Introduction to Emotional Anatomy - Dr Stanley Keleman

Stanley Keleman’s interest in the body has always been experientially based, beginning with an early involvement in athletics and continuing in his education at the Chiropractic Institute of New York, where he graduated in l954. After starting his practice as a clinician, he began to observe the relationship between emotional conflict, organismic movement and distortions of body posture. Following his interest, he initiated a program of training and research into the life of the body. He became a member in 1957 of Alexander Lowen’s Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis and was, until the l970’s, a senior trainer. He attended the Alfred Adler Institute and his thinking was affected profoundly by Adler’s ideas on the relationship of the state of the organism to its functioning, the will to power, and the role of society in personality development. This education and training balanced the characterological approaches of Lowen, Freud, and Reich.

In 1967, he moved to California where he interned at Esalen Institute in group dynamics and was exposed to humanistic psychology, the leading edge of psychology at the time. There in an atmosphere of cultural revolution, he established his form of working bodily. The interaction with many leaders of the humanistic movement – Carl Rodgers, 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 Stanley in Berkeley and Solingen Germany that connect dreams, body and the formative process.

His commitment to understanding the life of the body keeps him abreast of the changes in modern biology, neurobiology and molecular dynamics all of which help him understand how the body develops and matures. Along with his vision and philosophy, he has developed Formative Psychology®, an original methodology for teaching individuals how to participate in their own formative process. His pioneering efforts continue to take him into the forefront of learning how the body shapes itself over time, through all of life’s stages.

His Formative Psychology® methodology rests firmly on an anatomical and physiological base, as well as a psychological and mythological understanding. The Formative Psychology® approach deals with the human condition in its societal and evolutionary thrust toward forming a personal somatic self.