I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and welcome to another episode of Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Read the literature about complex problem solving and you're in for a challenging read. System structure and dynamics, facets of intelligence, positive and negative dependencies. It's mind-numbing stuff that seeks to concretize often abstract what if scenarios so popular in corporate planning departments or government games theory laboratories.
The nub of the thing is this: you've got a goal you want to reach, and a lot of variables in the way of achieving it. What do you need to put in place to transform the state of your current reality into the desired reality?
It's analytical, logical and quantifiable for flow charts and computer programmers. And its focus on solutions proves that complex problem solving is the territory of those pragmatic Americans, raised as they are on the can-do philosophy of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale.
But from the perspective of the leading edge thinking emerging from Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy, it misses a huge point: to go forward, we first have to look backward.
The science of real problem solving, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Thursday, November 06, 2014
The Sanity of Interiorizing our Lives
Welcome to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Carl Gustav Jung proposed that everything that irritates us about others can lead us to understand ourselves. For him, others were a giant mirror into our own psyches. The great German writer, Hermann Hesse, suggested that disliking something in another is disliking something that we have, too.
Freud, Kraepelin, Schopenhauer, those Germans opened the door to our psychological lies. And it was a shock at the time. Jung joked to Freud on their maiden journey to America that they were bringing the plague to American. And if you subscribe to the idea that hell comes from the others, as Sartre proposed, it is a little depressing to have to let go of that and point the finger back inside for the real source of our problems.
The consequences, however, of maintaining that outward blame are severe. From nuking plants with toxic chemicals to ethnic cleansing to executing the "evil" ones, we pay a big price for our naive exteriorization.
Let's go the other way. The Sanity of Interiorizing our Lives, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Freud, Kraepelin, Schopenhauer, those Germans opened the door to our psychological lies. And it was a shock at the time. Jung joked to Freud on their maiden journey to America that they were bringing the plague to American. And if you subscribe to the idea that hell comes from the others, as Sartre proposed, it is a little depressing to have to let go of that and point the finger back inside for the real source of our problems.
The consequences, however, of maintaining that outward blame are severe. From nuking plants with toxic chemicals to ethnic cleansing to executing the "evil" ones, we pay a big price for our naive exteriorization.
Let's go the other way. The Sanity of Interiorizing our Lives, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Tuesday, April 08, 2014
Our Inverted Contra Ego
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
It was part of the psychic apparatus defined in Freud's Structural Model of the Psyche. Its role was to mediate between the desires of our uncoordinated instinctual tendencies - the ID - and our critical moralizing part called the Super-Ego.
For Freud, our Ego - caught between these two forces, has a heck of a time maintaining equilibrium. It often loses, as we all know when we do something we know we shouldn't but can't help, and then have to live with the consequences.
But Keppe has re-defined this battle by proposing that our neurosis comes, not from the fight between our primitive instincts and our censoring personal and social Super-Ego, but from our inverted desires against our good, beautiful and true essence. A dilemma recognized by St. Paul when he lamented, "Why do I do the things I don't want and fail to do the things I want?"
A question perhaps all of us have asked in different ways. Keppe's work in this area is essential for all, but lamentably not well divulged. Let's go some ways towards correcting that.
Our Inverted Contra-Ego, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
It was part of the psychic apparatus defined in Freud's Structural Model of the Psyche. Its role was to mediate between the desires of our uncoordinated instinctual tendencies - the ID - and our critical moralizing part called the Super-Ego.
For Freud, our Ego - caught between these two forces, has a heck of a time maintaining equilibrium. It often loses, as we all know when we do something we know we shouldn't but can't help, and then have to live with the consequences.
But Keppe has re-defined this battle by proposing that our neurosis comes, not from the fight between our primitive instincts and our censoring personal and social Super-Ego, but from our inverted desires against our good, beautiful and true essence. A dilemma recognized by St. Paul when he lamented, "Why do I do the things I don't want and fail to do the things I want?"
A question perhaps all of us have asked in different ways. Keppe's work in this area is essential for all, but lamentably not well divulged. Let's go some ways towards correcting that.
Our Inverted Contra-Ego, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Eliminating Faith and Truth: The Failure of Psychological Science
“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. Bribery and corruption are common and there are signs the world is speedily coming to an end.” The latest doomsday prognostication from the Mayans? Not exactly. A statement allegedly lifted from an Assyrian tablet dated 2800 B.C.
Let’s look at how these ideas have helped us corrupt our planet and ourselves. Eliminating Faith and Truth: the Failure of Psychological Science, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.
Join the conversation at joneshealing@gmail.com
Monday, March 01, 2010
The Prison of Victimhood
It is enticing to follow its seductive lure. "It's not your fault. You couldn't help it. There was nothing you could do." These are the beguiling voices we hear.
Victims drive the ratings on daytime TV, after all. Blaming, finger pointing, laying on the guilt - so common, so righteous, so ... convenient.
