Richard Lloyd Jones: Everyone is weighed in with opinions on the subject. The comments flow endlessly from book titles and magazine articles. Our predominating materialistic worldview limits our discussions of it to the fields of money or fame. But as our defining economic structure crumbles before our very eyes, we'd be well advised to try to redefine it. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, success, what is it really made of?
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you of our other radio project, a new show I'm developing with Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco, a frequent contributor here. We're calling the program Healing Through Consciousness. It's a program focused on offering advice and counseling to you for any problems or difficulties that you want help with. We regularly take calls and emails to delve deeper into these difficult problems that you haven't been able to solve or get on top of before.
There is much exciting and important that's emerging from the Brazilian School of Analytical Trilogy, the science I base these podcasts on, and our programs develop and spread those ideas, so do take the time to find out more. You'll be glad you did.
You know, we've already approached the idea of success in a popular Thinking with Somebody Else's Head program way back in January of 2007, but I'd like to come at it again, this time from a little more metaphysical point of view. We're very limited about success today because of our economic bias we bring to any discussion of the subject. From the Forbes list to winners on The Apprentice, we give a lot of airtime to success defined by an extremely narrow range of parameters.
And that makes us very shallow. It actually deteriorates our cultural and even intellectual experience. Lily Tomlin expressed it well when she said, sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world. Amen, Ms. Tomlin. What's the value of that, right? But I sense a hunger for more. There has to be. Tell me there is. It's why I'm putting all the energy and time into this podcast, actually.
We actually do see evidence that people are seeking more in the acceptance of Norberto Keppe's TV show around the world. And Keppe's show is the polar opposite of the completely irrelevant discourse that passes for today's TV talk show. And more evidence of this with the worldwide appreciation flowing to Britain's Got Talent winner Susan Boyle. An ordinary, anything-but-the-usual, collagen-lipped, airbrushed, made-by-marketing, limited talent we are normally spoon-fed by our mediocrity-addicted media.
We are hungry for authenticity. I often think of Keppe's Analytical Trilogy like the water of truth on our parched earth. So let's look at success in that light today. Psychoanalyst Leo Lima joins me today. You know, Leo, there are absolutely reams of literature, books, articles, websites about this thing of being successful. And I'd really like to look at this trilogically today because this is a subject that people don't understand.
I don't think people understand as completely as we could. So what are the first things we can say about success first that might give us a starting point to launch into this subject?
Leo Lima: Well, I think that it depends on your purpose what you want to be successful at. For example, you may have a goal of doing something wrong. Let's say a person tries to rob a bank and he can be successful at doing that.
So just the word to be successful doesn't mean much. It doesn't mean that you're going to be accomplished, you're going to feel good, you're going to have a good life, be healthy, be happy, it doesn't mean that. When people say to be successful, they are thinking about being happy in a way or another. But it's not really connected to being happy. It depends on the purpose you
Richard: have.
Now, this leads into something I think that's very interesting in Dr. Keppe's work, is the study of the will. Because we have the idea, coming from English philosophy particularly, that we're free to do whatever we want. And so success, you know, because we always have good intentions, so whatever we want to do, we're going to be successful in that. That's fine, that's perfectly acceptable.
But this idea of the will, that we're not free to do whatever we want, has something very, very important to say.
Leo: This is called metaphysics in philosophy, when they say that the being in itself, and including human nature, is or is something, and the human being is not the one who determines it. In other words, you are born with a nature, and this nature, you didn't create this nature.
You are a human being, and the human being has a specific quality, which we believe that it's made of good, beauty, and truth. And there were philosophers that said, no, the human being doesn't have a pre-made, shall we say, kind of nature. You can be whatever you want. The English philosophers came up with this idea. You can
Richard: create yourself in whatever way you want to
Leo: go.
William of Ockham, for example, gave this idea that you have freedom to be whatever you want. And then comes the point of will and free will. And people like to believe that they have free will because it feeds our sense of arrogance. If I say, I can do whatever I want, so I feel powerful. But in fact, for example, you cannot eat rotten food.
