Thinking With Somebody Else's Head

Normally we see a person with serious problems we recommend professional help. After all, we go to the gym to keep our bodies toned, we go to the driving range. Why wouldn't we do something to address those psychological glitches that pop up in all of us? But what do we do when our whole society is showing signs of breakdown? Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we'll try to put "society on the couch". But a couple of things first. I always appreciate hearing from you. Your feedback is really helpful in helping me shape the program, so don't hesitate if you've got a point or a question to raise. I'm always available - rich@richjonesvoice.com. If it takes me a day or two to get back to you, hang in. I'm getting to it. If you've listened to the Podcast for awhile, you'll know Dr. Claudia Pacheco very well. She's a frequent contributor here and frankly is indispensable to this program - and indeed to everything we are doing down here in Brazil at the International Society of Analytical Trilogy. Well, Claudia and I are working on something really interesting ... a live, Internet call-in radio program which we're targeting to launch in January 2009. Make sure you're on the mailing list to learn more - rich@richjonesvoice.com What this'll be is an online advice show with Claudia, who has 25 years of experience in Norberto Keppe's Analytical Trilogy - to my mind, the most innovative, effective and powerful form of psychoanalysis on the planet. Anyone who's got any experience with Trilogical analysis knows the experience of taking a long-standing issue to a session and getting a completely fresh take on it from the analyst. "Wow! I never saw it that way before," is a common comment. Keppe's Analytical Trilogy goes to the root of the problem, which is always something deep inside us, hidden from view. This is true deep psychology, often helping us see clearly for the first time long-standing issues that have been blocking us from achieving what we feel we have the potential to achieve. And who doesn't feel that? And after Norberto Keppe himself, Dr. Claudia Pacheco is the best in the world at helping people at this deep level. So this radio program will be very cool. To have a chance to listen to her weekly will be a great opportunity to address some of the core issues of human beings ... and you'll be able to call in personally with individual questions and issues. We're calling the program "Healing Through Consciousness", and we're both pretty excited about it. Make sure you get on the mailing list. We'll keep you updated. You know, we've had a lot of response to the last 3 podcasts looking at the roots of the economic crisis. A few thousand downloads of those programs - giving a pretty loud message that people are looking for some answers, some ways to understand what is going on. One of the applications of Keppe's work is in the area of social psychology - analyzing the society as we would a person's neurosis. And why not? The corporation's been given the same rights as a human being through some decision of Congress way back along the way. As the Federal Reserve - a mostly private institution - was created by Congress back in the early 1900s, even though they had no constitutional basis to do so. So why wouldn't we hold society's systems up to scrutiny? In fact, we must. I noticed in the N.Y. Times earlier this week that European and North American political leaders admit they may not be willing to fulfill their commitments to cap harmful carbon emissions or phase out polluting factories because of the slumping economy. A European Commission spokeswoman said, "Investing in reducing emissions is more difficult to do in times of economic downturn." This is simply hard to believe, isn't it? How in 2008 can we make decisions based on profits over the environment? Hard to believe unless you understand about Inversion, Keppe's seminal psychological discovery. Keppe says in his beautiful book, Glorification, "Inversion, sickness,

