Richard Lloyd Jones: Analyzing and understanding what's going on in the world around us. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones from the International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo, Brazil. We are streaming weekly on the Positive World Radio Network at pwrnradio.com. Check out the spiffy new site there, by the way.
I was checking out a debate on the future of nuclear energy on the Charlie Rose show the other day in light of the continuing disaster in Japan, and I was struck by the lack of insight and options they had to offer.
They're lost, as all science is, in the materialistic debate between coal and atomic fission, for example. Well, the Keppe motor from Brazil was not mentioned, but should be, because it produces energy using a new physics that's superior to anything Newton or Einstein put out there. This complete science of Analytical Trilogy deserves debate in all circles. And why it isn't included means studying how society got so off track, which is what we'll begin to study today.
Society on the couch today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Joneshealing at gmail.com, our email, by the way, for comments or questions. I want to jump right in today to focusing on an analysis of society. We're very clued out when it comes to understanding how our society has painted itself into so many corners all at the same time. Economically, energetically, in terms of conflict resolution and diplomacy, we've hit the wall.
We're in trouble on all fronts, and I'd like to analyze why that is today. One of my colleagues, Sofie Bergqvist, a psychosociotherapist from Sweden, recently had a great aha moment when working in our social program in the small town of Kambukida, about 350 kilometers from São Paulo, where we're working to apply Norberto Keppe's social theories into practice. When did this insight happen exactly, Sofie?
It
Sofie Bergqvist: was that day that we were serving food for poor people. And I saw these lines and lines of people. I think we served 3,000 meals. And I was so surprised and a little bit shocked about that because I thought, how is it possible? We are actually in one of the richest areas in the world in terms of natural resources and plantation, coffee fields.
We have all this crop everywhere and
Richard: minerals and
Sofie: precious stones, perfect climate for agriculture.
Richard: And we produce for the whole world here in
Sofie: exactly this part of Brazil, the best mineral water in the world just coming up, popping up from the ground naturally.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: And I
Sofie: couldn't believe my eyes. How is it possible that we have families here, thousands of them without food?
And they are hungry. They are starving, these people, and they don't have food, and they are staying here. It was this sunny, hot day, and I saw this family standing there for hours. I think they were there 8 o'clock in the morning, and we served for hours.
Richard: And some people were taking like 12 meals, Sophie.
Sofie: Yes, back home to the family.
Richard: To feed the whole family.
Sofie: And I don't know, I saw, because this was one part of the project that we are doing for the city, right? And I don't know, I started thinking a lot about how is it possible? This is not a phenomenon just in that city, it's the whole world, right? It's the same thing. And then together with these other projects that we are doing in the city, I started to ask my students here at our school here in São Paulo.
I started to ask my students what kind of richness exists in a city like Cambuquira. In a little city, countryside city in the south of Minas Gerais, in that agricultural district of Brazil, what kind of richness exists in a city like that? What potential does it have? And my students, they came up with many things like the workforce. In the city, I think there are 12,000 inhabitants and many, many of them are unemployed.
We have all this food production, food industry. We have agricultural lots of agricultural products everything there. Yeah
Richard: it's beautiful
Sofie: very rich soil the year all the year around you can plant many times a year. The climate is perfect one of the best airs in the world probably. You have this number one mineral water medicinal mineral water in the world number one it's considered the one of the best and so on and so on and so on.
They also talked about tourism because it's a touristic area also because of the resort is mineral water resort. And um and i asked them but how is it possible you see this enormous wealth that this city has and if you talk about money reais brazilian reais it doesn't even exist in the city. There are like just a few reais circling around in the city.
People don't have money they don't have anything. It's like there if you have a bill of 10 or 20 reais you can't change it you can't buy anything because they don't have change for it. It's true it's and and what is happening how is it possible that the the amount of richness that exists really in the city doesn't correspond at all to the amount of money that circulates.
It's
Richard: rich in a real way and completely poor in our current economic
Sofie: totally poor totally. And then I asked, but look, imagine that you here, you have a shoe store and I really need to buy shoes for me and for my children. But I don't have a job and I don't have money to buy the shoes, so I can't buy them. And what happens to you and your store?
It's kind of closed too like most things do they close down there in the city and both of us will have problems with buying basic needs for for example food or everything that we even housing and everything stops. It's totally stagnated. I can't open a store, I can't sell anything, I can't do anything, I can't get a job. And the city hall can't invest in the necessary things because they also, they don't have money, because
Richard: there's no money, there
Sofie: is no money there. And they are waiting for money to come from I don't know where, but it won't come there because it's in the middle of the countryside.
