Stanley Keleman and
Formative Psychology®
Who was Stanley Keleman?
Keleman was born in 1931 in New York City, the son of Hungarian immigrants. He first graduated in Biological Sciences and realized even then that people wanted to be healthy but didn't know what to do to achieve it.
His interest in the body has always had an experiential basis, having begun with athletics and continuing later with his training at the New York Chiropractic Institute, where he graduated in 1954.
Biography
Keleman has built a professional reputation for his ability to reduce stress and tension, drawing on a solid clinical practice in New York, primarily trained by Broadway and Metropolitan Opera artists.
In his clinical practice, Keleman began to observe the relationship between emotional conflicts and distortions in body posture. He learned about the body's contraction and expansion reflexes, the stress patterns linked to these, and their relationship to the onset of diseases. By working physically with people, he realized that as he intervened in their muscular patterns, he evoked emotional responses.
Always following his interests, he began a program of studies and research on the life of the body. In 1957 he became a member of the Alexander Lowen Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis, of which he was... senior trainer Until 1970, Keleman had a close relationship with Lowen, but always remained methodologically independent in terms of his way of thinking and working
He attended the Alfred Adler Institute and his thinking was profoundly affected by Adler's ideas on organs, the will to power, and the role of society in personality development. He came into contact with Freud and Jung and with the notion of the unconscious (the unknown) as the basis of psychic energy, which deeply affected him. His studies at the A. Adler Institute enabled him to find a balance between the characterological approaches of Freud, Reich, and Lowen.
Simultaneously, Keleman began research with Nina Bull, a neurophysiologist at Columbia University's Physicians and Surgeons Hospital. Author of 'Attitude Theory of Emotions', Bull was interested in the relationship between patterns of muscular action and emotional experience. During the 12 years he spent with her, Keleman built a solid understanding of neurophysiology and its relationship to human behavior. Nina Bull's social philosophy and neurological knowledge laid the foundation for the somatic-neural model of emotions and behavior developed by Keleman.
In 1964, his research took him to Europe, where he studied existential and phenomenological psychology for three years at the Dasein Analytic Institute in Zurich.
In Germany, he associated himself with Professor Karlfried von Durkheim at the Center for Religious Studies. Keleman and Karlfried formed a great friendship that lasted until Durkheim's death many years later. Durkheim introduced him to a profound and religious psychology that established a relationship between the human form and the experience of the sacred. These studies provided fundamental experiences that confirmed for Keleman the concept of the body as the center of the self and were the seeds of what would later become his Formative Psychology® and the Somatic-Emotional Methodology.
Keleman was always a thinker and from an early age sought a philosophical reference point to guide his path. Initially, he was interested in H. Bergson's concept of élan vital. After some years, he embraced Husserl's phenomenological ideas as the philosophical basis for his view of the life process.
After returning to the United States in 1967, Keleman moved to California, where he worked at the Esalen Institute and encountered humanistic psychology. Interaction with several leading figures in humanistic psychology – Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and Alan Watts, among others – provided a forum for the development of his ideas. At Esalen, in an atmosphere of cultural revolution, Keleman established his approach to working with emotional conflicts. In 1968, he settled in Berkeley, California, where he founded and directed the... Center for Energetic Studies, the institute where he developed his training work. Center for Energetic Studies, instituto onde desenvolveu o trabalho formativo.
In the 1970s, Keleman met mythologist Joseph Campbell, with whom he formed a close friendship that lasted 15 years. During those 15 years, they coordinated annual workshops together, deepening their understanding of the connections between myth and the body. Years later, this work resulted in the publication of the book. Myth and the Body, by Keleman.
No Center for Energetic Studies In Berkeley, California, Stanley Keleman maintained a clinical practice, coordinated courses and workshops, and an extensive national and international program of professional development courses. In 2010 he became honorary president and director of Teaching and Research at the [institution name]. Center for Formative Psychology of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and of Institut für Formative Psychologie in Solingen, Germany.
Formative Psychology® and its somatic-emotional methodology are firmly based on an anatomical-physiological foundation, as well as a psychological and mythological understanding. The formative approach deals with the human being in their social and evolutionary drive towards forming a personal somatic self.
