SelfhelpMagazine

An interview with Stanley Keleman
by Terrence MacClure

From the interview

Stanley Keleman is a pioneer in the field of somatic-emotional education. He is the author many books in the field, most notably, Emotional Anatomy, Your Body Speaks Its Mind, Living Your Dying, Embodying Experience, and the clinical series - Love, Bonding, Patterns of Distress.

Introduction

Depression and panic are words that are used more and more in conversations these days. "I've been clinically depressed." "I've been waking up panicked lately." "I had another panic attack." A poet recently observed of this phenomenon that "one has the sense...a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape".

There is this observation: "I have heard that in ancient times human beings lived to the age of a hundred. In our time, we are exhausted at the age of fifty. Is this because of changes in the circumstances or is it the fault of men?" 4500 B.C. Maybe it's been a problem for a while.

After touring material on depression and panic, interviewing several psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists, I came upon the work of Stanley Keleman. He is a formative psychologist, who, over thirty years has developed a specific and aesthetic language of the body. Hence, the name of this language, "somatic psychology".

His somatic psychology borrows very little from others. You cannot compare it to Jung or Freud, for example. But, there are some fingers pointing toward Keleman's work from those pioneers: from Freud, "anatomy is destiny", and from Jung, "if you're going to have an institute, make it as disorganized as possible."

Keleman understands anatomy as behavior and behavior as anatomy. He uses the words "organize" and "disorganize" when leading a client to and from their situation. He might ask, "what layer do you experience that in?" referring to the skin/nervous system, muscular system, or soft organs. And where Freud and Jung might finally have agreed on something, Keleman refers to the 'somatic imagination': images and dreams which mirror processes in the always forming bodily destiny.

It turns out that somatic psychology has a lot to say about depression and panic. Quoting from his last interview in Yoga Journal, Keleman says, "a major element in my work remains to develop ways to help people deal with the abiding helplessness of the human condition. Anguish comes about from a state of being helpless about helplessness. Once we grasp the notion that life organizes shape, we can choose to identify with the shaper or the shape". In this interview, Keleman focuses on the shapes of depression and panic.

• Interview Part 1
• Interview Part 2
• Abridged journal kept by client suffering from depression who practices the exercises
• Frequently asked questions about the somatic-emotional exercise practice

About the Author:

Terrence MacClure is a writer and video producer from Berkeley.

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