Meeting Stanley Keleman and embracing Formative Psychology 

When I first read Emotional Anatomy in 1986, I was deeply impacted by the Formative Paradigm, by the vision of the human being as a subjective embodied process, continually reorganizing itself. Formative Psychology® views the body as an encompassing process — emotional, cognitive, imaginative, sensorial, motoric, subjective — a unified ongoing evolutionary process, inseparable into its parts. This concept spoke to my heart and I moved to the Bay Area in order to learn this work. 

I stayed in California for six years and attended every workshop, class, seminar, group, course led by Stanley Keleman, while also having individual meetings with him. Being in contact with Stanley was a powerful formative process in itself which would grow and deepen for the next 30 years. I was deeply impacted by his presence, his humanness, his enormous generosity and his expertise. He spoke with an authority clearly based in his own experience. He truly walked his talk, and that, for me, is a very high value in itself. 
During those six years I completely embraced Formative Psychology as a way of living and working. When I started preparing my return to Brazil, Stanley and I discussed how we would keep in contact and how I would organize the teaching of Formative Psychology in Brazil, including planning his visits here.

Professional Cooperation and Friendship 

I moved back and founded the Centro de Psicologia Formativa® do Brasil, (Brazilian Formative Psychology® Center), where I formed a professional team and have been teaching Formative Psychology in classes, seminars and workshops since 1994. Stanley Keleman became the Honorary President and the Director of Education and Research at Centro de Psicologia Formativa® do Brasil and we had a long and most fruitful cooperative achievement.

Stanley began his annual trips to Brazil in 1995, teaching his work, giving talks and consultations, sometimes even coming twice a year. He enjoyed meeting my family and experiencing Brazilian culture. We enjoyed good restaurants, Art and Crafts markets and taking walks on the streets where Stanley liked looking at people and learning about the culture. I continued going back to Berkeley twice a year attending his workshops and groups, and deepening my personal experience with him and the work. In between our trips, his to Brazil and mine to California, we had regular conversations, often several times a week. 

Stanley continued developing innovative concepts and ways of thinking about the human process, such as the quantum process in the body, the relationship between the Formative Practice and epigenetic evolution, the development of interiority and slow extended time, maturity and longevity, to mention a few. From these experiences an urge and a question began to grow in me — how to keep a record of the evolution of his thinking and make it available to the public? I thought we have to have a record of these developments and also of the way he talked, the intonation and the sound of his voice, his gestures and physicality. I wanted to capture his presence live. 

Stanley was a truly original thinker and I felt these new conceptual frameworks constituted an important contribution to the way we think about the human process, and very possibly would be an important influence in the way we approach and work with people in the future. This needed to be recorded!  We talked about filming because video is a quicker documentation than producing a book. Then in 2012 we initiated the project “Interviews with Stanley Keleman”. Four films have been produced from the Interview Project: “Living Your Older Age” (2017), “Quantum Dynamics in the Human Experience” (2018), “Dreams: A Formative View” (2019) and “The Development of a Somatic Language and the Body’s Organizing Principle” (2021). There is much more footage for films in the future.

 Another project we created was regular online conversations with my professional groups in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. People interacted with him directly and we had many good discussions that were incredibly rich experiences for all of us. Our frequent conversations stirred my imagination and intellectual curiosity and at the same time filled me with the joy of an affectionate and productive partnership. We developed both a professional and a personal relationship, and Stanley became part of both families.

I would like to share part of our conversation about the relationship of dreams and the body. In the Formative perspective dreams arise from the body and present an opportunity for behavioral change.  Working with a dream figure offers a possibility of learning to support an action that is seeking more structure in order to come into the world of daily living. Using the Formative Methodology with a dream figure promotes voluntary self-regulation and contributes to shaping personal evolution. 

Here is a portion of our interview conversation “Dreams: A Formative View” 

Leila: Hello and nice to be doing this with you again. Are you ready to dive into  the dream world? 

Stanley: Yes. From a somatic point of view, the dream comes to you. It is a  common misconception that we enter the dream world, but the dream arrives, it presents  itself and it envelops you. 

L: What would you say is the function of the dream for the human being?

S: The dream is a way the body talks to itself about its dilemmas so it can rehearse  new action patterns about situations that require a different way of behaving. The body  is capable of organizing a preverbal somatic language to communicate about its own  dilemmas. Basically a dream is how the organism talks to itself. The cortex translates  preverbal excitation into images of everyday social gestures and postures. The intent of  dreaming is to bring into the fore either a behavior the body is seeking to change, or a  behavior it is seeking to form in the next stage of its development. So working  formatively with a dream is one way we can learn how to behave differently so it fits a  situation. 

L: You are saying that the dream comes from the body? It’s an embodied event? 