I see Stanley Keleman as one of the great thinkers of our era, with a multidimensional, complex, and inclusive vision of the human process. The theoretical-methodological model of Formative Psychology is solidly grounded in the evolutionary process and embodied reality. Keleman is the author of 15 books and numerous articles, many of which have been published internationally. Nine of Keleman's books have been translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil by Summus Editora.
To learn more about Stanley Keleman's work, follow the links to articles and videos he has produced. You can also find more information about him on the YouTube channel of the Brazilian Center for Formative Psychology®: https://www.youtube.com/user/PSIFORMATIVABR
Formative Psychology® by Stanley Keleman
Formative Psychology® is based on the evolutionary process in which life continuously constitutes the next series of forms, from birth to maturity to old age. At conception, each person receives a biological and emotional inheritance, but it is through voluntary effort that a human fulfills the potential to form a personal life. Form gives rise to feeling. When individual identity is grounded in somatic reality, we can say: I know who I am by the way I experience myself.
Formative Psychology® provides a philosophy and method for working with our lives. We learn to regenerate our emotional and instinctive vitality, inhabit our bodies, and embody our excitement and emotional vitality. The goal of formative practice is to use everyday life to practice being present and create an adult self and reality. I proceed from the premise that each of us is conceived as an adult and that we grow into the adults we are meant to be.
We are all in a continuous process of forming, stabilizing, and reforming our adult reality. This process of formation and reform is a continuous extension and contraction of tissue motility, a reflex that is an uninterrupted chain in our lives. Pulsation is an essential expression of our hormonal and emotional life. The pulse process, like the heartbeat, is crucial for maintaining the body's form and development. A continuous pulse organizes cycles of excitation. When pulsation is inhibited or overstimulated, our somatic, emotional, and mental life also changes.
in the training practice, we work with the body's pulsation patterns and restore its natural rhythm and vitality. The areas of voluntary management in the brain are used and undergo growth
There is a methodology for Formative Psychology® that I call body practice. Body practice involves the voluntary part of the brain to work with reflexive and non-volitional somatic functions. The brain can suggest patterns of behavior and form an image of its own body to have a relationship with itself. Of primary importance is being embodied, forming the body by experiencing the stages of our somatic existence.
The practice of the body begins by intensifying everything we recognize as our current somatic-emotional state. This intensification aims to broaden the pattern of our way of being present, along with its images, memories, and thoughts. We can then disorganize what we have done voluntarily and, in doing so, learn how we can have some say in what we do. This helps to alleviate reflexive or unknown structures that have been inaccessible to us. It is similar to throwing a pebble into water and initiating response loops. In this sequence, we become familiar with how we organize our actions and how we can use our brain to affect our responses and feelings. The work of the exercises is to form an adult soma and brain, and an adult emotionality in social relationships.
The work is not only intended to become intimately familiar with past structures and disrupt them, but also to provide a tool for present and future situations.
The exercises are performed slowly, frame by frame, to discover one's own speed and compensate for somatic anesthesia – to become intimate with the sensation of pulse pattern formation and creation.
Working somatically in this way provokes a shift in recognition and experiences in how we organize ourselves to be present, solve problems, and experience new forms of expression. It also organizes a dialogue between body and brain, which changes patterns of meaning and order. We begin to live our destiny, our somatic heritage. We begin to empower ourselves in the formation of our adult selves and their relationships.
Formative methodology: the practice of the body
Few people realize that their somatic-emotional presence is a complex organization that is usually unconscious. The formative exercise method is designed to bring relief and revitalize the organizing and disorganizing sequence of somatic-emotional forms.
The body practice is based on the pulsatile expansion-contraction reflex and has five stages:
- What is our somatic situation? Organize the muscular pattern of our body.
- Intensify the pattern to make the emotional attitude vivid.
- Undo the heightened emotional-muscular attitude.
- Pause. Control the pulse response.
- Reorganizing New Patterns: Steps two and three, performed voluntarily, allow us to influence unconscious behavior. By practicing increasing and decreasing the intensity of the emotional muscular form, we generate specific sensations and feelings. This voluntary practice increases cortical function to influence reflex responses, making them personal. This dialogue between body and brain enhances our personal somatic adult.