And what happens is that you have the city hall needing to improve a little bit the infrastructure of the city. There are many holes in the streets. It's a beautiful originally very beautiful city but nowadays it's partly very decadent it needs to be painted, it needs to restore the schoolhouse but they can't do it. So there are lots of people unemployed doing nothing
Richard: The houses are falling apart the stores are closing Nothing is
Sofie: happening in the
Richard: city and
Sofie: there is no hope for the future.
People are starting to leave the And then I asked my students, so where in the world do we have a concentration of money? Where is the money, the currency? Where is it? And they said, well, in financial centers. Yes, but where are those financial centers? Yes, you have New York, you have the stock markets, bank institutions, mainly in big cities.
Richard: Multinational corporations, their headquarters around
Sofie: the world.
Around the world and these are like concentrations of billions of dollars that most of it is actually virtual money it's just inside the computer systems and it's not going anywhere else. It's there it's concentrated and it's not it doesn't have a correspondence to production it's not linked directly to anybody working there or producing anything but the money's there. And I said wow so this book working capital when dr capi says that work produces capital work produces the richness and they need to be correspondent they need to correspond to each other and be together.
I said wow, we live in a schizophrenic world. The money is where the production is not, and people produce and try to work and try to survive all over the world and they don't get a cent for it because there is no money there, no currency, no paper, no. And I said "wow, so this project now that we have in Cambocira, if we go back to that, is a project to start to see well, they have started this in many parts of Brazil it seems, in small cities.
But we have a little bit more interesting project in terms of consciousness and education and culture and everything, but to together with the city hall to put people to work, do things like things that need to be
Richard: done, that people want to
Sofie: do and that need to be done, grow food."
Yeah, grow vegetables. I think there will be a common vegetable garden that in a
Richard: land that the city hall has,
Sofie: right, and
Richard: start a market
Sofie: and kind of put people to service to produce, produce the food. Even they have small factories that have closed down with bricks factories and and construction material for houses, many people there don't have a house and there are many things that the city hall together with the work of the people, the production, you could create a real richness in terms of exchanging services and the city hall together and our project there together to create educational cultural programs together with production, because work and production is is the richness of a city, of a country.
Richard: There's so much richness there and people don't as you said don't have anything to show for it you know so they
Cláudia: have all this richness and this is the thing that staggers me. If you go to any of the
Richard: big shopping centers in São Paulo, we have some very wealthy shopping centers here. You can see jewelry, beautiful jewelry made, and
Cláudia: it's all made
Sofie: with precious stones from that area.
From that area, yeah. That the people don't have,
Richard: so they're taken out of that area, used to make very beautiful jewelry, that then is sold for thousands of dollars in these shopping centers, and the poor people have
Sofie: nothing. Nothing. Actually, you don't need much to save people in the world. You don't need much to liberate people from this situation. What you need is just to put people to work and have a decent return for this work.
If you work, you also have the right to have a salary, even if it's not in a currency. Maybe not. But you also have many, many cities around the world with this. I also told my students about this. Many cities have something called a social currency. Yes. It's just a city currency that is used only for exchanging services.
Richard: Participating merchants accept these as money.
Sofie: As money, yes. And the difference is just that it's easier to change the thing. So I work, for example, I work at the common garden there, at the common vegetable garden. And the city hall will give me one of these coupons. I don't know what you call it.
Richard: It's like a social currency, a social note.
Sofie: Cryptocurrency showing that I have actually worked, and with this I can either go to your shoe store and maybe you will accept it, will you accept this, and I can maybe buy the shoes that I need for me and for my family.
And you can also continue, you can use this money to buy the food that you need for your family, you can maintain the business in the city, and I can also go to this marketplace and buy the things that I need because there are many people producing now things for the city.
So the thing is that in the city like camboquira everything exists it's kind of self-sufficient self-sustainable in terms of food and products and clothing and most things but nothing circulates because people are unemployed people are waiting for the money to come. People are asking, begging for food or begging for other things, but nobody's working. Instead of producing food, having the stores, selling products.
Richard: They only work if there's a big corporation there that hires them to do the work. So they have these enormous farms there that are run by these big farm syndicates that control all
Sofie: the farms. But if
Cláudia: the people begin to take back the control of that, imagine how it could happen. And Sophie, we have a shoe store there, and they're selling shoes that are made in another city.
Richard: Well, why don't the people of that city take the leather that they can get freely from their areas, lots of cows there. They can create their own shoes that they create their own factory. They get paid with this social currency that they then use to buy homes, to build their
Cláudia: own homes, to buy food, as you said, to educate their children. All within that self-contained, because it doesn't need the shoes from outside.
