| Myth
and the Body: A Colloquy With Joseph Campbell By Stanley Keleman (Center Press, Berkeley, CA 1999 112 pages) Reviewed by Dr John Conger In the recent book Myth and the Body,the taped seminar conversations of Stanley Keleman and Joseph Campbell, as they met yearly for fourteen years, are represented in an edited ninety page book. The book is dedicated to his "friend and colleague" Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), and stands as a brief introduction to Keleman's "Bodying Practice" in the context of myth. Not since Reich has anyone applied biology to therapy so tenaciously and creatively. Keleman uses the restricted biological metaphor to explain all human experience. Even the imaginative range of the world's mythology finds it origins in cell tissue: "I define myth as originating from our tissue's cells, a nonlinear image that is governed by the body's metabolism. There is a pulse that initiates natural rhythms and tides of light, such as you see in dream (p.36)." But just when one might suspect Keleman of being caught in 19th century scientific concreteness, on the following page he describes science as a mythology: " And when one wades through all the anatomic and physiologic information, one is reading science's myths of what it means to be human (p. 37). Keleman, as poet and therapist, engages Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, in a unique dialogue. I remember, from attending one of the seminars, the excitement of bringing together two visions of humanity originating, one might imagine, from the earth and from the sky. Campbell, who became famous with the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, who saw the mythic hero emerge as a coherent figure across all cultural boundaries, brings the story of Parsifal to the seminars as the particular heroic model in western culture. Keleman identifies the hero's journey with the snake, "not because it sheds its skin; but because when it moves, it is continually changing shape...a snake, an animal with a thousand shapes, yet a snake...the integrity of our somatic process is like the snake (p. 61)." Keleman also recounts a somatic experience of the snake, "I remember lying down and being fascinated by the motile internal image that I could feel. From inside my torso came a snake. It entered my brain going from right side to the left. I felt a visceral movement in my belly and throat (p. 78)." Campbell, on the other hand recounts his experience in the caves of Lascaux when the guide turned out the light. " The world up there is experienced as being a secondary world when you are down in those caves. "And that puts you into something inside you, the enduring thing in you. Because each of us is just a little flicker of an eternal life that is in us. We are functions of an eternal. We get attached to the little local forms. "Campbell explains in the book how the snake represents life bound to the earth while the bird breaks free in spiritual flight. Myth and the Body gives us a glimpse of conversations between the earth and sky, between the snake and the bird, archetypes finding powerful expression through these friends, Stanley Keleman and Joseph Campbell. By John Conger –Dr. John Conger is a psychologist and Bioenergetic Analyst who teaches and has a private practice in Berkeley, California. He is the author of (1988) Jung and Reich: the Body as Shadow and (1994) The Body in Recovery: Somatic Psychotherapy and the Self, and is editor of the International Journal of Bioenergetic Analysis. To read another review of Myth & Body, by Grover E. Criswell, click here |