S: Correct. Dreams are motile anatomy, they are patterns of the body’s primary  activity. They are the body speaking with itself in its own language of primary  experience, which is pulsatory excitation.  

You might say a dream is primary excitation in social dress. Primary excitation is  imaged by the cortex as shapes and behaviors we can recognize. And this is non  symbolic, so in my way of thinking, dreams are not symbolic representations. It is like  a neural synaptic organization that is looking to collect information before the final  pathway of action is formed. Dream figures and images give clues of how to work with  the body’s excitation in order to create new behavior. When you work muscularly with  these patterns as body postures, they acquire duration and become new memories for  future use. 

L: So the dream is also a rehearsal for the future? 

S: It is a rehearsal of possibilities for behaving. For example, a person who doesn’t  have much self-esteem and has a collapsed chest or is in the world in a very shy way  could present a dream figure with an assertive shape, say holding the chest up or being  bigger or stronger — something a person wants to form. Working with the dream figure  begins with making a muscular model of the dream image so that you have a muscular neural connection. A person can recognize a muscular posture, and then learn to  differentiate it by voluntarily increasing and decreasing muscular intensity. The  voluntary effort of increase and decrease functions to create new behavioral  possibilities. Each voluntarily organized posture adds to a library of possibilities for  behaving differently. 

L: Could you say more about making a muscular model of the dream neural  activity? 

S: A dream is a motile body event that involves quickly changing neural  activity. As I said before, it is like a neural synaptic activity before the final pathway of  action is formed. It is a precursor of a completed muscular act. Because the neural  activity is rapidly changing, the patterns produced, which are the dream images, do not  yet have enough stability or ‘body’. Therefore a dream figure is looking for body to  support itself. By looking for body, I mean stabilizing a pattern of neuro-muscular  excitation that supports new behavior.

Approaching dreams formatively goes back to understanding the human organism  from a formative point of view. We start with how the organism is preparing to act. This  can be addressed by the question: How will I do this? 

First we are looking for how the body’s action pattern is organized. Making a  posture to mimic a dream figure connects the neural and muscular patterns. Once a  posture has been embodied this way, it can be voluntarily influenced and edited by the  cortical muscular areas in the brain. 

When you make a muscular model of the neural image in the dream and use  voluntary muscular effort to work with it, you have a chance to alter it. That’s a  voluntary act. I can change my action, I can change the way I am behaving. So the  relationship between the body and its cortex is how the body is able to influence its own  behavior. 

Using voluntary effort to make a muscular model of an action mimics the way the  body talks to itself. Most people think that if you interpret the dream symbolically or  emotionally you will change something, but you have to change the action because that  is the primary language, the body’s action is the primary dynamic. 

L: Would you say that the dream is an evolutionary step for the human being? 

S: I would say that a dream provides the possibility for personal evolutionary  development. Basically the organism is concerned with its own developmental process,  both as a child growing into an adult and as an adult growing into its maturity. It’s how the organism preserves itself over time and differentiates its behavior, so that its  survival potential is higher. 

First there is a general pattern of evolution which includes the development of the  human cortex. And then there is a personal evolution, which includes how you use the  cortex in relationship to your own body and how you influence your own behavior. The  evolutionary drama which we all live is the general organizing process. Personal  evolution relies on the ability for self-influence. The practice of voluntary effort is an  evolutionary process of learning to manage one’s emotional states as well as social  behavior. 

So we see a very important function emerging in the dream, and that function is  self-regulation. The body’s self-regulation is initially inherited and autonomous. It is the  result of a long history of animate existence. Then there is the emergence of voluntary  self-regulation which is different. The call for voluntary self-regulation appears in the  dream as a personal challenge to someone who may be inadequately prepared and  doesn’t know how to manage themselves in certain situations. 

As a generalization, you could say the function of the dream is to develop a  cooperative relationship between the body’s automatic responses and the ability for  voluntary regulation. This is an evolutionary process whereby the cortex and the  subcortical structures are forming a relationship which is, in my opinion, the  development of voluntary muscular cortical self-regulation. So that’s the biggest part of  the dream function, it serves personal relationships as well as evolutionary  relationships.

L: Please say more about the relationship between the body and its cortex when the  person embodies the dream figures using voluntary effort. 

S: Embodying a dream figure, through the repeat practice of voluntary effort,  differentiates a pattern of behavior and creates more behavioral possibilities. The repeat  practice brings more and more body into the scene so you are creating a more complex  relationship of cortex and muscle. You are also strengthening the ability to manage  yourself and personalizing your actions, which give you a sense of identity. 

You now have gone from working with yourself, experiencing the different shapes  you might have, to being able to repeat them in social and interpersonal situations. You  are increasing the range of personal experiences. And increasing your library of actions  becomes an important reference for your ability to act differently in situations. And that  is really the intention of dreaming, to change how you act in different situations. 