They can make their own
Sofie: shoes, they can make their own clothes, they can have their own teachers, they can have their own everything. They don't need anything from the outside. Yeah, and then my students, now I remember one thing. My students had one big question about this, but what will be the money reserve? What about, because if people start producing and they start, what will be the, how would, who would administrate this kind of city-invented money?
And then we understood that from from seeing the real wealth of the city and the real production of the city, what is really the wealth of the city, this should be the as a kind of a money reserve, this is the reserve of the city. All this infrastructure that exists, all the production of the people, the workforce, the richness of the city that exists, really the money has to correspond to that reality.
Richard: This is interesting Sophie, so the work then goes to enrich the city, yes, not the money. Work doesn't go to create money that sits in a bank somewhere or makes money
Sofie: for somebody, some shareholder somewhere, because now it's the opposite, right, in the world people are, we are, we limit our production to the amount of money that exists. So if there is no money in the city, "I'm sorry, we can't do anything."
Actually this is a question of giving people liberty real liberty of of growth. We think wrongly, and this is what I understood now from this book Working Capital. We think that our our modern capitalist system gives us freedom to grow as much as we wish, but it doesn't really, because you you may have talents, you may, you may be, you could do things, there are many things needed to be done everywhere, everywhere, in terms of even beautifying places, make it more beautiful, make it more comfortable, and it's just not possible to do it because we never have enough currency, enough money in terms of dollar or reais or printed money.
It's it, we don't have, I'm sorry, so we can't do it, we can't do it, we can't do it.
I am totally thrilled because for the first time in my life I see in practice that it's actually very possible to change this situation this terrible miserable situation of the planet today. I'm
Richard: Thinking with Somebody Else's Head we're putting society on the couch back in a moment you are listening to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Positive World Radio Network I'm always very happy to welcome Dr.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco to the show of course it's an absolute treat to be with her for these moments, precious few moments, actually. Cláudia, I think people are looking at the world, I don't know, I feel I've been saying this to my students, that I think these two environmental crises we've had caused by our technology of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and now the nuclear disaster at the nuclear reactor in Japan, I don't think people are aware of how much this is provoking a deep questioning of what's going on, but I think it is.
I think, you know, because we have the Haiti earthquake and even the tsunami was not the big deal in Japan. What's the really big deal is how our technology has led us to a road where we can't, a road with no exit. We're lost here. And so I think people are really looking at what's going on. And even if they don't understand this very well, they're questioning, what are we doing?
What's happening? What's going on? And so I was looking at an old TV program. Oh, not so old, probably. Probably a year or so ago, Dr. Keppe talking about Walter Benjamin, who at the beginning of the 20th century talked about the general decay in humanity. But when he talked about that, he talked about it in terms of cinema, television, the means of communication, magazines, newspapers, level of information is very poor.
And he didn't see this decay necessarily as an internal quality. I thought we could begin that discussion today. Dr. Keppe says that illness and virtue, both of them are inside. The problem is that our problems don't just stay inside. They get reflected outside into oil spills and nuclear disasters and polluting the earth, the seas, burning petroleum, manufacturing technology that's toxic, these incredibly destructive nuclear power plants invading countries.
So maybe we could begin that process of taking the internal problem of the human being and expanding it into a vision of our sociopathology, The problems of human beings reflected out into the greater society. So let's start there. Keppe's work in sociopathology is really innovative. I don't know anybody who's talking about it in these terms. So let's start there. Keppe's concerned with the social difficulties where social systems reflect the psychological problems of individuals who created them, thereby creating a psychologically unbalanced society, a society that makes us sick.
And this is what we see around us, isn't it?
Cláudia: Richard, I have in front of me a book that Keppe wrote and published in 1976.
Richard: Long time ago.
Cláudia: Long time ago. The name of the book is Psychoanalysis of Society. Yeah. When he wrote the book, he didn't have yet Analytical Trilogy. Developed fully
Richard: formed,
Cláudia: fully formed his discoveries that he he made a few years later around 79, 78, 79, and around the beginning of the the year 80s, in the 80s he was ready with the the basic, the essential body of theory and method that he used to treat patients, sick patients with neurosis, psychosis, psychosomatic diseases, but always kept, he had in mind, he had always have in mind the notion that society is also extremely sick.
Society in terms of what man built. Not this natural society which we see many times in animals, for instance. Gregarious animals that live in groups and somehow even being a very low scale comparing to us in development. Animals can be much more living in peace, in harmony, respecting nature than we do.
Richard: Sure. Ant colonies, bee colonies, it's very clear they work very much in harmony with themselves and with nature.
Cláudia: Yeah. Even monkeys, even monkeys, they have their instincts in freedom. They don't have any, like, stop in their instincts. They have some troubles in their instincts when they suffer the consequences of the interference of society, of man, in their lives. So they start presenting abnormalities, like even of homosexuality and...
