Stanley Keleman

Early life

Keleman was born in Brooklyn in 1931, son of immigrants from Hungary and Romania. He graduated from the Chiropractic Institute of New York, where he graduated 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.

In 1957, he became a member of Alexander Lowen’s Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis and was, until the l970’s, a senior trainer there. He attended the Alfred Adler Institute and his thinking was profoundly affected by Adler’s ideas on the relationship of the physical state of the organism to its functioning and the role of society in personality development. 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. Bull’s study of the relationship of body attitude to instinctual and emotional expression established the basis for Keleman’s somatic muscular-cortical model for influencing goal-oriented behavior. 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.

In the early 1960s, he studied Daisen Analysis in Zurich with Dr. 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 studies cemented Keleman's concept of the body as the center of one’s self and as the source of self-knowledge. They gave seed to the experiences that eventually led to his development of the approach of Formative Psychology and Keleman’s particular somatic-emotional methodology.

He later moved to California where he interned at the Esalen Institute in group dynamics and was again exposed to humanistic psychology, the leading edge of psychology at the time. There, he established his unique form of working bodily, with the all important concept of evolution providing the underlying context for his work and world view. The interaction with many leaders of the humanistic movement including Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Alan Watts and others provided a forum for his ideas. He met Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, and began a fifteen-year association, teaching an annual program in which they developed connections between myth and the body. 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

Since 1971, Keleman has been the director of the Center for Energetic Studies in Berkeley, California where he maintains a private and group practice and an active schedule of national and international educational and professional programs. 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 on June 2007 for his contributions to the field of Body Psychotherapy and Humanistic Psychology.

Keleman was 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 used to teach.