We’ve got change in the White House. And in the tennis ATP rankings. A change in Madonna’s marital status, too … for what that’s worth. Not that those last 2 mean much. And whether the first is truly meaningful remains to be seen, doesn’t it? One thing is clear, though … there’s not much change in the economic picture. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll continue our series looking at the causes of the economic crisis. Well, after a historic day at the polls, America has woken up to the same scary reality as before. Jobless rates are up, stock prices are generally down … well, you know the story. Some of you much better than me, actually. But what I’ve been trying to do in this series of podcasts over the past few weeks is investigate some of the reasons for the mess. And I don’t mean in terms of explaining how the sub-prime mortgage market suddenly went south. No. But one thing I can help with is getting at the causes of all this. This is no small feat, in reality, and can be done because of the expansive work done on the subject at the Brazilian school of Analytical Trilogy founded by Dr. Norberto Keppe. Look, one of the hardest things about trying to get a handle on what’s really going on is the style of the media. You watch CNN or CBS, and you get volumes of information. Analysis of the sub-prime aspect, reporting of G-20 meetings with ex-president Bush (and man, does it feel good to say ex-president Bush) … you get opinions and policies and figures, and spin, glorious spin. But it’s extremely difficult to pick your way through the information. It’s always been like this. In our Information Age, we’re bombarded with information but starving for perspective. You have to know how to understand all this, and I don’t mean in the sense of being able to debate economic policy - the benefits of government stimulus packages over tighter regulations and broader oversight, or vice versa. No, there’s got to be an overall view to be had. And it’s exactly here that Norberto Keppe’s work does what was before him very hard to do. Because of his success at mapping the human psyche, Keppe was also able to apply those findings to the society as a whole - verifying that what the human being does outside he first does inside himself. That our external social structures are simply the reflection of ways of seeing the world, of philosophies and biases and often questionnable reasoning. One of Keppe’s landmark discoveries is that we are inverted. We act against our nature now in favor of our inverted values. “Cash flow is more important than your mother,” as one Wall Street broker termed it. This Inversion stems from inside us. I want to start there today because understanding our psyche leads to understanding our society. And that means putting the finger on causes, so that we can take real steps to change, not just rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. As always, love to hear your thoughts … rich@richjonesvoice.com Sari Koivukangas, a professor at the Keppe/Pacheco Educational Institute here in São Paulo joins me today. Click here to listen to this episode.

It’s still hitting us hard. Markets are down, foreclosures are up. Shanty towns are springing up in southern California. We’re officially in recession, it appears. And what got us here varies depending on which side of the political argument you listen to. The only problem with that is … it’s a little difficult to get at the real root causes. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, let’s try to understand it a little better in the second in our series of what’s going on Behind the Economic Crisis. Depending on how long you’ve been listening to Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, you may or may not know that our work here is based on the extraordinary discoveries of Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Norberto Keppe. In a profound series of books he wrote in the 1980s, he essentially created a new branch of social science called “social pathology.” This was the application of his psychological assessment, analysis and treatment of the human psyche to the greater society in which we live. Our society, he determined, is a reflection of the unrecognized parts of our individual psychological reality. “The cycle is centuries old,” he wrote. “Man creates an increasingly sick society as he is increasingly sickened by it.” This awareness occurred shortly after he moved to New York at the request of a number of professors and academics to introduce his work there. He went expecting American ingenuity and “can-do” attitude to take his work,and spread it worldwide, as they did with everything else - from Breton Woods economic policies to pop music. But he encountered a country in trouble. “America has stopped working,” he noted. America was not producing anymore and was instead content to sit back and let the 3rd world do the work while they applied themselves to making money with money; that the U.S. was exploiting the globalization of the desire for a piece of the American Dream they’d so artfully perpetrated, stimulated and fed to chain everyone else to pulling the sled while they rode along behind, sucking up the profits. Keppe saw psychological Inversion in the creation of an economic system that rewarded a company with increased stock prices for lowering costs by farming out production to Asian sweatshops. He saw a psychological condition in the hunger for power and money and consumer goods that was causing us to destroy the planet in our insatiable desire for more, more, more. The three books I mentioned earlier were, and continue to be, extraordinarily astute and prophetic - Decay of the American People (and the U.S.), which we discussed in our last episode of Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, Liberation of the People: the Pathology of Power, and Work and Capital. These books discussed, analyzed and clarified the psychopathology of the human being that was manifesting in the social structures we had created. This was something remarkable for the time, and remains so even today. You’ll find those books totally relevant in today’s situation. Like they were written yesterday. Write me for more information: rich@richjonesvoice.com What Keppe noticed was the break in our social structures had made from our essential nature. From philosophy, Keppe knew that the essence of life was goodness, truth and beauty. At the same time, being successful in society often meant going against those values. We can’t suggest, for example, that the richest and most powerful among us got that way by acting like Mother Theresa or Albert Schweitzer. And we the people have bought into it all big time. We all want to throw our money into the stock market and see it double or triple or at least bring in 10 or 15% returns. And for doing what, exactly? As Warren Buffett has noted, we’re not a nation of investors anymore, we’re a nation of traders. Which conjurs up images of men and women staring for hours into laptop computer screens to squeeze dollars out of the differenc ein exchange rates between the Yen and the Euro. Surely this is not lost