Richard: Much more aggression than normal.
Cláudia: Aggression, and they start eating up each other.
Mothers can kill their babies, babies can behave in a very abnormal way. But nothing that the animals do come even close to the barbarities we human beings perform against ourselves, against our fellow man, against nature.
Richard: On a daily basis.
Cláudia: On a daily basis. So when Keppe wrote this book...
Richard: And this is not because we're animals.
Cláudia: Of course not. Sure
Richard: not. Because this idea is, the reason this is given for this is that, well, we come from the jungle, so we have these animals.
So you see the
Cláudia: opposite, right? So when Keppe wrote this book, Psychoanalysis of Society, I went with him to New York City because one publishing house was interested in publishing this book. But when the publishers read the book, how Keppe analyzes, psychoanalyzes society, even and mostly the people who are in charge of civilization, institutions, people in power, academics, economic powerful, financial powerful,
Richard: politicians, business people.
Cláudia: And how he sees and puts here very clear and sharp the pathology that humanity developed. And he points out that if humanity does not become conscious of its self-destructiveness, it would not be necessary an atomic war to destroy the planet. That humanity would arrive that, like, anyhow.
Richard: Soon. Soon. It would be
Cláudia: a logical end place for this kind of behavior. Because humanity is really not ready and willing to face its pathology, which is mostly unconscious.
So Keppe...
Richard: But hang on a sec, what happened
Cláudia: with the book? They didn't like this aspect of it. Yeah, so they saw this, and they decided... They ran
Richard: the other way as fast as they could.
Cláudia: Yes, because even here, Keppe already mentioned trilateral commission, which was mostly unknown at the
Richard: time. And Brzezinski and some others, Rockefeller, et cetera, et cetera. He was naming names.
Yeah, he was naming names here. He's a courageous guy, I'll tell you. But, you know, what I love about science is that science is about the truth, Cláudia. And so he's got to say these things because this is so clear to us. This was the thing that really touched me about Keppe's work. I had been working for many years in environmental movements, in alternative media, trying to understand what was going on.
It wasn't until I read his psychoanalysis of the pathology of power that I thought, oh, my gosh, finally there's somebody who understands this. So this is, it's very interesting that this has never been published because this is vital information. It
Cláudia: is published in Portuguese. Yes. We have the translation and I asked my secretary today to find out the translation and see if we can put it in PDF.
We have
Richard: it in English. We have it.
Cláudia: Oh. That's what we brought to United States.
Richard: Oh.
Cláudia: So we should now find a way to publish or to put it in electronic format in the Internet. So those who are interested in knowing more in depth Dr. Keppe's writings would benefit from this. We have to consider that he was Freudian, mostly Freudian and Kleinian at that time.
And he followed many of the discoveries of those traditional psychoanalysts, even Kretschmer and some German psychoanalysts and German language. But they had a lot of incredible contributions that Keppe even took advantage when he created or he adapted or he developed his own method because his own method and theory he didn't take out of the blue. It was all based and he got everything that was perfect and what some writers, some scientists, some thinkers, some philosophers and even theology, what was very important and right in those areas, He took advantage, and he added some important discoveries of his own.
Now, at this time, he applied the psychoanalytical concept to society. So he considered things like...
Richard: He put society on the couch, really.
Cláudia: Yes, exactly that. Wow. Society in the couch. And he made an analogy between what happens to one individual and what is happening to society. And so he he made an analogy like for instance instinct and culture, how this dialectic between instinct and culture is working in society, the for instance the super ego in society which are the institutions and the manifestations of the super ego of society that perform
Richard: the role of the
Cláudia: censoring, yes yes, and also the schizoparanoid feelings of society like hatred, envy, like a projective identification of the social
Sofie: hatred amongst nations
Cláudia: and groups and social groups and institutions, the fear, the importance of the fear in social life.
The depressive feelings in society, how they manifest, the necessity of reparation with those feelings of guilt in society, all the phases of the social development, meaning that when we consider the phases that Kretschmer developed, the oral, anal and genital phases, how these are applied in society. Like the most undeveloped societies or more primitive, they would be more oral oriented, more dependent, more religious in terms of institutions, institutional religions.
Like you can see the people in the Middle East or the primitive Indians, they are very religious and not necessarily spiritual. Religious in terms of following superstitious things and social laws and prohibitions. He saw the social erotism, like the genital face and the genital groups in society, like the artists, like the noble people in the past. Nobility. The nobility and people who are very much fond of romanticism and beauty and narcissism, which are typical of this genital phase of humanity.