I mean, you can in practice, but not in fact. But if you do, you'll not be healthy. So there are things you cannot do. You're not free. You can only do what is in nature, what's natural. If the human being's nature, true nature, is made of good, beauty and truth, we can only act that way. I may think that I can be dishonest, have bad intentions.
And I can do that, but the result is not going to be favorable to me, to my health, to my well-being. So, in practice, you cannot do that.
Richard: Are you suggesting there are rules then, Lil, that there are rules, there are ways we're supposed to be?
Leo: Yes, there are rules in nature, but that doesn't mean that you are limited. Because within this nature, you are unlimited.
For example, you can, using your nature, your true nature, you can develop many things, science, philosophy, you can create a good society, good laws, just laws, you can do many good things. So it's not limited. But we have this inverted idea that we follow, if we follow our true nature, we will be very restricted. And then you say, oh, then I can not do anything.
It gives this wrong impression that nature limits you. But it's the opposite. If you do your nature, people have so many qualities, so many values. It's almost infinite. You can't develop. Now, the opposite is also true. You think that if you do whatever you want, you'll be free and with thousands of possibilities. But it's not true. For example, people, when they are in a mental hospital, they believe they can do anything.
And pathology is very limited because they are all the same. You can predict how a schizophrenic will react. You can predict how a paranoid person will react. So when we do something out of reality, we are very limited and very poor. But within your nature, you have lots of possibilities.
Richard: Many people, I think, don't have a sense of this. And we look around in the society today and we see lots of really bad things, too.
So how do we build the argument for the true nature of human beings being truth and goodness and beauty? I'd like to just sort of raise that question while we're having this discussion today.
Leo: Well, by intuition, people know this is true. By intuition. So to start with, we wouldn't need to prove it. Because people know it. But let's talk about it. For example, by the results, if people who do things against their nature, against their good nature, they feel bad.
Then you say, well, but psychotics and psychopaths, they commit crimes and they don't feel bad. But they do. They try to incontentize the bad feelings they have. So they try to push this bad feeling away and they say, no, I'm okay, I don't feel bad. But they do. And this shows in diseases, physical diseases, they have organic disease, they have symptoms, they're very agitated, they get paranoid.
So all this shows that their true nature is about to explode from inside, trying to impose itself, no matter how much they try to push it away. So you don't feel good. And this is a sign that you are not doing what your nature urges you to do also
Richard: in our world leo we can see that A breakdown of all the systems.
A breakdown of the economic system. We are destroying the environment. We have serious repercussions to the way we being. This would be, in a macrocosmic view, this would be examples of the breakdown taking us away from our true nature in a macrocosmic way, just as the individual would be, right?
Leo: Yes, that's right. You can see that the world, we have exploited so much the natural resources of Earth and they are at an end and we are almost destroying our planet.
So we cannot do whatever we want. There is something that we should follow, which we are not. So
Richard: in a way, the breakdowns of these systems or the breakdowns of our health, any kinds of symptoms we have like this, are evidence of how far away from the truth of ourselves we are.
Leo: Could we define success then as the being in alignment with the true essence of the human being, the expressions of the truth of ourselves?
Could we define that? I think so, because if we followed this good nature, we wouldn't be ill. We would be always healthy, always self-confident. And so when we have problems, problems, they don't exist by themselves. They are results of our going away from this true nature and then you have a bad consequence in terms of being ill, not feeling good having a bad society an unjust society, destroying the
Richard: planet.
Incredible stress incredible frustration, this kind of angst that exists inside so many people
Leo: today so this anxiety shows that something is wrong if you could do something different from your true nature. And if that worked, you wouldn't feel stressed. So stress, anxiety, guilt feelings show that you're not going in line with something. This
Richard: is one of the things I think that's most impressive to me about Norberto Keppe's work is the reminder to us that there is a structure of life.
There are like sort of rules. There are ways to be. It's not just a random universe that's evolving out of the muck into whatever it's going to become. It is something that's organized and has rules and laws and ways of being, right?