L: And when you assemble or disassemble a dream figure you are creating new  possibilities. 

S: Yes. You are creating new possibilities through practicing differentiation. If you  want to change strong habits of any kind you have to learn altered ways of behaving,  both within yourself and in the world. It is a continuing effort of managing  yourself. This is a developmental process. It’s not an insight process. It is a change of  your anatomy, of your behavior over time. It is learning about using yourself  differently, learning how to manage behavior that has dominated you before, and  forming reliable new behavior. 

L: When you embody and differentiate dream figures you are creating new  memories? 

S: Absolutely, that’s what being embodied is. Embodied means, “I have formed  this for myself. I am using my motile experience and I am differentiating it, and giving  it duration and repeatability in me.” That’s the embodied life! 

L: So going back to working with dreams formatively….. 

S: What distinguishes Formative Psychology is that it has an anatomical and  evolutionary developmental perspective. Using voluntary muscular-cortical effort  distinguishes it as a functional way to understand the body’s relationship with itself and  its own productions. It isn’t looking for symbolic connections; it’s looking for  experiential connections. 

It is looking for actual ways of behaving, how you use yourself, not imagining how  to use yourself, but the actual steps in using yourself and then learning from that. So  every step of the way it is truly a body psychology, not a psychology that you try to fit  the body into. It is trying to understand the psychology of how the organism perpetuates  its own existence and differentiates its existence. The challenge and the reward is how  the organism can change itself to regulate its own states as a way of enriching its own  life. That’s what distinguishes it. 

L: So every behavior, every voluntary action entails an emotional experience, a  subjective experience, which you can influence?

S: Yes. VMCE — voluntary muscular cortical effort — is an experiential event  about how to manage your life. It’s not what I’ve experienced during my life, it is how I  have formed myself in this life. This has an enormous effect when you are addressing a  person who feels himself a victim to something rather than an empowered participant in  an event. Using VMCE a person is able to shape something for themselves. The  formative statement is, “I have learned how to resist. I have learned how to disassociate  myself as a way of surviving. And now I know how to differentiate my actions and re body myself differently.” 

L: Therefore we can have a different response when we are able to form a different  way to be in situations?  

S: Yes. Everybody loses their temper. Everybody is overwhelmed, or taken over by  something. The question is how quickly do you respond? How quickly can you  recognize the behavior is inappropriate and how quickly can you differentiate the shape  to change the behavior. That’s the act of maturity. The act of maturity is recognizing  when something is not appropriate for your own well-being as well as for another  person and knowing how you can change that as quickly as possible. That is the  relationship between the involuntary and the emerging voluntary self-regulation. 

L: What would you say to somebody who wants to work with dreams? What would  be your recommendation? 

S: Pick a figure from the dream and see how you organize it; how you assemble it,  how you give it duration, how you differentiate it. And after you work with the dream,  what did you learn from it about your own body, your own responsiveness, your own  feeling, your own thinking? How do you repeat it? How do you carry it into the world?  Where does it lead you? Each repeat is a developmental step in the process of creating a  history of forming your behavior and your responses. 

L: So you empower the person to take the dream in their own hands, work with it,  and form something for themselves. 

S: Yes 

L: In the larger sense where does the dream come from? 

S: The desire to live, the desire to have a future. Everybody inherits the desire to  perpetuate life. That is where it comes from. 

L: wonderful! 

S: Formative Psychology is not the correction of anything; it’s looking at what is  possible to shape from the dilemma of your own existence, your own body shape or the  situation you find yourself in. It is finding a way to enlist the organism’s formative  thrust and an individual’s ability to form their own life! You got it all. VMCE is the  key. 

L: Thank you for talking about your perspective and how Formative work applies  to dreams. I hope this will benefit many people.

S: Well, let’s put it this way: As long as people like being alive, they will be  dreaming. 

L: Thank you! 

The full interview is available on Vimeo “Dreams: A Formative View”

Stanley Keleman has been a teacher, a friend and a constant inspiration. I feel grateful and lucky to have met him and to have formed all we did together. Carrying out those projects strengthened our mutual trust and cooperation, as well as our friendship, which I will always value wholeheartedly. Although we can no longer have live personal conversations, I continue talking with him within myself. I think this will be an on-going conversation for many years to come. 

I continue forming my formative journey, and it includes being deeply committed to carrying on the teaching and developing of Formative Psychology®, as well as protecting the work and keeping the legacy alive.  Formative Psychology is a way of living and working, a way of being in the world. As Stanley always said, “To be continued”!

For more information on the Formative approach to dreams: 
https://psicologiaformativa.com.br/corporificando-o-impalpavel-o-trabalho-somatico-com-sonhos/
Keleman, S.  Dreams and the Body USABP VOL 6 Number 1 2007