When we speak about the schizoparanoid tendencies, we go directly to those people who are in charge of the economic and financial power. And also those who are very aggressive military, which play the role of sadistic and superego of society. They are the superego of society. Mostly the military play the police. They play a role of superego going against everything they fear to become conscious of.
Richard: Right, you know, this is interesting, Cláudia. We had a situation in Canada just last year where the G20, I think, was meeting. Maybe it was the G8. And there were protests, peaceful protests. And the police came down like, I mean, it's a scandal in Canada because they're taking away completely the rights. They're attacking people. Women were saying that they were being fought.
...wandled while they were in the vans and, you know, it's like, so we see this kind of imposition now of the power through the military and the police that's very strong. We have to take a break and this is going to get even more fascinating, I know, so don't go away. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Positive World Radio Network. Back with Society on the Couch in just a moment.
We can see this everywhere, Cláudia. We're back, by the way. Richard Lloyd Jones with you. I'm thinking of somebody else's head on the Positive World Radio Network. And Dr. Cláudia Bernhard-Proschek was considering Dr. Keppe's phenomenal work, really phenomenal work, in the psychoanalysis of society. You talked about a lot of things there just at the end of our second block, Cláudia, about the superego and also the manifestation of the psychopathology of individuals through the societal structures.
Fear and vengeance, hatred, mistrust, the persecutory feelings maybe, the feelings of being attacked. So this is a phenomenal study he's done here.
Cláudia: It's incredible.
Richard: It's incredible,
this.
Cláudia: It's incredible. It's unique, Richard. Because if you consider, let's try to speak a little about individual and then we try to make an analogy. Yeah. So according to the psychoanalytical ideas, when a person is born, a human being is born, he starts a development, which is natural, which is typical from every human being.
We start from the first oral phase, where we are fixated, we have a fixation in oral things, like…
Richard: Putting things in our mouth, mostly, at that age, right?
Cláudia: How do you say mamando in English?
Richard: Breastfeeding?
Cláudia: Breastfeeding, yeah. So the babies enjoy breastfeeding or they bring everything to the mouth because they have the erotic area in the mouth. Erotic in terms of having pleasure.
So that's why they keep that small device.
Richard: The soother they put in the mouth, yes.
Cláudia: How is this called?
Richard: It's called a soother. A soother.
Cláudia: You had to calm the kid. Shut the kid up, put that in his mouth. Yeah. So they put everything in their mouth, anything. So they scream when they want things. So they are very oral. They scream to manifest their feelings.
And they are very dependent. They have a kind of magic thought that is every time they scream something good happens. So as if and the lamp goes on because my mother hears that and she comes. So screaming is a way to having control on the surroundings, on the environment. And other people
Richard: are you suggesting that children use this to manipulate too a little bit? They
Cláudia: do.
This is the only
Richard: way they can interact
Cláudia: with society. You can observe that people that are fixated in this phase, when they grow older, they continue fixated in oral things. They can scream, they fight, they speak a lot because they think that they have this magic thought that screaming, fighting, yelling, eating, talking. Sometimes they have
Richard: this... Biting their fingernails.
Cláudia: Biting their fingernails.
They continue smoking, drinking. So this kind of attitude is very primitive in terms of development. They have eating problems. Either they eat too much or they eat too little. So these people tend to be very superstitious. Sometimes they are very religious-oriented in terms of institution. They are very dependent. They are not entrepreneurs, really. They are more depending on people. So this is the first.
Religious people are very much like this. Religious, really religious, like belonging to institutions, religious institutions.
Richard: Almost like a fanaticism, right, would be linked to this. I remember a story of an artist one time. He went from alcohol to drugs to religion. He was a dependency on something. Again, this is not to put down religion in any way, but this idea of needing the religion to
Cláudia: serve.
Yeah, like the religious people that need the help from
Richard: people. Aid, from assistance.
Cláudia: Yeah, assistance. So they don't go after it. They don't work for their support.
Richard: Yeah, even women who accept
Cláudia: alimony without doing anything for it from their husbands. Yeah, ex-husbands. So you're saying that
Richard: this is a person who has been locked into this developmental
Cláudia: stage. Because they took so much pleasure and they found it so much interesting that they didn't want to develop in a further stage of more interaction with life and reality.
And their inner lives, they were afraid of their own feelings, of developing their own feelings. So if you take this to society, you will find some institutions that are typically that you can see typically this attitude in themselves.
Richard: Oral
Cláudia: dependent. Oral dependent. And
Richard: amongst them are the religious institutions.
Cláudia: And some countries like India, very, very religious and very dependent, very talkative. And they have those bursts of emotion sometimes where they can really scream and be emotional.