And so wrong.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, freeing ourselves from the Prison of Victimhood.
Now you who are regular listeners to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head will already have a good idea which side of this theme we're goint to come down on, don't you? Our program, based as it is on the cutting edge psychological research coming out of the Brazilian school of Analytical Trilogy, could do nothing other than focus the discussion inward. Because that's where the trail inevitably leads.
Norberto Keppe, the scientist behind the profound work coming out of Analytical Trilogy these days - and it is formidable indeed, in the areas of education and medicine and economics and physics - Keppe puts forward the idea that we have contact with all the magnificence and glory of Creation through our inner selves, that beautiful atmosphere of universal knowledge and wisdom that resides within each one of us. Plato called it the world of infused knowledge, meaning intelligence and savvy that we are born with. In Keppe's language, these universal knowings within would be divine concepts inside the human mind.
And this opens the door to a staggering thought given all the modern science that points in the opposite direction, and that is that we are not creatures who are evolving to greater intelligence and knowledge at all, but we are instead creations with all possible understanding already infused in us. And coming to re-discover that is an inner journey.
There is already evidence of the presence of this native intelligence and sense of ethics from our very beginning as babies in excellent research coming out of the Infant Cognitive Center at Yale and University of California at Berkley professor, Alison Gopnik's studies into the Philosophical Baby, and they've reached fascinating conclusions about the rich and intelligent inner life of babies from the beginning.
All of this to say that it's by treading the inner path that we really come to know reality, not through our external machinations. Not to say we don't gain substantial wisdom from our experiences - of course we do - but I mean that it's through this outer contact that we come to know ourselves, that self that already exists and is not simply a product of our outer experience.
Which is what Socrates was contending 2500 years ago.
So victimhood, that state of being shaped and fashioned by our outer traumas, can be re-considered, which is exactly what we'll do today. Helena Mellander, a frequent contributor to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, is a Swedish journalist who's been having quite an impact with her new blog in Swedish written with our colleague, educator Sofie Bergqvist. Helena wrote about this recently to interesting discussion from the Swedish community.
If this also stirs your desire to comment, I'm always happy to hear from you. rich@richjonesvoice.com.
Now, freeing ourselves from the Prison of Victimhood.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Victims drive the ratings on daytime TV, after all. Blaming, finger pointing, laying on the guilt - so common, so righteous, so ... convenient.
And so wrong.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, freeing ourselves from the Prison of Victimhood.
Now you who are regular listeners to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head will already have a good idea which side of this theme we're goint to come down on, don't you? Our program, based as it is on the cutting edge psychological research coming out of the Brazilian school of Analytical Trilogy, could do nothing other than focus the discussion inward. Because that's where the trail inevitably leads.
Norberto Keppe, the scientist behind the profound work coming out of Analytical Trilogy these days - and it is formidable indeed, in the areas of education and medicine and economics and physics - Keppe puts forward the idea that we have contact with all the magnificence and glory of Creation through our inner selves, that beautiful atmosphere of universal knowledge and wisdom that resides within each one of us. Plato called it the world of infused knowledge, meaning intelligence and savvy that we are born with. In Keppe's language, these universal knowings within would be divine concepts inside the human mind.
And this opens the door to a staggering thought given all the modern science that points in the opposite direction, and that is that we are not creatures who are evolving to greater intelligence and knowledge at all, but we are instead creations with all possible understanding already infused in us. And coming to re-discover that is an inner journey.
There is already evidence of the presence of this native intelligence and sense of ethics from our very beginning as babies in excellent research coming out of the Infant Cognitive Center at Yale and University of California at Berkley professor, Alison Gopnik's studies into the Philosophical Baby, and they've reached fascinating conclusions about the rich and intelligent inner life of babies from the beginning.
All of this to say that it's by treading the inner path that we really come to know reality, not through our external machinations. Not to say we don't gain substantial wisdom from our experiences - of course we do - but I mean that it's through this outer contact that we come to know ourselves, that self that already exists and is not simply a product of our outer experience.
Which is what Socrates was contending 2500 years ago.
So victimhood, that state of being shaped and fashioned by our outer traumas, can be re-considered, which is exactly what we'll do today. Helena Mellander, a frequent contributor to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, is a Swedish journalist who's been having quite an impact with her new blog in Swedish written with our colleague, educator Sofie Bergqvist. Helena wrote about this recently to interesting discussion from the Swedish community.
If this also stirs your desire to comment, I'm always happy to hear from you. rich@richjonesvoice.com.
Now, freeing ourselves from the Prison of Victimhood.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
The Downside of Being Up
We see the legacy of its long history in the trend of magical thinking. Ask for it, believe in it, receive it - the mantra for getting what you want.
And woe betide you if you fail to follow its sunny side up paradigm. Then you can be hit with a double whammy - problems because you weren't positive and guilt on top of that.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the Downside of Being Up.