Leo: Exactly. And Keppe shows, he found through his years of analyzing people, that we human beings like to believe that there is no true nature.
There's nothing you should follow. You can do whatever you want because of our megalomania, our arrogance, this feeling, this attitude we have of feeling powerful. I mean, instead of following the true power and having all the advantages you can have, like being the son of a rich man, you can have all his wealth. But instead of enjoying this nature we've been endowed with, we want to be creators of life, which we are obviously not.
This idea feeds this megalomania. That's why we like to believe of a free will and not having any nature to follow. This feeds our this kind of idea grandiose idea. Dr Keppe has
Richard: been talking a lot lately about this excessive arrogance of the human being being the real source of of our problems and issues in life, right. So where he's talked in the past a lot about envy and censorship projection, he's now focusing a lot on this idea of extreme arrogance, that we're very arrogant.
How can we see this in terms of thinking about success? Arrogance manifests how in our life? How do we see
Leo: this deeper? Because who first brought this concept of arrogance and megalomania was Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist in the early 20th century. And Cappi shows this. He brought this idea, but unfortunately, psychology in general didn't follow very much this finding of Kraepelin. He found that psychiatric patients always had this megalomania.
They always believed to be gods, to be Jesus Christ. And you see this is very easily seen in psychiatric hospitals. They never believe they are simple people. They always believe they are big figures in history, always. But not only them, all of us have these ideas. We always believe we are right. Our ideas are always correct. When people tell us something, we say, well, let me compare this with what I think.
If it matches what I think, it might be right. If not, it might be wrong. So we always have this parameter with ourselves. And so when you are arrogant in that sense, you won't listen to people, you won't pay attention to data that life shows you, everything you see in everyday life, everything you read, everything your observation shows you, you won't consider.
So how can you learn? You learn from seeing things, from listening, from watching, from observing. You see geniuses, usually they are very humble. Because they listen to everything. And if you tell them something against what they say, if they see it's right, they will take it.
Richard: Yes, and many times we misinterpret the confidence an artist has with arrogance. We confuse these two.
There can be extreme confidence in what a person is doing. But the arrogance is this other thing of wanting to create another reality. Imagine if Mozart were composing a symphony and he suddenly said, you know, I don't like the rules of music, the rules of harmony. You have certain notes that harmonize with each other naturally. I don't like that very much. I'm going to change all that.
You get just a cacophony of sound. It doesn't make any sense at all. I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who said that art lives from restrictions and dies from freedom. That explains everything. He said somehow, he realized that it's the restrictions of the laws of the way things are. The laws of color, of harmony of color, of musical notes, the way angles and things work in engineering.
There are laws to this. You can't just throw up any old building and expect it to stand. You have to honor the laws that already exist. I think this is very beautiful. And
Leo: Dan Kapp helps us to understand this because he found out what he calls inversion. Where you have this misinterpretation. You think that if you follow nature, you'll be restricted. If you think you are free, then you are confident.
The more you are against things, the more confident you would seem. This idea gives this kind of atmosphere in schools, usually, in the 20th century. And nowadays, in journalism, you can see that very much. I'm sure you notice that too. The more the journalist goes against the person who's interviewing, the better he is. I mean, he feels more than he's more intelligent, wiser, more confident.
And in schools is the same. Students, they have to challenge the teacher, not to learn, but I mean, to oppose. This is an inversion. We think that if we go against things, then we will improve. We will learn and we will be self-confident. And if you just listen and try to listen to people, to nature, to everything, then you will be inferior, not intelligent, etc.
It's an inversion. It's the
Richard: opposite. You're not doing your own thing, not finding a way to take the laws of nature and bend them to your particular desire. Let's come back to this question of success then in this light, Leon. I think you've done a nice job of giving us an overview of the fact that life has rules and regulations. Because if we think about success, the rules for success normally, people will talk a lot about the need to have a goal, a vision, a plan to get where you want.
If you don't have a plan to get where you want, then you're going to be totally lost. This all sounds reasonable to us, but we don't question its validity very much. But let's question it now. What is the trap here, the trick to this question of having a goal, having a desire, having a plan?
