Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep. 2: True Medicine

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 that evil, unlike good, is insubstantial. So thinking of evil as a substantial entity is incorrect. All those years ago, the consideration was that evil is the privation of good, and even that evil is non-existent.

That’s difficult to accept, but it’s meant in the sense of the nature of life being good, and problems or pain or cruelty being nothing but attitudes against that inherent goodness. In terms of our health, then, sickness could be a kind of proof of something we’re doing against our health. Individually and collectively, of course. We can see this as attitudes or habits we adopt that work against our natural health, like a propensity for junk food or the destruction of our natural food with toxic chemicals, as I mentioned in episode 1.

Seen this way, sickness represents a distortion of health, not a naturally occurring situation at all. A challenging idea, which dramatically changes how we approach health and the treatment of disease.

Let’s tread into those exciting waters on our episode today with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep. 1: The Psychology of Health

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 is the psychological life, meaning psyche or soul as the Greeks considered it. 

Now we’re not suggesting, of course, that diet and exercise and good habits have no place. That would be foolish. What we are suggesting is that those good habits come from an inner equilibrium and sanity that spring from a healthy psyche. Exploring the pathway to that inner health is what we’re attempting here in this series.

So our contention is that our outer world of laws and norms and habits is a reflection of our inner beliefs and attitudes. If we have a predominance of chemically treated, non-organic, genetically modified food, that’s coming from an inverted mentality that puts corporate profits above human health – and that’s a psychological problem long before it becomes an economic one.

Our work in this series comes from decades of scientific discoveries and practice that are a product of the great psychoanalysts and social scientists, Dr. Norberto Keppe and Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco, both of whom have a peerless pedigree in psychosomatic medicine. Keppe worked for years at the largest university hospital in Latin America, the Hospital das Clinicas in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Pacheco, the daughter of a prominent Brazilian physician, wrote a seminal book on psycho-somatic healing that give us the title for our series, Healing Through Consciousness. Both are highly sought-after international psychoanalysts and founders of the Keppe & Pacheco Trilogical Colleges that are offering cutting edge university programs in psycho-somatic medicine, environmental management, clinical theology, arts and education.

It’s a potent, transdisciplinary approach, as Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco explains here in our first episode.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to download the PDF.