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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Tags: Norberto Keppe, Analytical Trilogy, World Conference of Analytical Trilogy, psychology and psychoanalysis