Correcting Psychology

It was Freud who first opened to us the rich and complex world of the human psyche. There've been many additions since - some of it useful, like Jung's association of ideas, some of it next to useless, like Skinner's insistence that we can be programmed like pigeons.

Now through the work of Norberto Keppe, there's a lot of light illuminating the murky corners of the human mind.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we're going to correct psychology.

Recently, I had a Podcast listener asking me about doing Trilogical analysis by phone. He said he'd been looking around in his home town for something to help him analyze some long-standing issues in his life, but "just never found one that was so in tune with what you're saying in your Podcast."

That's not an uncommon response to Keppe's work.

When I first came to Brazil, I was struck by the depth and optimism of Analytical Trilogy. Different from most psychological schools of thought that try to have you understand your problems by looking at the impact of significant events in your past, or exploring the elaborate coping strategies that you erect to get what is missing in your life, Analytical Trilogy cuts to the core problem: how we reject or deny or even destroy our essential nature, throwing the blame on these other things.

There is a strong philosophical base to Trilogy that allows a Trilogical analyst - and there are a number of them down here in Brazil - to reach the core of the problem.

The first thing to say about all this is that all sickness, all neurosis, all anxiety, is evidence of something we are doing against life. It could be an attitude, a lifestyle, a way of seeing the world. But something is out of whack in our approach to life. This is more profound than it may appear at first glance, because it supposes that reality is healthy, good, beautiful ... by itself. And it is this dialectic between reality and our rejection or denial of it that is at the basis of Keppean analysis.


I've asked Alex Frascari to join me again to explore this fascinating topic. And I'll start with a quote from Keppe's book, From Freud to Frankl: Integral Psychoanalysis:

"Up to now, all processes of psychotherapy have not been psychological. Psychoanalysis itself, whether orthodox or not, is more than anything else a biological, organic treatment, not to mention other techniques such as Rogerian and Transactional Analysis, psychodrama and behaviorism, which are sociotherapeutic."

Let's see how Keppe addresses this.

Click here to listen to this program.

Tags: Keppean psychology human psyche psychology and self-help