Depression and Panic - The Somatic-Emotional Connection
An interview with Stanley Keleman
by Terrence MacClure
"The purpose of the exercises is to be able to have an influence on your behavior. In this particular instance,
we're talking about depressive and panic behavior. Your brain influences your body and your emotional life by
shifting its attitudes. Attitudes are an emotional and physical shape. This is partly the neurophysiology of
emotional behavior. The exercises continue this dialog between brain and the muscular attitude with the
emphasis on managing depression and panic."
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.
4/17/98
Terrence MacClure is a writer and video producer
from Berkeley.
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