Thinking With Somebody Else's Head

Freud believed we were often influenced by memories, traumas and instincts we had repressed, but they influenced our behaviors anyway. He got there by studying hypnosis, analyzing dreams and paying attention to those slips of the tongue that reveal what we try to keep hidden. 

"No mortal can keep a secret," Freud maintained. "If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." 

Poetic language that. And the idea has weaved its way into our modern psyche. All of us have used that excuse along the way. "Ma...

There's an old Chinese phrase that goes, "It's better to be a dog in peaceful times than a man in a time of chaos." 

Wishful thinking, some may call that, for it's difficult to see peaceful times at any moment in human history. Most of us with a bit of life experience hearken back to when times were easier, and end up moralizing to any who will listen that our times back then were superior. And while that may be superficially true, it's not all that helpful. And complaining doesn't make the young fold feel any better.

I've been in Brazil going on 24 years, using Norberto Keppe's psychotherapeutic methodology in education and communications, and also as a psychoanalyst at Keppe's school. The positive results available to anyone who studies with us and accepts the consciousness that comes through our classes and therapy sessions are noteworthy. From overcoming learning blocks to resolving long-standing or acute personal or professional conflicts to curing from medical conditions, Keppe's on to something.

Where Freud initiated psychoanalysis with the idea that neurosis was caused by cultural and moral values, and Jung wanted to integrate our shadow side into our personality...

Sometimes, when I have something important to do, I must confess I feel a little resistance. It's an interesting phenomenon because it's like a general lethargy. Like the energy has drained away and there's nothing left for the job at hand. In those moments, all sorts of other activities suddenly appear infinitely more appealing. 

YouTube's a quick click away, and the algorithms have numerous suggestions that seem interesting and even, if I'm honest, urgent.

And there's research to be done, too. New equipment for the studio or books on Amazon.

And hey, I h...

Being upside down. Every kid loves that. Being hoisted up by the ankles and hanging there in your father's sure hands with your head where your feet should be.

It's great as a game, but none of us could imagine going through life that way.

But Norberto Keppe's discovery that humankind is inverted shows us how we are actually living life upside down. Not physically, but philosophically, emotionally and even spiritually.

We wage wars to find peace. Science considers apes to be our relatives. We consume billions in pharmaceuticals thinking that'll make us...

Maybe, like me when I first moved to Brazil, you have the idea that metaphysics is a kind of woo-woo field of study. That part of the bookstore with titles like Find Your Soulmate through Channelling, or Unlocking Your Invisible Power.

True metaphysics, though, is a branch of philosophy that deals with what's beyond the physical. Those elusive subjects like being and knowing, action and potential. The Greeks knew a thing or two about that, but somewhere along the way, the science of things that transcended the physical got reduced to just the things.

Norberto...

Today, a conversation with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco about living in the spiritual world. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

It was the Police back in the early '80s that approached the subject of us being spirits in a material world. A typically spare and rhythm driven track that was catchy and infectious. They were an interesting band.

But, while they were observing the bleak political situation we lived in, it may have been no more than the complaining of youth searching for an answer but with no solutions to offer.

After all, criticism...

Dr. Norberto Keppe, the developer of the psychoanalytical science used by Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco on this podcast, has written extensively about sociopathology, which is the application of psychological conditions to society at large. 

Quite innovative really. So, as we might analyze an individual's neurotic response to an everyday situation, we could also recognize an equally neurotic law or institutional bureaucratic hurdle.

Our modern society is displaying psychotic tendencies even in our continued use of war and terrorism to resolve conflicts. We live on a beautiful planet that offers abundance or everything we need to live w...

We are always, in our programs, trying to get to the psychological and spiritual causes behind our physical and emotional problems. It's a journey that Norberto Keppe's Integral Psychoanalysis is well positioned to embark on

Keppe has synthesized Freud's psychoanalytical methodology, Melanie Klein's observations on envy and gratitude, classical German psychiatric findings on megalomania and arrogance, Socrates' dialectics, and Aquinas' discussion of the perfect inner structure of man with his own discoveries of Inversion and psycho-socio pathology that lead us to oppose what's good in and around us.

This, I think, is unique in his...

Our latest podcast initiative is an attempt to create a forum for people to call or write with critical recent or long-standing issues they've never been able to adequately resolve and move on from.

