Just as the eye inverts the images it captures and these are automatically righted by the brain, our perception seems to capture reality in an inverted manner, and for reasons still not completely clear. (Because of personal and, mainly, social envy, the individual is probably influenced since birth to destroy his own happiness, and is taught to envy the happiness of others.) This perception frequently remains inverted in our interior, leading us to feel that goodness is evil and evil is good.
Keppe perceived in his patients that the individual mistakenly engages in addictive, alienating or dangerous acts because he believes it will make him free, even though his rational mind tells him otherwise.
He noted an aggressive person attacks others because he thinks aggression is the best means to achieve his ends. Similarly, the individual who is dishonest, lazy, delusional, or addicted to drugs or alcohol believes that an alienated lifestyle is the most pleasant and beneficial of all.
At the same time, people learn to identify love with suffering, consciousness with restriction, work with sacrifice, honesty and kindness with vulnerability, speaking the truth with aggression.
We live in a false society in which all values are equally inverted and everyone is obliged to live an unreal sort of life, different from what human and social reality is meant to be. The result of this inverted way of perceiving reality is neurosis, psychosis, organic disease, and social, economic and ecological illness.
The human being does not have a clear perception of the calamity that is befalling himself, humankind, and our planet. We must begin to make a willful effort to see our inversion, and that of our society, so that we can put our lives back in order.
The first step is to recognize that consciousness, or awareness, is the only salvation — but not that awareness that we invertedly think of as an annoying little voice, hammering away at our heads to deprive us of life's pleasures, a voice from which we do everything possible to hide.
From: PACHECO, Cláudia Bernhardt de Souza. The ABC of Analytical Trilogy – Integral Psychoanalysis. São Paulo: Proton Publishing House, 1988.
Reflection:
Is the consciousness of inversion fundamental to our salvation?
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