Richard Lloyd Jones: Neurosis. Sadomasochistic behavior. Schizoparanoid personalities. We've come to understand those words as applied to personal psychology, but never have we heard them applied to nations or even historical periods. Until now. Today, we'll dive into a fascinating study, the psychoanalysis of society. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. A couple of weeks ago, we started the process of investigating the social structures and our inverted society in our program about money and power.
And there's been some incredible response to that program. Over 20 people have requested free copies of Liberation of the People, Dr. Norberto Keppe's incisive analysis of the pathology of power. And by the way, there are still some copies of that book available. Just email me if you'd like one, free, rich at richjonesvoice.com.
Today's topic will probably whet your appetite for more of Keppe's extraordinary work in this area. Frankly, to my knowledge, there's been relatively little study of sociopathology as Keppe defines it. Normally, the term is applied to the behavior of sociopathic or psychopathic personalities. Keppe is concerned more with social difficulties where the social systems reflect the psychological problems of the individuals who created them, thereby creating a psychologically unbalanced society.
Prominent social critics have been trying to shine the light on abuses of power and injustice for decades, but none have Keppe's psychological and philosophical lineage or his clinical experience, so you'll find much that stands alone in his work. To focus our topic today, because it's an expansive one, I've asked Dr. Cláudia Pacheco, the vice president of Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy, to join us again.
Cláudia, give us the overview. What has Keppe accomplished in his studies on sociopathology?
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Keppe was able to apply the main concepts of the psychological structure of the human being in the society. For example, in the individual, there are some attachments to some phases of development and there is a correspondence between how the individual psychological structure is developed and the structure of society.
The individual who is attached to the oral phase tends to talk too much, drink, smoke, have oral dependencies like taking pills, drugs, and he is generally a dependent individual. He is not too much aggressive, but he also does not develop himself so much.
Richard: The oral phase of development, according to Ferenczi and Freud, was from zero to two years of age. Keppe's contention is that individuals and whole societies can get fixed into these development periods.
Let's apply this knowledge of the oral phase to the greater community, Cláudia. Who could we see as locked into the oral phase?
Cláudia: For example, many areas of Brazil fixated in this time of psychological development. For instance, when they travel, they are those who spend more money on telephone calls. So Brazilian people speak, speak, speak. And they are not so much linked to making wars or building empires or having colonies or having these multinational corporations.
But they are more linked to drinking, to smoking, to speaking, to eating. And they are very much dependent. They are oral kind of individuals.
Richard: Maybe every one of us can see some aspects of this in ourselves. You know, we Canadians have been known to like our beer. The second phase of development, Cláudia, is...
Cláudia: The anal phase. In this phase, individuals are more linked to sadomasochistic behaviors, and they tend to be more aggressive or to enjoy being attacked.
But very paranoid personalities are linked to this phase, and they are greedy. Money is one of the expressions of this attachment. For them, it's much more important to have things, to have economic power. They may not even be too rich, but what they have, they are very much attached to. They are materialistic. For them, it's much more important the bill they have in the banks or the money they carry than ethical, romantic, or they can even eat very little in order to save money because they value more money than anything.
Countries who are very much attached to those values sacrifice very much their peoples and other peoples as well because they tend to build wars. Military, powerful nations are more linked to this anal phase.
Richard: Well, we can certainly connect the dots to figure out who that phase applies to, can't we?
"Now and throughout history. Our next psychological phase of development, Cláudia.
Cláudia: The genital phase. We could name France, Italy, some other romantic-minded peoples like Austrian people. Sensual, narcissistic, romantic, artistic, Californian people are much more linked to this genital phase. Californian people could be seen as more narcissistic, more romantic, they value more beauty and human relationships. We could even name those times of history where this Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Romanticism.
So this time was the genital phase, much more developed than other phases. So a country where its citizens have those values, they tend to give a lot of value to human rights, peaceful movements, environmental movements, Women's rights, relationships, etc., etc., etc.
Richard: These are, as I said, infantile phases, the oral phase from zero to two years of age, the anal phase from two to four, and the genital from four to six."
But the idea is that we get stuck in one or a combination of all three and don't progress to...
Cláudia: It's a mature phase where we put reason, ethics, aesthetics, and the common good, the spiritual values, in practice in our lives. So we have to frustrate our sensorial desires, our sensorial attachments. Not always, of course, because this is natural. We have to have a balanced kind of living or life.
But if we need sometimes to do good for humanity, we have to sacrifice ourselves. We have to have a little bit less so everybody can have his share, a fair life, a beautiful life. And only mature individuals are able, are ready sometimes to sacrifice if it's needed for the common good of humanity.
Richard: And what's the relevance of all this now? Well, that all of this is flying below our radar.
We're completely unconscious of it, individually and collectively.
And what does this mean, Cláudia?
Cláudia: What is pathological and what is unconscious to us, this tends to create an enormous disease in the world. For instance, so-called undeveloped kind of nations. They don't have education. They are sub-developed peoples because the more developed countries don't bring consciousness and knowledge to them. And this is very dangerous. So we can call these undeveloped nations a kind of a cancer for the world because they are sort of unconscious peoples.
And if we don't bring awareness to them, the world will not have any chances. In
Richard: Keppe's book, The Origin of Illness, he spends a good length of time looking at the role of censorship in psychoanalysis, not on the part of the analyst, but of the patient. In Keppe's experience, blocking consciousness of problems and putting restrictions on what we're prepared to see about ourselves and our situations creates big trouble, more trouble, actually, than the problem itself.
And it's very interesting to look at that from the perspective of the greater society.
Cláudia: Censorship blocks or represses consciousness, especially consciousness of pathology, creating an enormous unconscious mass of individuals in the world. And these repressive mechanisms, we could name them as judicial systems and its unfair laws or tyrannical laws. We have police, we have military, we have wars, we have this censoring kind of systems in society.
They spend millions and millions of dollars just to cover up the truth for society. Unfortunately, a lot of medias play this role, too. We could name this as a mechanism. ...of defense of neurosis. They create mechanisms to distort, to rationalize, to deny, to cover up, and if necessary, fully and openly repress, kill people, invade nations. This is a very and the most dangerous mechanism in society, which is like the demon of all diseases, the creator, the master of all sicknesses and anguish and even social problems.
Richard: You know, in a fascinating interview I read a number of years ago with Edward Bernays, Freud's cousin and the father of public relations, allusions to this kind of control were everywhere. Bernays believed that there were an intelligent few, his words, who had been chosen, him again, for the responsibility of understanding the world and influencing those who didn't understand it. And you know that mentality is all throughout the corridors of power.
Keppe's book, Liberation of the People, was written to wake us up to the pathological reality that our world has become so we can take steps to change it. What does Keppe call for most, Cláudia?
Cláudia: Consciousness, consciousness, and consciousness. Keppe's analysis is the analysis of consciousness. We have to light up truth and consciousness inside of ourselves to diminish censorship.
You know, the biggest philosopher the world ever had, Jesus already spoke about this, and even Socrates. "Truth sets you free." The most important, the crown of the sciences, it started just in the 20th century, which is the science of the mind, which is the most powerful tool or instrument humanity has, But it can be used to destroy or to construct. And it has been used to destroy more than to construct lately.
So we need to address our psychopathology and how our psychopathology has built the sociopathology, pathology in society.
Richard: This psychological perspective goes to the root cause of our human destruction. And this has been missing from our global conversation in helping us face our enormous collective problems. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
