Richard Lloyd Jones: Love. How much do we really know about it? We've got to love shops, love food, love travel. Love inspires us. Some say it even destroys us. Love is blind. Love can keep us together. Love is like an itching in my heart. You see, we're surrounded by the word, but I wonder if we know the first thing about it. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the truth about love. Maybe there's no subject that's been as written about, thought about, sung about, and cried over than today's topic. But all of that only gives us the illusion that we know about it. You say it enough times, you hear it enough, you see people doing the craziest things to get it, and you can think you know it.
But how many of us have ever actually taken a hard look at love, what it is, and maybe more importantly, what it's not? Because with all the emphasis on it in the world's major religions and philosophical orientations, we have precious little of it in the world today or of its close cousins, tolerance, sacrifice, and kindness. It's time to think about this elemental and universal force called love in a new way.
Well, that's happening here in Brazil at the International Society of Integral Psychoanalysis where I'm studying. Psychoanalyst Norberto Keppe is doing something extraordinary in his work here. He's helping us to see and finally understand the enormous human rejection of beauty, truth, and goodness that forms our psychopathology. And this has not been fully understood before him. The great psychological giants of the 20th century, Freud, Jung, Klein, Frankl, Skinner, Rogers, never managed to arrive at a clear view of the true nature of man and how we've strayed from it.
Dr. Cláudia Pacheco has worked at Dr. Keppe's side for the past 30 years and is better positioned than anyone to talk about the application of Keppe's work in the area of love. Cláudia, what's the first thing Dr. Keppe's work can tell us about
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: love? We as human beings suffer from what Keppe called inversion. In this inversion or inverted process, we are very much afraid to feel our feelings, especially the feelings of love.
We know that love is something that is overwhelming. Love is the most powerful and has the biggest capacity to heal a person. But love is something that you cannot control. You can either accept it or try to stop it or deny it. And if we do reject love, we start a lot of problems in our heart, in our circulatory system, and in many other areas of our body.
So if we treat the problems we have in the area of the feelings, automatically the heart related problems can be healed and be corrected. And we have been working with patients for many, many, many years using just a dialogue as a treatment, and many of them can be healed with no drugs whatsoever. Well, we've
Richard: heard for years maybe about the healing properties of love, so that's no surprise, but this idea that we're afraid to feel and express love because it's bigger than us is interesting.
I know Dr. Keppe's Science of Analytical Trilogy shows us that our inversion that you talked about stems from the rejection we have of the source of love, because we didn't create it. Talk a little bit more about how you see this,
Cláudia: Cláudia. Mankind is very much afraid to feel love, to be good, to let go arrogance, to let go defenses, to let go suspicion.
Mankind is very suspicious of feeling one's feelings. And that's the problem, Richard, because we didn't create our beings. We didn't create our bodies. We didn't create anything. The only thing we have that we can create is the way we use our will, either to accept who we are or to reject, to neglect, to distort. And then all illnesses start. So what I'm saying is that humanity is very much against affection, against love, against being good to each other.
To feel good depends on being good. And when people speak about love, this seems to be like a word, just an empty word. It has been very much misused by humanity, the word love. But when we come down to practice. And when we have to feel love, especially when love is much stronger than we are and it manifests much stronger than we can control, then we can really block our cycle immune system and create many troubles for our lives.
Feelings of love, they are really, really powerful. And if we want to repress them, the results will never be good. We have to learn how to deal with this question.
Richard: You said earlier that we have resistance to love, that we even reject it. How would you explain that to people who say, well, wait a minute, I want love. I'm waiting for it.
I'm looking for love. Maybe in all the wrong places, but bring it on. How would you answer them?
Cláudia: Love, Richard, is something that comes like previously. We don't decide anything about love. Love is doing good, is wishing good, is even feeling weak. It's like a total denial of narcissism, of egotism. And very often people think about love, wanting to use other people for their own egotistic purposes.
So love is not having the other person. Not wanting another person to fulfill like a hole in my life. Or something that is missing in my life. Or making me or someone to make me happy. Or give me things that I could enjoy for my life. No, love is something much more deep. It's something that includes responsibility and includes mostly of all doing good for the other person.
Which, as you
Richard: talked about, is a sacrifice because our will is actually inverted. We often have desires to do things that are not good. Yes, and
Cláudia: we can see this very, very, very frequently in family relationships when parents and children, they have so many so much difficulties in relating to each other. And the sicker the person the more they reject their parents.
They cannot accept their parents the way the parents are. And because love includes accepting the other person's problems and limitations and also to have tolerance to help the person to improve his life. And this is very difficult. This starts even with ourselves because in our arrogance, we never want to see weakness or faults or limitations in ourselves. We want to see ourselves all controlling, very rational.
And in reality, we are not because if we don't accept love we get very weak. Love is the basis of reason because you cannot be really rational and use your reason if love is not in the basis. Don't
Richard: you find yourself wishing that a lot of very smart but emotionally vacant people were listening to this right now? Well pass it on. Subscribe at somebody else's head.blogspot.com.
Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the program that helps you think again. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
