Stanley Keleman
1931-2018

Stanley Keleman’s pioneering work places the body at the center of the human experience. Emotional reality and biological ground are indistinguishable. 

He is the founder of Formative Psychology™: a methodology and conceptual framework in which changing anatomical shapes define human existence. These shapes – which form through inheritance, aging, behavior, feelings, and response to challenges – give rise to emotions, thoughts, and experiences. Feeling follows form. Through voluntary effort, people can learn to influence the shapes dictated by inheritance and social learning, and become creators of a personal world.

Keleman founded the Center for Energetic Studies in Berkeley, California, in 1971 and was its director until his death. For decades he maintained a private and group practice, as well as an active schedule of national and international professional programs. His multifaceted, prolific career in somatic studies – as a theorist, clinician, author, educator, and artist – spanned more than sixty years.

He is the author of numerous groundbreaking books including Emotional Anatomy (1985), Embodying Experience (1987), and Your Body Speaks Its Mind (1981).

The Stanley Keleman Papers are housed in the Humanistic Psychology Archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

Keleman received an honorary Ph.D. from Saybrook University for his contributions to the field of body psychotherapy and humanistic psychology. He is the recipient of lifetime achievement awards from the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy and the European Association for Body Psychotherapy. 

Keleman was the honorary president and director for research at the Zurich School for Form and Movement, the Centro de Psicologia Formativa do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the Institute for Formative Psychology in Solingen, Germany, where he also taught. 

Read Stanley Keleman’s full biography here.