If you have some Hindu friends, you will see that they can be very oral in terms of achieving what they want through the word, through mouth, through screaming, through emotional manifestations. But they are not that dangerous for the world because they are too dependent. So they stay in that low level of development. They are not that dangerous. They don't generally make wars.
They don't create wars. On the opposite, people go inside their nations like the African, for example, Hindu, even Brazilians. They're very much like this. Very religious, primitive religion, and very oral, like dependent, not really aggressive, not invasive to other countries.
Richard: Not dangerous to others. Brazil has this tendency to give more value to what comes from the outside than to
Cláudia: what is inside them, thinking that we need the outside world.
Very dependent, very dependent. So, this would be one of the manifestations. Now, as Freud saw the manifestation of the individual, he saw that we have the instincts. The instincts are from nature. The instincts are natural. And he put a big emphasis in sexual instincts, oral instincts, and anal instincts. Oral belonging to the mouth. Anal belonging to feces and aggression. And genital uh belonging to this uh libido like the relationship amongst uh two sexes, sometimes among the same sex, but this would be also considered some distortion.
But the the interest in the other person to bring me pleasure.
Narcissism
Richard: too, right? Narcissism,
Cláudia: to be adored, to have all this. But this requires another step of development because if you are interested in another person, you have to take care of your appearance. You are generally focused in beauty, in elegance, in charm, in being well treated and treating better the others. So it's more a romantic vision. A fourth step which would be the ideal would be the the phase mature phase, the phase of maturity, when the human being would live behind this sensorial oriented, instinctive oriented impulses to a higher level orientation and intentions, a social ideal, common good, where you would sacrifice your own desires and satisfactions for the good of humanity.
Well this
Richard: is almost non-existent,
Cláudia: almost non-existent, almost non-existent in terms of individuals and in terms
Richard: of society.
So we did not get there yet. So we're locked in these three phases. We talked a little bit about the oral phase. Some might think this is not very politically correct, by the way, what we're talking about. But this is science. This is like a psychological analysis of what's going on. And this idea of political correctness, this may be the superego. You're to one of the forms of superego, this imposition of censorship.
You know, you have to say it in the right way or
Cláudia: I don't know.
Richard: So what
Cláudia: Keppe mentioned here is that civilization and culture in this planet is not a true civilization and not a true culture. It acted more as a super ego instance, like instância as we say in Portuguese. Instance instance a super ego because human beings here and human society are so much afraid to look inside and see all these instincts and emotions like fear hatred envy like this primitive instinctive impulses.
They are so much afraid to recognize this and to deal with this that they found means to cover up and to hide everything they find non-acceptable. So our culture became a pseudo-culture, the culture of a mask. So everybody knows what everybody is behind the mask. Behind, for example, a politician. He comes and says beautiful words that are more based like in this counterculture or the super ego element than to the truth.
So when they come and they play a role, everybody knows that behind all the true intentions are hidden in individuals and in our society. So nobody trusts those meetings, those UN assemblies, because what they say there is one thing, and what they really do is another thing.
Richard: Yeah, well, we see this all the time. In the Second World War, you had Russia, Stalin, and Roosevelt as friends, and Churchill in England.
And then after the war, suddenly Stalin is the worst enemy, and he thinks that Roosevelt and Churchill are the worst enemies. And so you have this whole social...
Cláudia: And all this schizoparanoid feelings applied to society, they are, if they are not conscientized, they can become incredibly dangerous because they are not really mechanisms of defending life in a more balanced, a mature way to endure the well-being of humanity.
But it's more based in schizoparanoid tendencies that are not dealt properly, because society is very underdeveloped in these terms. Society behaves like a psychotic and a psychopath, creating sociopaths and sociotics, like Keppe called them, sociotico, socionoia, sociopata are the terms that he coined to apply to society, to psychopathology manifesting in social terms. So you see this. You see the war is a manifestation of nations that are stuck in the pseudo-anal phase.
Richard: The second phase of development, the anal phase,
Cláudia: sadistic. Sadistic, because they think that aggression is the best mean to get what they want. And they are also very much linked to money. An economic power. You pay attention, the most developed countries, as so-called developed, economically developed, and that are called civilized, they are not the true civilization. They are the pseudo-civilization in a counterculture fighting to hide all these instincts that are distorted.
Distorted, uncontrolled instincts and desires and pleasures and desires to satisfy their fixations. So you see all the media, marketing and the countries, they develop means to guarantee their primitive satisfactions, food, sex, drugs, money, power. Oil. Oil, all this that is very much instinctive.
Richard: So they are manifesting what's behind the mask, what's masked on the outside, they are manifesting through these things of war and torture.
Wow, how fascinating.