Body practice is a powerful tool to help reorganize past somatic traumas and help form somatic solutions to problems. However, its most urgent goal is to continue, expand, and reorganize experience to develop a personal somatic identity. For example, it can help identify and reorganize restrictions around the heart, allowing a surge of warmth into the blood that can enable us to love again. It can also use its warmth to personalize a loving relationship and deepen bonds.
Being able to influence the intensity of how we react is no small thing. There's no stereotypical way to do the exercises, there's no need to perform them. What's important is how you learn by doing. I recommend doing the exercises at a slow, rhythmic pace. This helps to freeze a phase of the structure, to maintain the form and savor the change in form and feeling. This is an important experience in self-regulation and identity.
The work involves linking the deep pulse process between form and expression in order to deepen the instinctive and personal somatic adult self. The exercises are ways to help us get to know our somatic-emotional identity and, if we wish, change our state, to be here in a different way. This is how problems are truly solved. The work, then, is a process that helps establish a basic somatic adult self that gives us a truer sense of our identity, somatic sanity, and reality.
The practice of the body emphasizes everyday life as the practice of forming the body of the adult self. It is a process of existence, a pulsating continuum. It invokes a reflex of expanding, gathering, dismantling, regrouping, reorganizing, growing, and forming.
The desire to learn is a basic appetite, generating optimism, hope, and charity. The ability to commit to this process, using the cerebral cortex, gives our lives a reference point for living and generates satisfaction.
The formative method: how we voluntarily influence our presence in the world. Formative philosophy.
Anatomical structure is behavior. Formative philosophy states that there are two ways in which the body manages its behavioral process. One is inherited, the pulsating, neural, and muscular patterns with which we are born; the other is a voluntary effort. Both arise from the cells and are a natural process of the body. Inherited behavioral patterns are autonomous and automatic. They do not require voluntary effort. Voluntary behavior arises from the inherited, non-volitional behavior and is located in the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex has the capacity to voluntarily influence behavior, creating new connections and new patterns. These new behaviors become anatomical and complement the inherited behavior. These two behaviors, the inherited and the voluntary, are experiences of self-knowledge.
The soma grows into an adult, organizing itself into a series of forms over time. There is a sequence in this series of forms. They begin as mobile and unformed forms; then they become diffuse and porous. Finally, they become more formed and stable, rigid or dense forms.
This sequence of developmental forms can be influenced by gradients of voluntary effort. With voluntary effort, the cortex can manage bursts of motility, osmotic diffusion of porosity, rigid firmness, and compacted forms. The unformed, unstable, and stabilizing continuum of forms occurs between the body and its cortex and the world.
Adults who learn to influence their behavioral processes develop an ability to govern their lives and transitions. Adults who develop their voluntary function are able to incorporate new experiences and actions. They develop a variety of ways of being present in the world. Discrete voluntary acts turn complexity into simplicity and transform and deepen our anatomical and experiential reality. Voluntarily formed behavior organizes the anatomical structure – a living memory that is a center of action and knowledge.
The formation of a personal anatomical structure requires persistent voluntary effort. Voluntary effort extended over time increases the anatomical connections that form relationships between the body and its cortex. It is a somatic function that can alter and create an anatomical structure.
Voluntary effort is the driving force in the development of a personal life. It has consequences by influencing emotions, satisfaction, relationships, destiny, and personal awareness.
Memories anatomical
An anatomical structure is a remembered behavior. The remembered behavior is ready to be used, since it has already passed through the mobile stage and the diffuse and porous stage. A remembered behavior can be recognized as anxiety, yielding, rigidity, or squatting.
There are four patterns of remembered behavior: two are inherited, one is not programmed, and the last is formed voluntarily. The first inherited pattern of remembered behavior is the organization of an organism, its architecture, and its expansion and contraction movements. The second inherited pattern of remembered behavior is the patterns of excitatory electrical pulses, which resonate and form bonds with other cells, like birds singing together. The next pattern is the experiences that accompany the developmental process. Then there are the anatomical behaviors formed by voluntary effort. Voluntary effort influences both inherited and developmental behavior.