Leo: Yes, I think that not having a goal is a goal.
So, I want to say that we all have goals, even when we think we don't, because many of our goals are unconscious. In other words, not because we were born with an unconscious, like as Freud believed, but because we try to hide from our own perception what we know. So we have hidden goals, unconscious to our own selves many times. So, and they predominate, Dr.
Kapp says in his books, that what you don't know dominates you. So that's why we should pay attention to what consciousness tells us, because then if you know your problems or whatever, you will dominate it. So people have goals, even if they are not aware of them, they should pay attention what their goals are. For example, you know, the very common concept in psychoanalysis, slip of the tongue, when you intend apparently to do something, but you do the opposite.
Apparently it's a mistake We in psychoanalysis know that that was the person's true intention. So that was the real goal of the person. We all have goals. And if you don't pay attention, many times you might be being led by a goal that will not be to your favor. And you will not be successful, really successful.
Richard: This strikes very hard at the question we're raising today.
If I want to be successful in a conscious way, I have to have this goal, I have this objective, and I'm making all the notes on my paper. Okay, I need to do this, I need to do that, I need to do that. And I'm not getting to where I think I want to go, or I'm going in some different direction. This is indicating that there's something else below the surface.
Leo: I remember a client I have in analysis. She works for a company, a big company, and she's a manager and she always wanted to be promoted. But when she talks about her everyday life at work, she's always against people. She is lazy. She doesn't do her work properly. So she could see in analysis that her real goal was not to be promoted.
How could she be promoted? Then she said, yeah, it's true. How could I be promoted if I, you know, was not doing my work properly? So she just wanted a miracle, if you like. And her real objective was not to be promoted. She was working against herself. She was unconscious.
Richard: Now, usually in success literature, we'd say that we'd help the person to, okay, you need to get more fixed on your goal.
You need to work harder. You need to be more dedicated. You need to plan a little bit more. You need to go to the office earlier. You need to leave later. You need to have a very clear list of your schedules. Your to-do list needs to be very clear. We would give these kinds of more superficial advice things. But in a psychopathological way, we'd have to help the person do what?
Leo: To see that they are not following their real goals. Because for you to tell a person you have to work hard, etc., everybody knows that. That's obvious. They know. Everybody, there's no need to tell anybody this. The point is that they are mistaken, they are inverted, they think they want to be successful, and many times they work against their success without perceiving it.
So they should pay attention to their hidden, unquantiatized goals, their inversions, in other words, what we call their problems, their errors, their mistakes, that they cannot see clearly, but they are there, active. This is
Richard: not such a popular thing to talk about, perhaps, in terms of our positive thinking culture in North America, but I think it's essential what you're talking about now.
Cláudia Pacheco has said it this way. She said that if we don't know what's going on inside the heads of human beings, we're not going to have a chance to be successful in relationships, in any profession. If you don't understand what's going on between people's ears, you'll never be able to truly succeed in your profession. She's talking about the need to understand psychosocial pathology, the things in our psyches that might hinder our success.
You've talked about a couple, arrogance, megalomania, inversion, these hidden intentions, envy. What do we need to know about this human psyche that we don't see very well?
Leo: It's because I think the idea, we have the idea that if we see our problems, we are being negative. The basis of Keppe's work, psychotherapy, is seeing one's mistakes. In therapy, we always show one another our mistakes in a positive way.
And people usually, at the beginning, they think that, well, if I see my problems, I'll be depressed. You're attacking me. I'm being negative. I want to think about my qualities, not about my mistakes. Because if I see my mistakes, I'll sink in them. But this is an inversion. It's the opposite. The CAPS method is absolutely positive. Why? Because it starts from the point that nature itself is only good.
Problems don't belong to true nature. Any kind of problem, difficulty, nothing belongs to true nature. True nature is only good. Nature as it was created. But we, with our actions, inverted actions, we destroy, we don't use this good nature, then we have problems. So that's why we have to see what we are doing wrong. That's why we have to see problems, but focusing on what's good.
