatic health, education, scientific methodology and perspectives, arts, media, and how our human inversion, envy, and theomania are leading us to create an increasingly sick and destructive society. I'm getting a website together to announce this and tell you more about it.
I hope to have that up in the next week or so. For now, write me if you'd like more information, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Today, Dr. Cláudia Pacheco joins me again to explore, to begin exploring with me, actually, a very expansive topic that we won't entirely get to the bottom of today. In his book, From Sigmund Freud to Viktor Frankl, Integral Psychoanalysis, Keppe's book outlining his psychoanalytical view, he says this, Up until the present moment, all processes of psychotherapy have not been psychological.
Psychoanalysis itself, whether orthodox or not, is, more than anything else, a biological or organic treatment. Let's start there, Cláudia. How can we understand this better?
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: This is absolutely important for everybody to understand. This is like a revelation, a scientific revelation. Because everybody thought that they were doing psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, psychiatry. But in reality, the psychic in front of the word, psychiatric, psychology, psychotherapy, was just a misunderstanding of the thing.
Because all psychotherapists, all schools of psychology, they studied behaviors, which are external manifestations of your inner life. They study environment and its influence in people, how your parents, culture, society influences your life. They study how instincts and unconscious life can influence your own life, like sexual traumas, lack of development in your childhood or problems that you had with your family and parents, censorship you got from culture and society, teachings.
Then we had some psychologists that studied a little bit of motivation, like Maslow, and some studied personality, like Allport. But most, the big majority, never considered some essential factors. For example, the factor of our free choice, our free will, our inner feelings and choosing what to feel, love or hate, anger, of generosity, tolerance or censorship, envy or gratitude. So this is an incredible inner life that we have, which is coronated by what Keppe calls consciousness, which is a mixture between feeling and reason all together.
It's like an inner force, an inner energy that moves our life ahead, that is leading all our actions. So if you like, if you have love, if you are interested, genuinely interested in something, then you at the same time you think accordingly. So if you want to help to have a better motor for the car so you don't pollute so much, you have this impulse which is a loving impulse, loving feeling.
You see an error, you see a problem, you want to fix it, you want to help, so this is a very loving impulse. And then after that or at the same time you start thinking and reasoning how you would do this. It's like synonyms, love and reason. You use your mind, you use your intellect, you use your knowledge, your perception, your intuition to third as the third step put in action to express this in society.
On the other hand, or in the opposite side, if you have an envious instinct or impulse or feeling or megalomaniac or arrogant or voracious, you want to have everything for yourself. So you use your mind, your intellect in this direction. How can you get more money with less work, even if you have to exploit people or steal people or speculate or destroy the planet, but you will find means, devious means, to accomplish your feelings and your desires.
Don't
Richard: we have the same impulses inside, Cláudia? Do we have different impulses? Because you're suggesting that there are some who want to act from a position of love and others who want to be criminals or be corrupted, is there a different impulse inside us then?
Cláudia: We have the genuine feelings and intellectual life and a similar essence, Jones. All of us have, in essence, a good essence, which is feeling of love, rational thought, which are clear and reasonable ideas, and the right use of your intellect, And good actions should be the result.
This should be our, if we would live according to our essence. But unfortunately, there is a flaw in our will, in our free choice. We have this like a decadence. So we have what Keppe discovered as inversion. So we have inverted kind of wishes and desires. And this inversion that we have makes us many times wish for the worst for us and for other people and take pleasure in destroying, in being egotistic, envious, destructive.
Richard: This aspect of Keppe's work, I think, is extraordinary, that we have this essential nature, as you described, good, beautiful, truthful, loving nature inside us, essence inside us, given to us by God, but we have this will that's inverted. And Freud didn't understand anything about this. This is only Keppe who's leading us.
Cláudia: Only Keppe,
Richard: only Keppe. Talk a bit more about this
Cláudia: neurosis.
And also, Richard, many people say, well, this is the world. This is humanity. This is human being. Corruption is the law. So if you don't act accordingly, you will be left aside, stepped over. You will be robbed. You will be like foolish, foolish in society. And you will be humiliated. So, there is this understanding, which is not official, but it's practical in our everyday life, that we should live upside down.