Well, we're striking into the core of one of the foundational pillars of the American way of life today. We're weaned on positive thinking from the time we're in our mothers' wombs. We're praised and coddled and told we can do anything. We're reminded to use smiles as umbrellas and exhorted to make lemonade with the lemons life deals us.
Positive thinking, or the importance of it anyway, comes as natural to us as breathing. And it's a tricky thing, because it seems so right. But it can lead us to something so wrong.
Positive thinking is based on the premise that human beings have wonderfully good intentions, and for those occasional hiccups that occur during our gilded steps along the yellow brick road leading to happy ever after, we just need to re-frame our thinking and we'll be back up on our feet and heading in the right direction again faster than you can say "think and grow rich."
But there's a dark cloud moving over the sunny side of the street. Americans, for all their training and encouragement to think positively, are not very happy people. A recent analysis of over 100 happiness surveys worldwide found Americans mired in 23rd place among developed nations. The Happy Planet Index puts the U.S. in 150th place worldwide. Americans are #1 in anti-depressants, they have more kids on Prozac and Ridalin than anyone in the world and pessimism about economic recovery is high, too.
What's going on? Well, we can turn to the study of psychology for some clues. According to the leading-edge research emerging from Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo, Brazil, the basic premise that we're well intentioned and good hearted people who occasionally screw up is being challenged. Exhausive clinical research and practical testing have shown a darker underbelly to the human psyche. And that is that we are much more pathological than that. We actually have many more desires against our development and happiness than we have believed or perceived, and positive thinking only serves to slip a thin veneer over this deeper trouble, and so only covers for a little while. Like painting over a water mark in the ceiling, the leak behind continues unaffected, causing more damage than if we'd gone to the problem in the first place.
So it is with our psyches. And real understanding of this is well documented in Norberto Keppe's vast body of work. Our Trilogy portal offers a door into all of this if you're interested in exploring more. And I would highly recommend that.
And all of Keppe's extraordinary work will be laid out from March 12 - 15, 2010 at our World Forum on psycho-socio-pathology, along with some planetary solutions, and I encourage you to get on my mailing list for updates on that.
Today, professional broadcaster, Susan Berkley, joins me for what is not our first kick at the positive thinking can, but I feel it's very important to tackle this again.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, The Downside of Being Up.
Click here to listen to this episode.
And woe betide you if you fail to follow its sunny side up paradigm. Then you can be hit with a double whammy - problems because you weren't positive and guilt on top of that.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the Downside of Being Up.
Well, we're striking into the core of one of the foundational pillars of the American way of life today. We're weaned on positive thinking from the time we're in our mothers' wombs. We're praised and coddled and told we can do anything. We're reminded to use smiles as umbrellas and exhorted to make lemonade with the lemons life deals us.
Positive thinking, or the importance of it anyway, comes as natural to us as breathing. And it's a tricky thing, because it seems so right. But it can lead us to something so wrong.
Positive thinking is based on the premise that human beings have wonderfully good intentions, and for those occasional hiccups that occur during our gilded steps along the yellow brick road leading to happy ever after, we just need to re-frame our thinking and we'll be back up on our feet and heading in the right direction again faster than you can say "think and grow rich."
But there's a dark cloud moving over the sunny side of the street. Americans, for all their training and encouragement to think positively, are not very happy people. A recent analysis of over 100 happiness surveys worldwide found Americans mired in 23rd place among developed nations. The Happy Planet Index puts the U.S. in 150th place worldwide. Americans are #1 in anti-depressants, they have more kids on Prozac and Ridalin than anyone in the world and pessimism about economic recovery is high, too.
What's going on? Well, we can turn to the study of psychology for some clues. According to the leading-edge research emerging from Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo, Brazil, the basic premise that we're well intentioned and good hearted people who occasionally screw up is being challenged. Exhausive clinical research and practical testing have shown a darker underbelly to the human psyche. And that is that we are much more pathological than that. We actually have many more desires against our development and happiness than we have believed or perceived, and positive thinking only serves to slip a thin veneer over this deeper trouble, and so only covers for a little while. Like painting over a water mark in the ceiling, the leak behind continues unaffected, causing more damage than if we'd gone to the problem in the first place.
So it is with our psyches. And real understanding of this is well documented in Norberto Keppe's vast body of work. Our Trilogy portal offers a door into all of this if you're interested in exploring more. And I would highly recommend that.
And all of Keppe's extraordinary work will be laid out from March 12 - 15, 2010 at our World Forum on psycho-socio-pathology, along with some planetary solutions, and I encourage you to get on my mailing list for updates on that.
Today, professional broadcaster, Susan Berkley, joins me for what is not our first kick at the positive thinking can, but I feel it's very important to tackle this again.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, The Downside of Being Up.
Click here to listen to this episode.
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