Faculty Members of Somatic Psychology

Program Chair

Meg H. Chang, EdD, LCAT, NBCC, BC-DMT

Core Faculty

Ian Grand, PhD
Don Hanlon Johnson, PhD
Mark Ludwig, MSW, LCSW

Ian J. Grand, received his MA (1984) in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University and his PhD in Social and Cultural Psychology from the Union Institute. He has taught at various colleges in the Bay Area and was director of the Center for Educational Alternatives at San Francisco State University.

Ian is director of the Center for the Study of the Body in Psychotherapy, where he explores the relationship between social forms and physiological function. In his research, he studies how literature, music, art, and the media affect cultural enactment and self-enactment.

He is interested in the somatic aspects of interpersonal and intercultural relations, and is developing somatic contributions to psychodynamic theory. Ian is coeditor with Don Hanlon Johnson of The Body in Psychotherapy: Inquiries in Somatic Psychology. His doctoral research examined collaborative creativity.

Ian is also is a painter, musician, and philosopher. He has been a leader in experimental education since the 1960s, when he was one of the first directors of the Experimental College at San Francisco State University. He is the author of A Beginner's Palette of Somatic Practice and Qualities and Configurations: Working with the Relational Body.

Don Hanlon Johnson holds a PhD in philosophy from Yale University (1971). He founded the Somatic Psychology program, the first of its kind in the United States. He is the author of four books, and of several journal articles on the central role of bodily experience in providing a unique understanding of critical social, spiritual, pedagogical,
and psychological issues.

He is also the editor of a series of foundational texts in the field of Somatics, including
The Body in Psychotherapy: Inquiries in Somatic Psychology. Since 1988, Don has been the director of a study group in Somatics whose members include founders or heirs of late founders of nine major schools of Somatics work.

The aim of the group has been to improve educational quality and further research projects in the field. His most recent work is as editor of and contributor to The Meaning of Life in the 21st Century: Tensions Among Science, Religion, and Experience.

Mark Ludwig, LCSW, is a clinical social worker, university lecturer, and somatic psychotherapist in private practice in the Bay Area. He received his clinical education at the University of California, Berkeley School of Social Welfare and through a postgraduate fellowship in Psychoanalytic Child Psychotherapy at the Kennedy Child Study Center in Santa Monica, CA.

He has been a senior faculty member in several national and international somatic
psychotherapy training programs (Radix Institute, Center for Biosynthesis), where he focused on relational and developmental approaches in somatic psychotherapy. From 2000 to 2007, he was program director of the Somatic Psychology Master’s Program at John F. Kennedy University.

Mark is a graduate of the Napa-Harvard Children’s Hospital Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship. He has studied with Diana Fosha, PhD; Allen Schore, PhD; and Steve Seligman, DMH. Mark has published several articles in national and international clinical journals and anthologies.

He is currently enrolled in a Human Development doctoral program at Fielding Graduate University and is codirecting the formation of a new model of infant-parent mental health intervention that employs infant-parent massage as a platform for supporting secure attachment and parental attunement.