Myth & the Body: A Colloquy with Joseph Campbell By Stanley Keleman Center Press Berkeley California, 1999 100 pages: $16.95 softbound reviewed in: Somatics Magazine Journal of the Mind / Body Arts and Sciences Vol. XII, Number 8, Fall/Winter 1999/2000

Myth & the Body is a wonderful coming together of the mind and experience of the somatics practitioner Stanley Keleman, with the mind and spirit of Joseph Campbell. It is a distillation of 14 years of annual seminars in which Keleman and Campbell traded thoughts on mythology and the body. Campbell's statement, "Mythology is a song. It is the song of the imagination inspired by the energies of the body." formed the basis of their relationship and foundation for the book. Keleman says that "for me mythology is the poetics of the body singing about our cellular truth." He continues, "I know that experience is a bodied event and that myth, as an organizing process, is one way to help make order from somatic experience."

Myth & the Body has five parts, "beginning with the initial definition of body as myth, describing the hero's journey as a means of understanding our own somatic destiny, and finally showing how we can experience a somatic mythic realm." Campbell says that "the human imagination is grounded in the energies of the body." Keleman adds that "from out of the great somatic collective from the genetic codes comes the story of our basic identity, our predisposition to respond to the world in a particular way."

Myth & the Body reminds us that "the hero's myth is about embodiment. It shows us how to learn the lessons of our embodiment as we overcome obstacles, challenged, and changes." Finally, Keleman tells us that "the goal of formative psychology is to get us to feel our situation so that we can find a way to form our experiences and to be intimate with our life."

Chapters include" Part One: Body and Myth: "Myth as Body," and "Body as Inheritance." Part Two: Entering the Formative Life, "The Wasteland," "Body as Image, Experience, and Somatic Imagination," and "The Sirens Call: The Authentic and the Inauthentic Life:" Part Three: there's Journey: the Somatic Unconscious"; "Parsifal: A Formative Myth of the West," The Legend of Parsifal Resold by Joseph Campbell, "Compassion, Transformation and Rebirth,"and "Our Life Stories," and Part Four: Initiation: Deepening our Somatic Humanity:"Deepening your Fate," "The Return to a Somatic Reference," and "Forming your Somatic Humanity: The Bodying Practice."

It is extraordinary that these seminars and this friendship occurred. Each man is a Renaissance man in his own right. Both Campbell and Keleman have a deep understanding of the somatic side of things, i.e. somatic humanity. Keleman makes extensive use of William H. Sheldon's body type concepts of mesoderm, ectoderm and endoderm. Keleman also explains his formative psychology. At time it is difficult to tell who is speaking until one recognizes the favorite themes of each. Campbell is a rich repository of myth, unconscious outcroppings,and Jungian understandings; Keleman has the genius of the somatic perspective.

Myth & the Body is full of nuggets of wisdom and significant insights. In addition, it has wonderful illustrations, drawings and photos of statues that reflect Keleman's aesthetic sense. One would like to listen to the seminar tapes in their entirety. The tapes are a rich collection of insights that could be mined considerably. The combination of Campbell's understandings and Keleman's body wisdom is a great contribution to human understanding and the field of somatics.

Stanley Keleman was born in Brooklyn, New York. He is director of the Center For Energetic Studies, Berkeley, California. A practicing somatic therapist for over thirty-five years, he is a "pioneer in his study of the life of the body and its connection to the sexual, emotional and imaginative aspects of human experience." His approach to somatic work can be seen in his recent books.

Joseph Campbell was an educator, author and editor. He received his education from Columbia University, the University of Paris and the University of Munich. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly forty years. He authored the four-volume series The Masks of God and the well-known The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and edited The Portable Jung.

Myth & the Body: A Colloquy with Joseph Campbell
By Stanley Keleman
Center Press
Berkeley California, 1999
100 pages: $16.95 softbound

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Myth & Body: A Colloquy with Joseph Campbell
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