We should live denying our essence. And that's society and that's how it works. And this is neurosis, psychosis and organic diseases. Like this is the major cause of all these problems in our lives. Also socioeconomic diseases.
Richard: The topic of our podcast today is how to see yourself through other people's eyes, which is part of this process of interiorization.
Cláudia: And that's a problem, Richard, that Keppe had to confront in his methodology.
How a psychoanalyst could help his client to know himself innerly. The importance of the inner life is essential because from our inner selves start everything that we do, that we accomplish, even our mental and organic health. Because from our inner feelings, perceptions, choices, values, especially, what are we really interested about? Are we focusing in the construction of my life? Am I really accepting the good, the beauty, the truth that exists in the universe?
Or am I more directing my attention to destructive behaviors? So I don't have consciousness of my own intentions. I don't have consciousness of what I really want, what I really do to myself and to others and to my life. I project outside of the... People are to be blamed. Society is to be blamed. Food is to be blamed. Institutions, schools of thought, anything is to be blamed.
Even God is to be blamed. But I am always right and good intention. And this is not so. This is not so. We are the worst enemies we can imagine. We are the real true enemies of ourselves.
Richard: Yeah, we can use some specific examples about that in a minute, Cláudia, but I want to come to something I think that's essential in understanding Keppe's work, which is the sense that he reminds us of, that we have a good essence, that we
Cláudia: have something good inside, and our neurosis comes from deviating from that.
The denial, the distortion, the misrepresentation of our true essence, meaning we can be loving, but we don't. We normally are envious, egotistic, angry, and so forth. We could be truthful, but we are always deviating, masquerading, creating fantasies, being devious. We are not really truthful, even to ourselves. We could also do good actions, just constructive actions, be good to others, be kind, be loving, helping, but we normally act egotistically, wanting to take, take, take, take, for me, for myself.
So this is upside-down view of the being, that having is more valuable than being, for instance. It's nothing wrong with having. It's good to have. But with what purpose?
Richard: What is anger, frustration, jealousy for Keppe?
Cláudia: Oh, they are the denial of the true feeling, of our true essence, which is love. We should be loving beings if we would want to be healthy.
But we deny this, and we start creating all the problems. And as well, when we are not truthful, we start creating anxiety, panic attacks, because we know something is wrong. Deep down there is this alarm system. And that's why Keppe never wants to cut off or to finish with symptoms, giving pills or drugs or anything or techniques, reprogramming techniques, for instance, to cut off with anxiety, with anguish, with panic attacks, because they are like alarm systems.
They are very important. It would be something similar if you would give an aspirin for a person to bring fever down, and the true infection would not be treated. So anxiety, panic attacks, anguish, feelings of guilt, anything of those uncomfortable feelings, they are a door to our inner lives. They are showing something you are doing wrong against your being. So pay attention, it's not normal to have panic attacks, anxiety or anguish.
So it's not to hide these feelings. It's to understand better their causes and go to the root.
Richard: And the cause is not something external, right? It's going to be something inside us.
Cláudia: Mostly inside of us. And if we are creating a crazy society and if we want to live a society upside down in its values, it's something wrong that we are doing against ourselves.
If we accept this with no resistance, we take in. So we just follow and we sometimes even enjoy a society which is materialistic, sensorial, dispersive, wasteful, egotistic, inhuman. This is the society we are living. How can we be happy or feel good in a society like this?
Richard: Yeah, because if we have this basis of goodness inside every one of us, then if we start to live in a way that's not aligned with that, we must start to feel desperate.
Cláudia: Yeah, because you know what? Neurosis is also the wish to live in existence against our essence.
Richard: What's the role of the will in all this, Cláudia? Because Keppe talks about how illness is a creation of the human beings because of the will to go against this nature. So this
Cláudia: must be very important in understanding human psychopathology. Pathology, yeah, because when capi speaks about essence he speaks about intelligence, intuition, consciousness, feelings, so we are born with more or less the same potential, everybody, in any race, in any country, and under any circumstances we are essentially similar.
But all of us have a flaw when we are born, which is the flaw in our will. Our will is not original anymore because we don't want anymore what is the best for us, nor the best for other people. So, my intelligence is okay. When I'm born, I have a very, very sharp intelligence, which is developing until more or less 18 years old.