Those habits or patterns of response you've never fully understood. You know there's something unresolved moving below the surface that's affecting your health or relationships or professional performance - or sometimes, all three - and you just can't get a handle on, and so they operate invisibly in your life.

We're here to help you with that. In a safe and...

Are there any of us completely free of what happened in our upbringing? I was joking with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco after the therapy session you're about to listen to about how I was relating to today's client. She's dealing with fear of judgment, and I can relate to that feeling of pressure in social situations. 

As Dr. Pacheco will discuss today, there's a lot of internalization that we do of the demanding and censoring environment we grew up in that's at play here. The brilliance of the Integral Psychoanalysis we use here in our Therapy Online S...

Adolescents and their parents. Who doesn't have a story about that? I sometimes wonder how any of us survive our adolescence.

And I would extend that as I've gotten older to wondering how our parents survived our adolescence. Premature grey hair is probably the least serious consequence. 

We are embarking on this journey to discover how the therapeutic application of the science of Dr. Norberto Keppe can help people.

Like you. I mean, who of us doesn't have sometimes long-standing issues that have never been adequately resolved. Sometimes we're hyper aware of them...

A number of years ago, I initiated a series of call-in shows to deal with real life problems - from new work initiatives to relationship challenges, even to drug abuse, death and suicide. Those everyday situations that hit all of us. 

Integral Psychoanalysis is the name of the therapy we do form our clinic in São Paulo. And it goes out to the world through our psychoanalysts who attend clients in person and online, reaching people all around the world.

That's no small thing. And have been personally helped by Norberto Keppe's psychoanalytical method fo...

Inversion. It's a recent 20th century discovery by the brilliant Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Dr. Norberto Keppe. 1977 to be precise. So, if you hear about our modern inversion of values, you can be sure that's come into today's lexicon because of years of effort from Keppe and his team, who work tirelessly to bring consciousness of the root psycho-social causes of human malevolence and destruction. Seems we're inverted from our original good, beautiful and true essence. And that inversion causes us to do the weirdest and most pernicious things while thinking we're acting honorable.

How else...

Welcome to the, I suspect, final episode in our Healing Through Consciousness series. It'll be the final curtain for this series. Unless I discover more pearls from past programs that are relevant, of course.

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and I've been working through old episodes of my Thinking with Somebody Else's Head podcasts and re-editing them into shorter programs based on single themes. The first foray into that forma was on our Modern Relevance of God 17-part series, which, by the way, had been turned into an actual book now. Pretty proud of that. And I'm working...

Welcome to our continuing Healing Through Consciousness podcast series. Just when you thought it was over. Fitting we'll be addressing death today in Episode 13. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

Death. Such a downer, isn't it? The final curtain. The choir invisible. Kicking the bucket. 

Except it's much more complex than that, don't you think? My sister tells a story of going into the mountains for a solo picnic shortly after our dear mother died, and a huge crow stole her bag lunch, flew off a few meters, and then landed and turned to stare at her. S...

Beginning a new series today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head - Therapy for the World. In fact, this is the slogan of our Keppe & Pacheco Trilogical Colleges in Brazil, where we teach the science of Analytical Trilogy developed by Norberto Keppe and Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

Today, an interview with Susan Berkley, president of the Great Voice Co. in New York. Susan's an accomplished broadcaster, best-selling author of Speak to Influence: How to Unlock the Hidden Power of Your Voice, and coach to thousands of voiceover actors and presenters in all formats - from video to podium...

We’ve been focusing on more specific health situations in our series lately, and we’ll continue that today with an expansive look at eating disorders. You may know someone dealing with this neurosis – it’s all too common today – and you’ll find an abundance of treatments for this – most of them physical and ranging from highly elaborate nutritional plans to pills to acupuncture to removing part of the stomach.

And the explanations for the problem are diverse as well. But the view explored from the psycho-somatic department of the Keppe & Pacheco Trilogical College offers a deeper perspec...

In the early part of the 20th century, a non-medical educator was hired by the Carnegie Foundation to report on the state of medical education in North America. Abraham Flexner wrote a book concluding that there were too many bad medical schools, too much non-scientific quackery and curricula that were all over the place. Specifically, there was a lack of application of the scientific method in medical education in general.

The report led to the closing of many so-called medical schools in America – some of which were apparently no more than proprietary for-profit trade schools run by on...

I’m a product of the ‘60s and ‘70s. I saw guys trying to homestead in the woods of Vancouver Island as I was walking to a favorite swimming hole. I remember the distinctive smell of those funny cigarettes permeating the summer air. I thought they were struggling to find something.