The formative method
The Formative Psychology® method regenerates our emotional and instinctive vitality. It suggests ways to inhabit our bodies and resist the shrinking of our excitement and emotional vitality. The emphasis is on everyday life as the practice of being present as a somatic adult.
Each body type represents a unique combination of tissue types with a specific organizational process. The endomorph, a pear-shaped body with large lungs and intestines, gathers and incorporates. The muscular, square-shaped mesomorph likes to act and confront. The long-bodied ectomorph possesses a large sensory area for gathering information and is hyperactive and alert. These body types guide the body's experiences and interactions with others – incorporating, confronting, being alert and mobile. How we exercise and the responses we have to it are related to the type we are. We can exercise and respond in an endomorphic, mesomorphic, or ectomorphic way. We can misjudge our responses or be critical of them.
There is an overall organizational process that forms our somatic reality. This organizational process is essential for establishing a relationship with ourselves. It has several phases and stages. Four stages, on a continuum, are tissue responses: swollen, porous, rigid, and dense. These stages affect how our soma also takes shape. We can be a swollen or porous, rigid or dense mesomorph. Our bodies can be inflated, with the membrane stretched, or the membrane can be porous, rigid, or compact. These states influence our organizational process. It is important to know that our inherited vitality and desires, our patterns of arousal and emotional and social response, can be modified or exaggerated, individualized and personalized. We can do the exercises and respond in a swollen, porous, or rigid way.
Pulsation is an essential expression of our emotional life. Exercises influence and amplify the motility and pulsation of our tissues, which in turn organize cycles of excitation. When pulsation is inhibited or overstimulated, our form also changes. The organizing pulse, when interrupted or excited, disrupts the body's formation process. The methodology of Formative Psychology® involves the volitional part of the brain to work with the non-volitional tides of excitatory pulsation, desire, and feeling.
The exercise method is initiated when (1) we recognize the pattern of our current somatic-emotional position, an alert ectomorphic state. (2) we intensify our pattern of somatic presence and give ourselves more definition, a mesomorphic function. We amplify the action pattern and the images, memories, and thoughts that accompany it. (3) we disorganize the muscular pattern that has been organized. This is also a mesomorphic function. These three steps bring relief to unknown somatic-emotional structures and their response rings. Step two organizes rigidity and density, while step three organizes porosity and swelling. (4) In this step, we contain the increase in pulsation, excitation, or imagery made available in step three. This is an endomorphic and porous form. (5) This step is new form, new behavior.
Somatic work organizes a dialogue between body and brain that changes the pattern of meaning and order. We begin to live our destiny, our somatic emotional heritage. We begin to empower ourselves in the formation of our adult selves and their relationships. In this way, we recognize and experience the body we have, the body in which we live, and the potential of the soma we can become.
Vision and Work of Formative Psychology®
The Work of Formative Psychology®
Formative Psychology® is an educational-therapeutic approach developed by Stanley Keleman in California in the 1970s. For Formative Psychology®, the human being is a living, interconnected, and evolving process, constantly changing physically and emotionally. We believe that emotions and thoughts are linked to body posture; the body manifests our way of feeling and thinking, as well as our attitude towards life. Although we do not control our emotions and thoughts, we can influence them by working with our muscular postures. Formative Psychology® uses voluntary micro-movements to help the person transform their emotional postures and their way of relating. Formative exercises deepen the connection between body and brain, stimulating the formation of new neural connections and new behaviors.
We start from the principle that a person functions in the best possible way in their current moment and uses the resources they have, even if these bring them pain or suffering. However, when seeking help, the person is looking to reorganize their habitual patterns and learn more satisfying ways of living. In Formative Psychology®, we are interested in what the person wants to develop for themselves and what difficulties they face in achieving this. We identify their postures and patterns of muscular, emotional, and cognitive functioning and use specific exercises to help them create alternative courses of action. We work to help the person influence themselves in daily life.
There is always a chance to create something new. As adults, we are not victims of our habitual patterns or the attitudes of others. Exercise is a practical tool for living and an opportunity for self-dialogue.