Cláudia: And what they want, they want to preserve, to guarantee the satisfaction of these three main phases. And unluckily, lately, the second phase, which is the most dangerous one, is in charge.
Richard: Let's talk about that when we come back. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Positive World Radio Network. We have society on the couch today. Don't go away. We are back with your Lloyd-Jones with Dr.
Cláudia Bernhardt-Krusheko. Fascinating discussion as always on the psychoanalysis of society, putting society on the couch. This is not something I've ever heard done, Cláudia. Only here are we having an opportunity to look at this. And you were saying, just as we went to break in the last segment, that we're seeing a real predominance of a society dominated by this second phase that the early psychologists talked about, of an anal sadistic phase, the second phase of development in the human being from two to four years of age, when the kids start, the terrible twos we call them for kids, when children
Cláudia: start to get dominant, they start to get possessive, they start to get jealous.
If they are born and raised up in a very strict environment with strict parents and strict school and teachers, they tend to not to be to overcome this fixation because the super ego attacks the consciousness and represses the consciousness of these problems.
Richard: Every time they do something bad they get attacked, they get and
Cláudia: they say yes yes and they find it so ugly and so forbidden and so moral forbidden and so they don't have the chance even not only to manifest but to even think about that.
And so what happens is that the superego has the consequence of reinforcing the impulses the distorted impulses to the superego to strict superego deform the instincts. You can see this for instance Richard amongst military they have the superego mentality the repressive powers to keep in order society in order but what they do is not to keep in order, but they keep everything under the cover.
So if you see all the smuggling of drugs and arms are performed by military, all these assassins that are really eager to kill, to destroy, to attack, to be very sadistic, they go to military functions. They killed in war and if they cannot kill in war they they sometimes kill people on the streets. Well
Richard: this explains Cláudia then why we have these these things that happen with the the abu grabi prison in iraq where the american soldiers were treating the iraqi prisoners like animals and you know and everybody says you know well that's just that's an exception, "that's not who we are, you know." You always hear this in the even in the movies, "that's not who we are, we're not like that."
But we are like that when we censor, repress this psychotic tendency so strongly. It pops
Cláudia: out in these areas. Yes. And you see also inside religious institutions with pedophilia, they censored and repressed so much their instincts, their sexual instincts, that they became like all deformed, like monstrous instincts.
Richard: Cláudia, you see this all the time in the psychopath movies, you know, the guy who's a religious fanatic, but he has these desires to kill, and he feels so bad that he flagellates himself.
They show this in the movies. They don't understand it, but they're showing exactly this, this
Cláudia: heavy repression, I shouldn't do that, I shouldn't be that way, and then unable to control the desire. And this is the function of psychoanalysis. It should be the functions of a psychotherapist to have a room where people could come and see and talk and become conscious of the worst impulses in themselves and to like to clean them up, to preserve the good instincts and the healthy ones and to make them become more balanced.
So this would be, and also the feelings and the intentions, because one thing are the instincts, another thing are the feelings and intentions and more metaphysical, spiritual level. And if the metaphysical level is too much distorted, this affects also the instinctive ground in ourselves, in our inner lives.
Richard: Kind of perverts the instinct.
Cláudia: Yes. So what happens is that humanity didn't come yet to a phase where they are conscious of themselves.
Like one is not conscious of oneself and they are not really ready to admit and to know the worst about them. They just use this mask like in a medieval dance, minuetto, where people behave and when
Sofie: they are inside
Richard: five or four walls and then things get really troubled. In the halls of
Cláudia: power, we have a lot of difficulties in that way.
So what's the advantage of seeing these things, though, Cláudia? These are horrible things to see. Well, in terms of individuals, the individual that can work with this can properly come to this mature phase where they are able to sublimate.
Richard: Sublimate, to control in some way, in a healthy
Cláudia: way. To understand his tendencies, to see the tendencies, to choose consciously what he prefers to do, what is wise, what is advantageous, really advantageous because we follow inverted values.
So what is really rational, what is really loving, what is really balanced, so I can try to create mechanisms of behavior that will lead me to a more healthy life, more conscious, mature, where I can really choose in freedom what do I prefer to do and what is more sensible to be done in order to have a better life. And this in terms of society, we don't have this yet, because you see all the institutions in society, they are taking care to hide this instinctive part of society.
Like, for instance, Richard, Keppe in his book, he quotes here that, for instance, the id or the instinctive side of society is mostly formed in its primitive form by the prostitutes, by the sexual… Deviants.
Richard: Yeah, disturbances by the drug
Cláudia: addicts, alcoholics, and all the kind of individuals that are stuck in this sensitive, sensorial, but this
Richard: is not extremities, this is the mass.