I also remember some idiot slipping a hit of acid into a friend’s brother’s drink at a party, and watching the ensuing bad trip play out horribly in front of us all.

Our question from a listener today addresses those two...

What is an addictive personality? You’ll see all sorts of definitions if you Google that! From addiction being a learning disorder, to a passion for something gone wrong, to the more serious diagnosis that it’s a character disorder, it’s difficult to get a final word on this all-too-common behavior.

I’ve been around my share of addictive behavior, including a favorite uncle who beat his battle with the bottle courageously and, I think, cold turkey, and lived out the rest of his life as a functional and responsible contributor to society. I rememb...

Well, this is a relevant – and disturbing – topic for any who’ve experienced its devastating effects. The thought of someone taking his or her own life can leave us bewildered and even horrified. How could someone do that?, we wonder. And why? And when we see it happening in teenagers and young adults, we’re even more mystified. They’ve got their whole lives ahead of them, we reason. And while that’s true, it seems that opting out is becoming an increasingly common choice in many countries around the world – particularly in the so-called developed world. Lucky you are if you hav...

This is Episode 7 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. This time, a clinical look at a modern mental health crisis. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

We’ve been laying a foundation for a more psychological and even spiritual approach to health and healing in our first 6 episodes of this series. That’s been important. But Norberto Keppe and Claudia Pacheco’s work in psychosomatic healing is not just conceptual. There’s a vast history of clinical therapeutic treatment of a wide range of physical and mental health disease conditions at the Integral...

Today on Episode 6 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll look at the effect our minds have on our immune system. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

One of the consequences of Louis Pasteur’s Germ Theory was the inevitable fear that outside us lurk nefarious elements waiting for their opportunity to pounce. Deadly viruses and germs in birds and pigs and now bats and monkeys are lining up to show us their stuff, and it’s possible they’ve been strengthened by genetic mutations in secret labs.

Today on Episode 5 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll tackle an alternative view of disease infections. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

We can be forgiven for following the mainstream view about the origin and treatment of infectious disease. Ever since Carnegie and Rockefeller got ahold of Pasteur’s Germ Theory as a perfect vehicle for pharmaceuticals based on oil derivatives, medical education in the west has been teaching the idea that disease comes from outside. I sometimes imagine what it would be like trying to raise money for research...

This is episode 4 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones. 

From the time we're young, we're taught to protect our lives from nature. Sprays to keep off the bugs, oils to block the harmful rays, potent cleansers to ward off the offending bacteria waiting to take up residence in the bathroom.

And don’t even think about eating that bread that dropped on the floor.

Nature is often a savage place, we're shown on Discovery Channel documen...

From the psychosomatic department of the Keppe & Pacheco Colleges, this is episode 3 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

It’s been very interesting to live through this pandemic time, hasn’t it? In the face of a real worldwide challenge, it’s been illuminating to watch how health has taken a back seat to fear. Panic, I think we could say, has largely driven our political and social responses to infection, and this seems to have trumped any reliance on a robust immune res...

From the psychosomatic department of the Keppe & Pacheco Colleges, this is episode 2 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

Our first episode was spent laying out some credentials of our College’s psychosomatic vision and pedigree. And I want to stress that our discussions here in these episodes are based on solid clinical case studies, as you’ll see throughout our series. And where we’re coming from is this: good health is a natural state. In philosophy, great thinkers like Augustine and Plotinus and Aquinas proposed t...

Welcome to our new series on the Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head podcast. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

We’re calling this series Healing Through Consciousness. An abstract title, perhaps. In our western civilization, with its over-emphasis on the material solutions for disease of pills, surgery, vaccines, righting our chemical imbalances and tweaking our diets, it’s possible we’ve diminished the importance of the most crucial aspect in our human quest for health and longer life: our vast inner universe of feelings and perceptions, values and philosophy of life, intuition and consciousness.

This...

Welcome to Episode 17 – our final episode – of the Modern Relevance of God Podcast Series on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. 

You know, as I think about it, 17 is kind of an odd number for the final episode in a series about spirituality, isn't it? It's not particularly a number of completion ... although I guess adding one and seven together equals eight and eight brings balance between the material and spiritual worlds in Numerology, so maybe that's something. But I'm not much one for the esoteric in these things anyway – a holdover from an upbring...