But after this time, our intelligence, for some reason, slides down. So, what happens to our intelligence? If some individuals, some geniuses, just go up and up and up, and they take advantage from their intelligence up to their 80s, 90s, and 100s. So, what we see is the use we do with our intelligence, the use we do with our consciousness, with our perception.
For instance, I don't want to see problems. I really dislike facing problems. So if I open my eyes and if I let them see what we need to see, we will see plenty of problems to be corrected. Many things are wrong. So if I want to deceive myself, to distort my perception, to distort my intelligence and think, okay, so life is like that and I need to corrupt myself and my principles and get along with the society, I will corrupt all the essential talents I got from my birth.
So I would decay my intelligence, I would decay my feelings, my capacity to love, to trust people, to trust life, my hope, my faith, everything that is good and necessary to live. My energy
Richard: to work. I'll just give it up.
Cláudia: Motivation. So it's going like downhill and corrupting, corrupting, corrupting because we corrupt our values in order to adapt ourselves to society even.
Richard: When you talk about this tendency that we don't want what's best, which is this corruption you're talking about, how do you show this to clients? Because this is something I think that is very difficult for us to accept. It's not sort of
Cláudia: like at the forefront of our consciousness, right? We don't wake up in the morning and say, how can I destroy my life today?
Oh, for sure. But somehow it's operating because we see this everywhere. I have a client, John, that she was analyzing that if she would do everything she wants to, she would die in a couple of days. Meaning if she would be very honest and do just what she pleases, she would not wake up in the morning. She would sleep as much as she likes.
And then she would watch TV or she would go to the movies or shopping as much as she likes. And she would just eat as much as she likes and what she likes, like chocolate, like macaroni, spaghetti, ice cream. So she would get fatter and fatter and she would spoil her health. And then she would just hang around and go to the beach, and she would very soon lose her job, her clients, she would become poor, she would just become more and more decadent, sick, with less energy.
In a very short time, she would be almost dead. No, it doesn't take long, does it? It doesn't take long, Richard. And this is the way people follow when they take drugs. So they want pleasure instead of discipline, work, and they see discipline and work as negative.
Richard: This is evidence that this will of ours is against our own
Cláudia: development. Yes,
Richard: yes. Now, there's something to say here about Keppe's idea about consciousness, because we can think, if we've been raised in any kind of society based on what Freud thought, that we're mostly unconscious.
But Keppe is saying exactly the opposite, that we are consciousness that we choose to ignore, that we don't want to see. And this relates to this inverted will. We have these desires that we don't want to see. We pretend, ah, it's okay. You know, I'm just sleeping a little longer than normal. It's not a problem. Like an alcoholic who says, I can stop anytime I want.
But in this sense, then, of consciousness, The external world is very revealing to us, isn't it?
Cláudia: Yes. The only way for us to know ourselves is through the external world. It's like a resonance system. If we resonate with something externally, and we almost always do, because our inner life is like a resonance system. It's very, very rich. It's like a universe. So, we have, in one way or another, all the elements inside of us that we see outside.
All the evil is potentially there, and all the good. Evil in terms of this inverted will that we are born with. The universe is a big big mirror and if i resonate with something in a negative way, if i get irritated or afraid with something externally more than the normal, i i could say i have something inside of myself which is resonating with this.
So i have something that i need to pay attention because I don't perceive. And this is the importance of psychoanalysis because we normally are and we behave in a way that we don't know. We have some bad habits that we are always hiding from our consciousness. We have aggressive behaviors, we have decadent attitudes that we don't realize many times. On the other hand, if we resonate with something, if we admire a genius like a leader, an artist, the beauty of nature, if we resonate with the wonders we see in the external world, this means that we can only recognize this because we have something inside of ourselves which is similar.
That's why a murderer or a very decadent person can go down deep there in their inner selves and rescue this healthy aspect, because there is a healthy essential basis there that can be recovered through even resonance, through the help of the analyst, through the help of someone that I admire or something that I admire, and especially through the resonance with God. What is divine?
Inside us and... Inside us and outside. Because when we get in tune with these healthy aspects of a work of art, if you listen to a symphony of Beethoven, and if you resonate, you lift your soul and you lift your being. And energetically, you lift even your cells up to that higher level of energy. And it's very, very therapeutic. We've
Richard: all had this experience.