In formative work, the therapeutic relationship is one of cooperative partnership; the person actively participates in their process, building autonomy to deal with situations in daily life. Formative Psychology® works to help the person grow and develop what they desire in life, whether in the personal, professional, or community sphere.
Leila Cohn
Theory and Methodology
Theoretical Foundations
Formative Psychology® is based on phenomenology and its view of the human being is grounded in the reality of biological processes and the inseparability between subjective and somatic life. Formative theory links the biological process to the human subjective-existential process, establishing a field of knowledge where subjectivity and the bodily process are seen as a continuum, a single reality. Every human event is part of a larger somatic organization and includes an emotional attitude, a pattern of thought, behavior, a way of imagining and feeling. Viscera, nerves, and muscles interact with each other and with the brain, forming relationships that we express in language, thought, feeling, image, dream, and behavior. Subjective experience is formed from the reality of the somatic process, from embodied experience.
Formative Psychology® is an evolutionary approach that treats the human body as a journey of growth and maturation, a living, subjective process continuously moving towards self-formation, growth, and maturity. The body is a formative process organized into a series of somatic-emotional forms that appear and disappear over time, from conception to death. These forms are layered throughout our existence and coexist within us, superimposed. The way we receive or resist these transitions of form throughout life affects the organization of our adulthood and shapes our capacity to deepen and mature.
We have an inherited body and a formed body interacting with each other. The genetically inherited body gives us a constitutional structure that will influence our lifestyle. Formative Psychology® is based on the typology created by W. Sheldon to organize the concept of the inherited body, grounded in the embryonic development process. Interactions with our genetic legacy and with the social environment in which we are embedded generate the organization of a personal body, the formed body.
When faced with a challenge, a threat, or an insult, we organize a sequence of genetically predetermined somatic responses: we assume an alert attitude, our chest expands, our heart rate accelerates, and our muscle tone increases, preparing us to act. Once the initial situation ends, we may return to our original pulse, disrupting the emergency responses described above. However, if the insult persists or returns, or is serious and intense, we alter our posture to deal with this reality. We change our pulse pattern, our breathing, our muscle tone, our hormone secretion levels, the consistency of our tissues, and the geography of our internal spaces. We form somatic-emotional postures with varying degrees of tonicity and malleability, organizing the inflated, porous, rigid, or dense somatic types. Each somatic structure has its own logic and emotional pattern that organizes a way of relating to oneself and to others. The somatic-emotional structure that we form to deal with life's challenges, whether internal or external, is our distinctive mark, our uniqueness.
The body's objective is to perpetuate itself, shape a future, and personalize its genetic legacy through the organization of a relationship with itself. This intrapersonal relationship allows us to differentiate ourselves from the whole and form an individuality. A person's body structure expresses their personal history, their way of being and relating to the world. When we work with someone, we deal with the logic of that somatic form and with that person's set of internal rules. The capacity for internal dialogue, for influencing oneself, and for intervening in one's own process—a hallmark of human subjectivity—is mediated by the cerebral cortex. The volitional function of the cerebral cortex and voluntary muscular effort enable this dialogue of the body with itself. The formative methodology rests on this basis.
The Training Methodology
Keleman created a methodology that allows us to experience and influence our organizational patterns through the use of voluntary muscular effort. This formative methodology, or "Body Practice," works with the innate pulsating continuum of contraction and expansion present in our cells and tissues, and with the relationship between body and brain. The volitional capacity of the cerebral cortex enables us to muscularly alter our emotional postures and form new behavioral patterns. The methodology allows individuals to influence themselves and participate assertively in their self-regulation process and their transformations. Through the use of voluntary muscular effort, the exercises make it possible to alter somatic-emotional organizational patterns, influencing our internal state and our sense of identity.
The formative work seeks to shape and deepen the body's dialogue with itself, giving voice to the internal reality that exists in each human being and enabling the embodiment of this reality as a subjective personal presence. The methodology aims to provide the person with a way to organize the experience of their process, influence themselves, and organize a set of personal values based on their experience.
“…The practice of body awareness begins in the cortex, organizing its volitional ability to influence its own behavior and to generate possible ways of being in the world bodily. The exercises help to reorganize the flows of arousal and urgency, turning them into expressions of affection and organizing lasting bonds…” (Keleman, 1997:6)
The Practice of Bodybuilding – the Five Steps:
- Become aware of how physically present you are.