And this is
Cláudia: mostly also the people in power when they are not performing in front of people because they are so much masqueraded that all these instincts that are manifested outside, they have them inside their lives and sometimes even in a stronger way than what you see on the streets, these
Richard: problematic people. This is the id, the collective id of society is
Cláudia: formed by these people.
These are the instincts. Which are the masses. You see everybody's eating and taking drugs and having fun and wanting and looking for pleasure and leisure and all sensorial pleasures. All sensorial. And then the superego on the opposite, besides this moral censorship that they have, they are very impositive and rigid. And there are more characteristic representatives are the repressive powers, all repressive powers.
On the first side, Keppe says that they can represent a good for the people like police, military, that they can represent a need or a good for the people. Who would deny the value of a policeman and that are looking after or looking for the... To serve and protect. The public order. Yeah. Or sometimes a religious man leading humanity to penance and to do good.
But on the other hand, nevertheless, the kind of moral rigidity was so strong that became harmful for humanity. That the superego is not what is going to calm down the id forces, the impulses, but it's incentivator.
Richard: It stimulates. Stimulates.
Cláudia: Sure. So the only way... What
Richard: is repressed increases in strength, doesn't it?
Cláudia: So the only way to put order, like in the id, in our inner side and in society, is through consciousness, through reason, becoming conscious of things, admitting, seeing, having balance and maturity enough to look and to admit and be humble and be ethical, not to hide what is wrong but to see in oneself and to deal with this and to see how we can correct it.
This
Richard: is tolerance isn't it,
Cláudia: this is tolerance with
Richard: consciousness, with consciousness, because people who are repressive they do not tolerate in
Cláudia: front of other people but behind they give all the strength to that mistake,
Richard: behind closed doors they do, which explains the
Cláudia: kind of kinky weird things that we've seen from royal families, from elected officials. Exactly, my
Richard: gosh, exactly. So extremism in this area
Cláudia: you can see the dictatorships, yes. Repressive.
Like we are seeing now, all these people, very religious oriented, very oral oriented, very primitive oriented. They have dictators for years and years. And now it seems that humanity are increasing
Richard: in consciousness. Thanks God. Humanity is increasing in consciousness. So where societies, they have to deal with its assassins, with uh its thieves, prostitutes, um terrorists, terrorists,
Cláudia: drug dealers, pedophiles, pedophiles, whatever. One must deal with the sickness, depressive maniacs. We have to deal this because there are many of those in power leading society.
So we, if we don't look to the pathology and if we don't treat pathology as such, we will see the extermination of humanity. Because this dark impulses, they lead to self-destruction. But
Richard: you're saying now that these uprisings that we're seeing in the Arab world, that this is a sign of more consciousness. Ah, yes. This is interesting. This
Cláudia: is very beautiful. They are coming to a situation where they see they cannot depend on the dictators anymore, as they thought they would depend on a dictator, seeing them as like a god or a figure of a good father or
Richard: a good mother or whatever. But they didn't.
They really did not perform this because they paid a big price of having a good father between quotes that would decide everything for them. Yeah, but going in with military forces to take out...
Cláudia: Ah, it's the same problem. It's the same problem.
Richard: Right,
Cláudia: right. It's the same censorship.
Richard: The same censorship, even worse. Even worse.
Cláudia: Because then a higher, more aggressive truculent power comes to finish with the problem, then the problem will not resolve, it will become worse, like what happened in Iraq.
Richard: Exactly. So
Cláudia: things in Iraq got worse, not better.
Richard: Because we're trying to impose a moral code on people without seeing the problem.
Cláudia: And aggressive military interventions. So total censorship, total repression. So in order to have a democracy, one must have room to speak and to deal and become conscious of pathologies. Pathologies. This is absolutely essential. If we don't do that, we will never get to a mature phase.
Richard: Because there are people, there are women particularly in Canada, Cláudia, who justify Canada's involvement in the war in Afghanistan because of the Taliban. Because the Taliban treats women badly. So
Cláudia: they say, well, we have to get them out of there. So this is the same censorship, isn't it? It's the same. Well, the military, the Canadian military will perform in the same or even worse way that the Taliban men are performing.
Truculent, aggressive, violent is the same violence. So violence doesn't heal violence at all.
Richard: Yeah, this is something we've learned from the greatest human beings in society, haven't we? That you cannot get anything good from something violent. Wow, this is fascinating. So
Cláudia: you see a man who comes and works and does such research and writes and perceives this kind of super developed kind of, my God.
Keppe is in front 100, 200 years from our time. Yeah, way ahead. My God.
Richard: It's all the time we have today. I'm so sorry. It would be wonderful to continue. I feel like I could go right through lunch hour. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Positive World Radio Network. It's been great to have you with us.
