Working with clients in psychoanalysis, one of the hardest tasks is helping them to see the negative things they do without realizing it. Self-destructive habits, procrastination of important activities, reckless or careless behaviors -- these all have causes from deep inside that we can't get to without help.

Freud mistakenly linked these to what he called Thanatos -- a death drive -- proposing that we had a drive of destruction directed against life. Freud saw it as a complement to the life drive -- Eros -- and he saw both as part of our nature.

That's a tough one to wrap your head around.

But chew on this: Freud was an atheist. The idea of a struggle between life and nothingness was probable for him. Keppe, though, takes us back a step: we're not programmed for death, so to speak. We're infused with and immersed in life and goodness. Happiness and success is our natural inheritance then. Keppe's eminently hopeful perspective sees problems and anguish as common, but not inevitable parts of nature.

For Keppe, what goes wrong circles back to human doings -- both individually and collectively. Our problem lies in psychological inversion; in a strange way, we're attracted to the dark side, and often repulsed by the good.

Not by nature, then, but by choice.

An even more difficult thing to wrap your head around then.

The Inverted Pleasure in Evil, our episode this time on Therapeutic Theology.

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Back in the 1950s, the CIA and Kremlin got it into their collective heads that figuring out how to brainwash and modify human behavior was a good idea.

Totally illegally, of course. And damaging to any who were submitted to their personality control experiments.

Out of this abusive and paranoid climate came such films as The Manchurian Candidate and Wormwood and even Jason Bourne.

Some have linked various high profile murderers to mind control experiments, but it's difficult to get any final conclusions on those. The whole subject is very secretive, and you get the feeling if you go down that rabbit hole of really sleazy, dark and evil intentions masquerading as national security imperatives.

In Norberto Keppe's scientific work, there is an even more nefarious program going on here on Earth - and it's been happening since the dawn of time. Demonic Mind Control.

And just like it's difficult to find out about those shadowy CIA and Kremlin programs, it's also difficult to find out much about the shady activities occurring on the transcendental plane. And largely for the same reasons - subterfuge. For just as the security agencies hide and deny and obfuscate, so do the spiritual ones. We'll bring some of this spiritual aspect to light today.

Demonic Mind Control, our Therapeutic Theology episode today.

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