Many people are frustrated by what happens in the outside world. I see a lot
Cláudia: that people are very disillusioned with the corruption that they see outside. You know something, Jones? We think that we accept the goodness and to be happy. And this book, Origin of Illnesses, that Keppe wrote, is like a treaty of how we really destroy happiness in our lives. And this is a universal problem.
So we see many times people getting sick or dying as soon as they achieve everything they wanted. It's like a syndrome of success, as they say. When the person steps to a higher position or they achieve ideals and they get everything they want, they destroy. They either have an accident or they die or they develop a cancer or something.
Richard: Addicted to drugs.
This is classic.
Cláudia: Yeah. So this is a symptom of this inability of ourselves to deal with happiness. And so this is a corruption. We corrupt. We corrupt the good that we already have, the talents we have, the chances to feel good that we have. We go always after a negative thought, a negative feeling, a negative memory to destroy, to corrupt our lives.
This is one of the hundreds of forms of corrupting life.
Richard: But we say this, we say that we're waiting for the other shoe to drop or we say, I think it's too good. Something bad
Cláudia: is going to happen. Yeah, it's too good to be true. So I have to wait for the worst because if this doesn't work, I'm prepared. And all of this is a big corruption, corruption in gratitude, corruption in hope, corruption in faith, faith in what is good, beautiful and truthful.
Normally we believe that reality is always negative and we should always expect for the worse.
Richard: So this corruption we get upset with on the outside is the corruption that we do in different ways inside
Cláudia: our own lives? Because we should not complain because we are not happy. We reject, we refuse, we push away from us everything that is good. We are very suspicious.
Suspicion is a sickness. Suspicion is a corruption, corruption of what is good. To be suspicious of someone or something that is good is an enormous dishonesty that we have.
Richard: You had a wonderful example of this, Cláudia, from the teleclass that you do with us every Saturday in English where you're helping one of the participants to understand this better. This is a guy who works with men who are in prison or are being restricted by the legal system because they've been beating their wives.
And you were asking this man what they say about this, and this fellow said that most of the time the men who are involved in this situation say, "I know I shouldn't do it, but I love her so much, and when I see that she doesn't show the same level of love to me as I show to her, I know I shouldn't do it, but I get terribly frustrated and I lash out."
In some way. And you said to this man on the teleclass, how do you see this from our Analytical Trilogy perspective? And he said that they're falling into the trap of looking for the outside world to make them feel okay. And you said, "but you have to help them to see that the lack of love that they feel from their spouse or their girlfriend is actually the lack of love that they themselves have, and that they're projecting the lack of love they have into their partner." This happens all the time.
Cláudia: All the time. And one of the the ways we corrupt and we are have no we don't have affection towards our lives, Richard, is the way for instance we waste our time socializing, using internet, procrastinating the most important things we need to do to progress in life.
Richard: Stopping things that are
Cláudia: important. Denying to do what needs to be done to STOP the Destruction of the World or this injustice in society and these inverted values. Because if we see things and if we don't do, it's a choice. It's an attitude we are adopting of not doing anything about. This is a choice, a destructive choice. So when I say, what can I do?
Or, okay, so other people would take care. Oh, I'm just one. So this is a choice, a choice to destroy. Because if we don't do, we are choosing to destroy, to help the destruction.
Richard: Yeah, no choice is a choice, right? Yes, yes. To do nothing is a choice.
Cláudia: And we do this every day in our everyday lives, not only with major subjects, but what we do with our time.
Do I really use in a good way my time? I'm sure we don't. And I'm sure our listeners will agree with us that they are procrastinating what is the most important things in their lives they don't do. And this is a corruption. So when we see outside people corrupting society, we can say uh oh, this is a big mirror. Because that's what I do with the wonder of life that I received.
What am I doing with my own life? This is the only life I have to take advantage. What
Richard: am I doing with my creativity, with my intelligence?
Cláudia: Yes, we should all be geniuses like Mozart and like Beethovens and like Cappies in life. We should all, we have the potential. It's a matter of choosing. And this is absolutely inner. It's our inner choice.
And this choice has nothing to do with the external life. We cannot blame anyone for this. The
Richard: big upside here is that as we begin to understand our inner selves better, We develop more strength to cope with what happens outside. That means we're happier and healthier. And that's good news. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
