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Sexuality, self & survival /
BF692 .IC45 10975
Keleman, Stanley.
NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA (SF)
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Also by Stanley Keleman
BlOENERGETIC CONCEPTS OF GROUNDING
TODTMOOS
sexuality,
self
&
survival
STANLEY KELEMAN
Introductory Essay by Peter Marin
LODESTAR PRESS
Many friends helped edit, correct andtype the original transcript;to all
of them, my affection and thanks. And were it not for the love of
George Calmenson,my editor, there wouldbenobook.
-S.K.
Sexuality, SelfandSurvival © 1971 by Stanley Keleman
Introductory Essay © 1971 by PeterMarin
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
Library ofCongresscatalognumber: 78-176200
Firstprinting, October1971
Secondprinting, September1972
Coverdesign:AnneKentRush
Book design: GeorgeCalmenson
Distributed by RandomHouseandin Canadaby RandomHouse
ofCanda, Ltd.
Published by Lodestar Press. P.O. Box 31003, San Francisco,
Calif 94131
Contents
A Note to the Reader 6
Introduction 7
INITIATION
I.
Life Builds Structure 23
Unity 28
Gracefulness and Streaming 32
Evolving Sexuality 35
Foreplay, Excitation and Sexual Feeling 40
APPLICATIONS
II.
Sexual Responsibility 49
Hunger and Fulfillment 56
Guilt and Trust 60
Nudity and Groups 68
Fathers, Mothers, Daughters, Sons 74
Work Sessions 80
PERSPECTIVE
III.
Culture and Disease 97
Death and Survival 103
Evolution 112
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A
Note to the Reader
This book is compiledfrom transcripts of tapes recorded at
workshops and seminars. It is a written record of spoken
events, and we have attempted to keep the vitaHty of the
original setting. Therefore, a brief description will be helpful
to those readers who have not had experience with the
workshop format.
Twenty or so people met with Stanley for a typical week-
end workshop. They spent about fifteen hours together.
During that time there were two general kinds of activity:
Stanley talking with the group, responding and reacting to
questions and concerns; and Stanley working with individuals
while the others provided the ground by their presence. Any-
one who wanted to work individually would put on abathing
suit. Based on his understanding of the person'sbody andwhat
the person said, Stanley would recommend an appropriate
physical activity designed to mobilize that person's energy,
from lying on the bed andbreathingdeeply, to strenuous pos-
tures, to kickingorbeating on the bed.
These sessions of individual work are described in more
detailinboth the Introduction and the text. Since the point of
this book is not to demonstrate or showcase bioenergetic tech-
niques, but to convey the sense and understanding behind
them, specific references to the techniques have been omitted,
except where they help clarify the process.
Introduction
I.
Stanley Keleman's work.
It is indeed a work: a craft and labor. But it is also a work in
the sense of art. It has an art's relation to its time and place;it
grows out of them and is responsive to them; but it is also a
way of moving paist them. One finds in this book what is
happening to Stanley as a man: not a technique, not a thera-
peutic model, but the search for a way ofstanding in America
and history. You cannot understand what is here without
understanding the confusions and illuminations besetting us
now, and so for a moment I want to ride the loops and rapids
of our shared predicament before talking about Stanley's
work.
We know these are curious, uneven, even desperate days.
Beneath a surface of repression and rebellion we drift in a
thick electric sea of sensation and events. We are moved by
sudden eddies and weathers of change. They come so quickly
and so often that one cannot remember their progression: a
succession of squalls and calms without clear meaning. There is
a continuous, exhausting and involuntary learning, a stripping
away, the devolution of old meanings, balances and modes,
and what takes their place is a gravid bewilderment, a driving
need for hope and release and, even in the best of us, a sense
INTRODUCTION
of childish ignorance or deep humiliation. Binding myth and
meaning dissolve. In the absence ofan agreed upon reality, we
float in immense and lonely inner distances. Our experience
grows more incoherent and threatening, slides closer to mad-
ness; but it also grows more raw, more pregnant—as if the
turning which reduces us to children also offers us the grace of
significance again, the chance to be heroes and adventurers.
There are strange stroboscopic openings in the darkness
around us: sudden visions and flashes of light. The world
deepens and moves. In our privacies we stumble into mysteries
which humble but enliven us. Most amazing of all is how far
we have come in so short a time; or, rather, that our own lives,
so crippled by the emptiness of the fifties and the hysteria of
the sixties, have taken on in these days a new dimension of
meaning. Our lives are all more fearful, more exposed, andyet
unarguably more real, as if we have crossed a threshold, made
an involuntary jump from mild lies to vivid and unstable
truths.
We have entered another element altogether: a warrior's
landscape. Some men and women struggle with it and
succumb, and others succumb without a struggle, and at times
one would swear we have already come to 1984: most faces
gone numb and troubled andblank, as iftrying to forget some-
thing they cannot quite remember. In too many places we
have already come to amindlessness so familiar we have ceased
to recognize it. We pay lip service to things like freedom,
passion, independence and choice, but those are too often
merely words and hollow shells. In their place and on too
many faces one finds the seeping sleepy presence of political
resignation, or apackaged salvation, or empty rhetoric and the
thickening thinness of "screened" realities. In response, we
hurriedly manufacture self-delusive cure-alls. We invent new
diversionary roles, costumes and games. We counterfeit the
shadow of a shadow of a counter to culture and vainly claim
to have remade a world. All the while, beneath our un-
