Stanley Keleman

Stanley Keleman (November 1931 – August 11, 2018) was an American writer and therapist, who created the body psychotherapy approach known as "formative psychology". He was one of the leaders of the body psychotherapy movement nationally and internationally. His methodology rested on an anatomical base and incorporates an evolutionary, philosophical and mythological perspective; within this formative paradigm the human is capable of learning voluntary self-influence of instinctual and emotional expression as a way to manage dilemmas of daily living and to form personal choices for creating a future. Keleman started developing and articulating his concepts in 1957. In 1971, he published the first of 10 books.

Early life
Keleman was born in Brooklyn in 1931, the son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary and Romania. He graduated from the Chiropractic Institute of New York in 1954.

Early career and mentorships
During his early years as a chiropractic clinician, starting in 1955 he focused on stress reduction and began to observe the relationship between emotional conflict, organismic movement and distortions of body posture.

This education balanced the characterological approaches of Lowen, Freud, and Reich. He also started leading emotional expressive classes at this time to explore the relationship between movement patterns and psychological expression.

At this same time, he began a personal mentorship with Nina Bull, of, Columbia University, and author of The Attitude Theory of Emotion. He joined with her on a research project which resulted in her book, The Body and Its Mind. This work became the driving force that transformed Keleman's chiropractic orientation from postural distortion to postural reorganization and profoundly influenced the direction of his work. In working with her on her research he came to see how physical actions are at the base of the emotional organization of a person and not the other way around. Action precedes emotion and is its creator; action is not the result of emotion. He took part in Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais's workshop in Berkeley in the summer of 1973, during which Feldenkrais emphasized breathing and possible ways of rehabilitating it for optimized human functioning (see "Stanley Keleman, The Shapes of Depression and Panic".

In the early 1960s, he studied Daisen Analysis in Zurich with Dori Gutscher, in the school of Medard Boss, and in Germany with Professor Karlfried Graf Durckheim, at the Center for Initiation Studies. Durckheim offered an approach that used the human form to reveal the relationship of man to his own nature and to nature in general. From these experiences Keleman evolved from an instinctual and social emphasis, adding a phenomenological and existential orientation which he felt was a missing philosophical perspective.

These workshops evolved into the annual programs taught by Keleman in Berkeley and Solingen, Germany, that connect dreams, body and the formative process.

Later career
Somatic-emotional education at the Center uses individual experience, emotions, action patterns, insights, and images to discover how life has been shaped and what is seeking to emerge. The focus is on learning to use the cortex and muscles to voluntarily generate experiences to grow oneself and to create a personal skill for managing one's life, in one's own way.

Beginning in the early 1990s, Keleman developed his work with an emphasis on education rather than therapy. He has applied ideas from Darwin's theory of evolution and Einstein's theory of mass and energy to understanding how shapes change over time and how the individual can learn to influence the body that nature has given us. Along with his vision and philosophy of Formative Psychology, he has developed an original methodology for teaching individuals how to participate in their own formative process. His focus is on how the body shapes itself over time, through all of life's stages, as part of an ongoing process of voluntarily forming a future and a personal self.

Keleman has given public seminars on Formative Psychology at Spectrum Therapy in London, England. Spectrum is a member of the international formative psychology community and its professional supervision and study program. Additional centers where Keleman's Formative Psychology approach provides the basis of both clinical work and education are Practice for Somatic Education and Therapy in Groningen, The Netherlands and the Institute for Stress Management in Mainz, Germany.

Awards and honors
He was the recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from the USA Association of Body Psychotherapy June 2005 and the European Association for Body Psychotherapy in Berlin in September 2007. He received an Honorary Ph.D. from Saybrook University in San Francisco in June 2007 for his contributions to the field of Body Psychotherapy and Humanistic Psychology.

Keleman is the Honorary President and Director of Research at the Zurich School for Form and Movement in Zurich, Switzerland, the Brazilian Center of Formative Psychology in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and at the Institute for Formative Psychology in Solingen, Germany where he also teaches.