We've been attempting in this series to make the scientific case for the relevance of a more theological consciousness in our everyday lives. Along the way, I've been impressed with what Dr. Joseph Ghougassian elaborated in the preface he wrote to Keppe's book, Glorification that if we have religions in the world, this must be because of a metaphysical dimension in us. "Worshiping is natural to the soul," he wrote, "And not something imposed by institutions." Otherwise it wouldn't have been so practiced through the millennia, long before we built churches to formalize the ceremonies. This goes deep to...

I've been impressed in my personal journey of discovery with the rational arguments for the existence of God throughout history, by Augustine and Anselm, and more recently, as I mentioned back in episode 11, by the logical argument for Jesus elaborated by Oxford's C.S. Lewis. They all make provocative reading. 

But for me, a devout and believe-it-when-I-see-it modern materialist, it wasn't until Brazil and the surprising revelations of my latent hidden spirituality that unveiled during the psychoanalysis and study with Claudia Pacheco and Norberto Keppe that I began to understand in an elementary way t...

Welcome to Episode 14 of the Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

My dad used to say the problem with the human being was we were born without an owner's manual. I used to nod in agreement, but now I'm pretty sure my father was a little simplistic in his understanding. To be fair, I think he meant it in a lighthearted way, a joshing comment not meant to be scrutinized as to its theological accuracy. But like all things related to my spiritual understanding, I have...

Welcome to episode 13 of the Modern Relevance of God audio course here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

As I’ve been developing this series, I have to admit I’ve been wondering about the acceptance of its premise in the English-speaking world. Living in Brazil for the past 20 years has coloured my perceptions and tastes in ways I wasn’t expecting. My Anglo-Saxon feeling of assumed superiority has been challenged here in surprising ways. I imagined the typical cultural challenges of language and bureaucracy and doing the exchange in my head about the co...

This is episode 12 of the Modern Relevance of God audio course here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

I think one of the greatest difficulties I've had in coming closer to spirituality has been a pretty common one: mixing up God with religion. If God was all the mess stirred up by the church over the centuries, I wanted nothing to do with Him. It's a frequent oversimplification, one which doesn't require that much thinking actually. Just a knee jerk generalization in the same vein as all Chinese people look the same. And...

How many times have you heard this phrase: "I don't believe in God anymore because how could a loving God allow all this misery on Earth?" Usually it's a Bruce Willis-like character in a war zone in some desolate African country squinting his eyes and muttering weightily, "God abandoned this place a long time ago."

The writers mean this to be profound. a world-weary comment on the state of Man, but it's really overly simplistic. After all, is it God’s hand working in evil and terror, or Man’s? Isn't it a little unethical of us to b...

Can God and science exist together? I think that’s a fundamental question. I've heard some of the more vocal scientists proclaiming that a belief in God is the sign of a weak mind. Well, one thing I’ve discovered: the deeper I delve into the theological and philosophical knowledge, the more I encounter rather brilliant minds, actually. Some very intelligent people have speculated about, argued for, worshiped and drawn inspiration from what they believe to be a higher power. So I don't think you and I are losing any brain capacity in wandering a little down that well-trod, but...

The Dark Night of the Soul. In the theological canon, this signifies a spiritual crisis in a journey towards union with God. In more secular language, that would be the transformational journey that takes place when you're suffering. 

A journey of transformation. A conversion, even. A deep repentance for a path ill chosen. And at the end, "the sudden reception of grace," as Aquinas called it. Surely that's what slave trader John Newton must have gone through on that wild stormy night as he stood on the wind-swept deck and surprisingly found himself muttering, "May God have m...

So far in our series, we've been looking at the nature of life and God, and how that knowledge has been pushed aside from our daily considerations and from scientific inquiry, obviously. The concretization of the scientific method was an attempt to free the human being from superstition, squalor and medieval cruelty.  

The cherished ascendance of reason that emerged out of the philosophy at that time, however, while successfully challenging the corrupted church authority, also diminished the importance of the theological themes that are still relevant to our understanding. The nature of man, the s...

Welcome to Episode 7 of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones. I was struck in re-listening to our last episode that perhaps some more explanation of the story of man might be necessary. I also realize the challenge today of Biblical references. Religious life has often been equated with fanaticism, and that conjures up images of cults and Kool Aid and suicide vests, doesn't it? But let's be careful not to fall into that dismissive mindset too quickly, because after all, the story of man! Yeah, these are r...