- Strengthen your posture through voluntary muscular effort, in stages.
- To undo the intensification of the form in managed stages.
- Pause to receive your somatic responses.
- To consolidate the emerging organization, giving it firmness and permanence.
Steps two and three form a pulsation: contracting and expanding, towards the world and towards oneself, intensifying and de-intensifying. Expanding evokes the reflex to contract, and contracting evokes its opposite, expanding. By practicing in both directions, we set in motion a process of internal reorganization that will imply a new pulsation pattern and a new bodily form. This embryo of a new pulsation-form manifests itself in stage four, the stage for new possibilities of embodying. In stage five, it is up to us to embody the form that emerges and consolidate it, giving it duration through muscular effort.
The formative exercise sustains the organizing pulse and the tension between postures through the capacity to inhibit movement. The practice of embodying makes the internal pulse available for voluntary influence. This pulse is an internal master that helps us organize and somatize the different layers of the body. By working with the methodology, we organize a space to receive and embody our responses. The exercise enables us to establish distinctions within the same organization, manage our behavior, and define an identity.
By working with the volitional capacity of the body, the formative methodology enables us to influence the emotional forms we embody and the behavioral patterns that accompany them. In groups and workshops, we work to increase our capacity for self-influence and to be agents of our own destiny.
Bibliographic References:
Cohn, Leila and Teixeira, Iracema. Formative Psychology®: a somatic-emotional approach, in Proceedings of the 2nd Forum of the Postgraduate Course in Body Therapies: Theoretical Foundations. Brazilian Institute of Medicine and Rehabilitation. Postgraduate and Research Coordination, 2001.
Keleman, S. (1987) Embodying Experience. Berkeley, CA: Center Press.
» (1985) Emotional Anatomy. Berkeley, CA: Center Press.
» (1999) Myth and the Body: a colloquy with Joseph Campbell. Berkeley, CA: Center Press
» (1989) Patterns of Distress. Berkeley, CA: Center Press.
» (1979) Somatic Reality. Berkely, CA: Center Press
» (1991) “Maturiry – Somatic Appearances Rippening” Summer Institute-Berkeley, CA
» (1995) “Deepening Our Interiority: Dreams, Soma and Maturity” Winter Institute- Berkeley, CA
» (1997) “Being an Adult: Age and Identity” Summer Institute-Berkeley, CA
» (1998) “Dreams and Deepening the Adult” Winter Institute-Berkeley, CA
» (2003) “More and Less Voluntary Muscular Effort” texto transcrito de palestra em Berkeley, CA, a ser publicado na edição alemã de Insultos à Forma.
» and Russel, David (1993) Who Owns the Body? The Life and Work of Stanley Keleman. University of California, Santa Barbara. Library Oral History Program.
Ribeiro, Ana Rita e Magalhães, Romero. (1997) Guia de Abordagens Corporais. Summus Editorial.
Philosophy
Formative thought is based on the philosophical principles of phenomenology, understanding the human being as a process that is continuously constructed through experience. The human body is seen as a subjective process, a living phenomenon that pulsates and forms itself. Bodily process and subjective experience are a continuum, part of the same reality.
We exist simultaneously in a biological body and in a personally formed body. The human journey encompasses the development of the various forms that appear from childhood to adolescence and then in the various phases of adult life, and their respective subjective experiences. The innate process of being born, growing, maturing, aging, and dying, destined for every individual, is understood by formative theory as being malleable and capable of being voluntarily influenced. The degree of personal involvement with one's own process and the commitment to taking it into one's own hands differentiates each individual's journey.
Keleman's clinical philosophy is based on an educational-therapeutic process that reorganizes inherited and learned somatic-emotional patterns. Using the formative method, the therapist works in partnership with the client to deepen self-knowledge and generate new possibilities for self-development. The formative approach does not aim to fix something or heal past damage, but to facilitate the reorganization of emotional attitudes and behaviors that hinder growth. The method works with the restructuring of neuro-motor forms and the consequent expansion of the subject's influence over their emotional reality and their personal development process.