Monday, August 25, 2008

Hope for a Troubled World

We've been in the dark about ourselves for a long time. But writers and thinkers from Homer to Schopenhauer have always known there was something powerful going on below the surface of our demeanor. "There's daggers in men's smiles," as Shakespeare put it. But with the help of a brilliant Brazilian psychoanalyst, the way is becoming clear.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Hope for a Troubled World.

Norberto R. Keppe has been plying his trade for half a century or so. And it's a difficult trade indeed ... developing a theoretical, philosophical base to understand, and a therapeutic methodology to treat, the human psyche. That vast, murky part of us that lurks in the shadows has been perceived but never brought fully out into the lights.

Freud caught a whiff of it in his early reading of Schopenhauer and his early studies with the great hypnotist and neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. The subject fascinated him sufficiently to dedicate his life's work to developing a way to treat what we couldn't see, and worse, didn't want to see all that much. Humankind's greatest artists depicted kingdoms being lost and lives being destroyed by the machinations of this unexplored netherworld. And those dark, unfathomable passions lay deep inside us, as well we ordinary humans suspected in our quiet moments when we were alone with our thoughts.

The problem was, Freud and Jung and Kraepelin and the other founding fathers of psychology didn't get it quite right. And that left a void in understanding, and a hodge-podge of theories and opinions that have often conflicted. Certainly, they've confused us, and led some of us to discredit psychology. "We've had 100 years of psychotherapy and the world's getting worse," as James Hillman and Michael Ventura put it in their critical analysis 15 years ago.

But that's only because they haven't read Keppe's work yet. Norberto Keppe has discovered some answers for us. For example, that we are not unconscious at all, but conscious of much more than we realize. There is great hope in Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy, which we'll explore soon at our World Conference of Analytical Trilogy, Sept. 24 - 27, 2008 in San Diego. And that we'll explore today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head with Dr. Claudia Pacheco.

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Sunday, August 10, 2008

The Inner Game of Health

We're conditioned to it now. We're stressed because of work. We're shy because our family's shy. We're sick because there's a nasty flu bug going around. We vaccinate. We medicate. We pop vitamins and supplements to pump up our besieged immune systems. We're burned out and fed up. Because of what's going on outside.

There's only one thing we forgot: the real problem is inside.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the Inner Game of Health.

Well, this is a subject we can speak on with some authority here at the International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo, Brazil. Dr. Norberto Keppe, whose work inspires and forms the basis of our podcast, has been working with psychosomatic illness for decades. He formed the first psychosomatic clinic in Latin America at the Hospital das Clinicas, part of the medical school at the University of São Paulo back in the '50s. Here's how it'd work back then: the patients the medical doctors couldn't get anywhere with - the hopeless cases - they'd send to the new guy in that psychosowhatchamacallit department. Then maybe they'd roll their eyes and wink at each other knowingly. "What chance did this young upstart, Keppe, have," they'd suggest smugly, "When the greatest medical scientists of the time like them couldn't even get to the bottom of the problem?"

But more than a few times they'd have to eat their tongue depressors when their patients - the hopeless cases - would come back with miracle cures and spontaneious remissions. All through this process of psychoanalysis he was developing. He refined his studies with work in deep psychology in Vienna with Viktor Frankl, Igor Caruso and Knut Baumgarten, and his work deepened profoundly with his discovery of Inversion in the late '70s. This was a psychological discovery that gave Keppe a glimpse of a fundamental problem inside the human being that caused almost all of his physical, mental and even social problems.

Let me be sure to underline this: Keppe's discovery of our psychological inversion has connected all the dots of the map of the human psyche. With the Keppean understanding, we can treat all disease, all relationship problems, all self-sabotaging behavior - even problems at the economic and political levels, which were before this seen as totally disconnected from the sphere of psychology. Keppe's Analytical Trilogy is a unified science as no science before it has been.

Join us in San Diego, Sept. 24 - 27, 2008 to get the overview of Keppe's comprehensive science as it is applied in many areas of human endeavor. www.wcatus.org. And of course you can write me anytime at rich@richjonesvoice.com

Dr. Marcia Sgrinhelli is a Trilogical dentist who's been working with Keppe for 20 years. She's the autho of 2 books on psychosomatic dentistry. She applies his therapeutic discoveries in her thriving dental practice here in São Paulo, and is closely involved with the Trilogical Psychosomatic Department here coordinated by Keppe's close associate, Dr. Claudia Pacheco. Dr. Sgrinhelli joins me today.

Click here to listen to this episode.

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