The symptom is one symptom
A person who hears a voice, loses the thread of logic and loses the capacity for affection is describing precisely what the tradition called possession. The vocabulary differs. The phenomenology does not.
Keppe Pacheco Trilogical College · Department of Theology
Psychotherapy and Exorcism
A scientific study of the link between possession and psychopathology — and the practical consequences once the two are no longer kept apart.
8episodes in the series
100pages, free to read
30propositions in the book
4languages
“Humanity is on the verge of solving its greatest problem, which is to free itself from the satanic power that took over the twentieth century.”Norberto R. Keppe
The problem
A split that has cost us the human being.
Exorcism and medicine have been separated for a very long time, and the separation has made it almost impossible to say what belongs to which. The result is a double blindness: the doctor is trained to treat a body with no psychological life, and the exorcist is trained to address a spirit with no body, no history and no mind.
If exorcism worked the way it is usually imagined, a single session would free the possessed. It does not. The process can drag on for years — which is itself evidence that something in the psyche is doing work that prayer alone cannot reach.
And if mental illness were only a matter of the brain, then anaesthetising the perception until the voices stop would be a cure. It is not a cure. It is silence.
“The split between exorcism and medicine has caused great confusion.”Norberto R. Keppe
Keppe's claim, developed across five decades of clinical practice and more than thirty books, is simple to state and difficult to live with: psychosis and possession are not two conditions that happen to resemble each other. They are one human movement seen from two sides — the clinic and the sanctuary, the inside and the outside.
That claim has consequences for both professions. It tells the exorcist that the demon cannot simply be commanded away from a person who has not yet withdrawn his consent. And it tells the psychiatrist that a mind is not a machine to be quietened, but a freedom to be brought to consciousness.
The discovery
One phenomenon, two vocabularies.
Keppe's clinical finding was not that possession is “really” psychosis, or the reverse. It was that the two describe a single human movement — and that treating it from only one side leaves half the person untouched.
Neither prayer nor pills, alone
Every mental illness has a spiritual component, and every spiritual affliction has a psychological one. Treat one and you have treated half a person — which is why the exorcist and the physician so often plateau at the same place.
Conscience is the treatment
What changes is not the demon’s address but the person’s consent. Conscientization — seeing one’s own inverted intention — is what finally makes the influence let go. This is the part neither tradition can supply alone.
Where to begin
Three ways in, depending on the time you have.
Five minutes
The Demon is a Schizophrenic Spiritual Being
The thesis in its plainest form: a patient describes the sanatorium where the bed was bolted to the floor, and Keppe asks who lifted it.
One sittingOne hundred pages, no cart
Thirty propositions in three parts, translated into four languages. Download the PDF in English or Portuguese — no account, no checkout.
The long wayHow spirit-pathology works
From the split between the disciplines to the mechanism of resonance, and what conscientization actually changes. The science, in order.
Essays & transcripts
Keppe on possession, psychosis and consent.
Ten pieces from the book, from clinical dialogues and from the teleclasses — the shortest route into the argument after the book itself.
01From the book
Introduction
The mistake at the root of both disciplines: demons treated as human beings who merely happen to be out of sorts.
Read · 3 min02Clinical dialogue
The Demon is a Schizophrenic Spiritual Being
Psychosis can be identified as a kind of possession — which is why the individual is so illogical and so deficient in affection.
Read · 2 min03Teleclass · 2000
Angels, Demons and Mental Health
We are never good — or bad — alone. What that means for diagnosis, for treatment, and for an ordinary day.
Read · 3 min04Essay
A Study on the Devil
Are demons real, or only symbols of human attitudes? Keppe’s answer is neither — and the reason is clinical.
Read · 7 min05From Universe of the Spirits
Demons have a Direct Influence in the Human Mind
We are not operating alone — and not only psychotics are influenced by malicious spirits.
Read · 2 min06From Universe of the Spirits
We Are Under the Influence of Good and Bad Spirits
The spiritual life has two directions. Perceiving which one is operating is the difference between clarity and catastrophe.
Read · 3 min07Clinical dialogue
We Fell From Paradise to Hell on Earth
We did not leave paradise. We stopped accepting that we were in it.
Read · 2 min08Essay
Man is a Demon to his Fellow Man
Hobbes said man is a wolf to his fellow man. Keppe’s consulting room suggests something considerably worse.
Read · 3 min09Radio transcript
The Banalization of Evil
Good. Evil. What’s the difference? There are universal laws we break when we do something nasty — and it pays to know it.
Read · 5 min
The series · 8 episodes
Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head
An eight-part series on Keppe’s book, hosted by Richard Lloyd Jones with psychoanalyst Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco. Produced by the Department of Theology of the Keppe Pacheco Trilogical College, and broadcast on the STOP Radio Network.
Our Entangled Spiritual Reality
The influence no one talks about: the very real influence from the spiritual world.
32 min
Transcript
Human Resonance with Evil
We explore the perverse human attraction to evil — and why it is not a metaphor.
42 min
Transcript
Certainty of the Divine
Looking at the intricate way natural processes mesh together, we would be foolish to rule out a divine cause.
41 min
Transcript
Man’s Greatest Enemy
We seldom in our modern world even think of putting temptation down to influence from nefarious spirits.
40 min
Transcript
All eight episodes
Every episode has a full transcript on STOP Radio.
The book · free
Psychotherapy and Exorcism
Thirty propositions in three parts. What the possessed and the psychotic share; why society is structured exactly like a mental patient; and how consciousness of goodness is the only route to understanding evil.
No cart, no account, no email required. The Portuguese edition and the Spanish and Italian covers are on the book page.
100 pages
30 propositions
2018 Proton Editora
The author
Norberto R. Keppe
Norberto R. Keppe trained in Vienna, where he worked with Viktor E. Frankl at the Polyclinic Hospital and School of Existential Analysis, with Knut Baumgarten at the Child Guidance Clinic and with Igor Caruso in the Deep Psychology Circle. He was a guest professor for many years at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) in São Paulo and at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine, among other institutions. He has written more than thirty books, translated into eight languages, and has attended clients all over the world — including five years in New York and eight in Europe, where he developed most of his work in socio-pathology, metaphysics and the new physics.
“Undoubtedly the most original heterodox contemporary writer of our times.”French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)
Continue the argument
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