So it's absolutely positive. We only see a mistake. For example, I tell someone, you are being lazy because I want to say your nature is not being lazy. You have so much activity, so much good things to do in life, and you're blocking this positive side. So I only show mistakes because there is something good behind. So it's absolutely positive. Actually, it's the only way to be positive.
Because if you only want to focus on good things without seeing what wrongs you are doing, you're being negative.
Richard: Dr. Keppe said in one of his books, he said, since 1977, I've been working with what I call consciousness of error, showing that the human being needs to become aware of what he does wrong in order to do what is right. Then he went on to say that he concluded his study of consciousness of error in 1992. And went on to demonstrate how man opposes what is good, genuine, and beautiful, including his own qualities and gifts. Which means that he spends all his time debasing himself.
So this is the process of trilogical psychoanalysis, and I like it very much, showing how we are against our true nature, not because our nature is to be lazy or to be dishonest, but because those are attitudes we take against our true nature. Talk a bit more about this, Leo, and how this relates to success.
Leo: So, for example, training courses, therapies, counseling.
Many times they have this general idea that you should force someone to act in a good way, as if that was not natural to him. Like, I have to teach you how to be good. You have to force yourself to be good. It's the opposite. Cap says, you were created good. Why don't you act that way? So that's how we show problems and focus on mistakes in that sense.
And like here in the United States and the founding fathers, they had this positive idea. They believed that people are good. But if we are not acting like that, we have to see that, right? That's why we focus on problems. But to go back to this good nature, we are not going to be good artificially. We are not going to put on a mask of being good.
We are good. And we are putting on a mask of being bad.
Richard: It's a good thing to think about this, that any problem we have in life is not natural. This is something that somehow we are creating, and therefore we can stop creating it and return to this true nature of ourselves. What about the twin fears, Leo, when we're talking about success?
The twin fears, fear of failure and the fear of success. These wouldn't be real fears then in your view, would they? They'd be something else.
Leo: Exactly, because when you are afraid of not being successful, of failing, it's very much connected to arrogance. Because what's a failure? A real failure? If you make a mistake, if you're going to speak in public, you can be afraid of making a mistake.
What's the problem if you make a mistake? The public will say, hey, this is wrong. If you accept that, oh, thank you, that's right, I'm wrong. So that's a problem. You correct yourself immediately. So there's no problem. You can learn from mistakes. I mean you should learn from mistakes if you accept them seeing them. So it's connected to arrogance to this idea that you should be perfect and not see your problems.
Now when you are afraid of success it's connected to envy because we we have been made for success only for success. Everybody failure should not exist. So if we are afraid of being successful It means you want to destroy this good thing. You want to destroy your qualities, other people's qualities, the planet, your work, your family, everything. So it's not a fear of being successful.
It's a willingness to destroy what's good in your life. And we do that out of envy and out of a competition with the Creator.
Richard: Are you saying that our fear of failure is kind of like a consciousness to us that we have something going on inside against our own success?
Leo: Also, you are saying that. It's a good point. When you think, I'm going to fail, it's because you already have this intention, hidden intention, and then you should pay attention.
Why? Why do we want to fail? I have everything to succeed. Why am I already planning ahead
Richard: to fail? And fear of success could be then the consciousness to us that we actually want to work against our success in some
Leo: way, right? Dr. Cláudia Pacheco said recently, how to be
Richard: successful is try to unite love with reason. And she asked a couple of questions.
Does your reason approve of what you want to do? Second question, is what you're thinking about doing in accordance with the feelings of affection and goodness? If the response to those two questions is affirmative, It's a sign that what you intend to do will have a good chance of being successful.
Leo: Dr. Keppe says that reason is love. True reason is love. And love is reason.
I mean, they are the same thing. The real success is when you are, you go back to being a human being as you have been created, which means being healthy, good, happy.
Richard: Yep, sounds good to me. Thinking about this true success has many implications, like stopping considering 10% economic growth, which is based on destruction of nature, is a good thing. Keppe's discovery of inversion really gives us a new perspective.
This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
