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Bradford Keeney, Ph.D., has served distinguished careers as a social cybernetician, systemic therapist, anthropologist of cultural healing traditions, conversation analyst, improvisational performer, and creative consultant. His classic text, Aesthetics of Change, is cited by Heinz von Foerster as one of the key texts of cybernetics. In the profession of alternative psychotherapy, Keeney has directed several doctoral programs and has worked at some of the most highly respected psychotherapy institutes, including the Ackerman Institute, the Karl Menninger Center, and the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania.
He is the originator of several orientations to psychotherapy (“improvisational therapy” and “resource focused therapy”) and the inventor of a research method that discerns pattern in conversation (“recursive frame analysis”). His therapeutic work, described by Lynn Hoffman as “brilliant and refreshing,” is an improvised performance of transformational play. He has presented keynote addresses to audiences throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Africa, Japan, Central and South America, and Australia. Keeney is the author of several classics in the field of psychotherapy, including Mind in Therapy, Improvisational Therapy, and more recently a biographical study, Milton H. Erickson, M.D.: An American Healer, co-edited with Betty Alice Erickson.
As a fieldworker, Keeney has been called “an all-American shaman, the Marco Polo of psychology, and an anthropologist of the spirit” by the editors of Utne Reader. Elders of indigenous traditions throughout the world – including the Kalahari Bushmen, the Caribbean Shakers of St. Vincent, the Guarani Indians of the Amazon, and leaders of the Japanese healing tradition of Seiki Jutsu – have embraced Keeney as an elder and spokesperson for their ways of ecstatic transformation. He spent over a decade traveling the globe with his colleague and wife, Mev Jenson, living with spiritual teachers, shamans, healers, and medicine people who trusted them to share their words with others – modern cultures in need of Elder wisdom. The result of Keeney’s work is one of the broadest and most intense field studies of healing and shamanism, chronicled in the critically acclaimed book series, Profiles of Healing, an eleven-volume encyclopedia of the world’s healing practices. His autobiography, Bushman Shaman, tells how he became a n/om-kxao (shaman) with the Kalahari Bushmen. Megan Biesele, Ph.D., former member of the Harvard Kalahari Research Group, writes: “There is no question in the minds of the Bushman healers that Keeney’s strength and purposes are coterminous with theirs. They affirmed his power as a healer.” He is the subject of the book, American Shaman: An Odyssey of Global Healing Traditions written by psychologists Jeffrey Kottler and Jon Carlson, which won a Best Spiritual Book of 2005 award from Spirituality & Health magazine.
He also has written numerous titles for the popular press, such as Everyday Soul, Shaking Out the Spirits, Crazy Wisdom Tales for Deadheads, Shamanic Christianity (winner of a Best Spiritual Book of 2006 Award from Spirituality & Health magazine), and Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement. His radical improvisational work is presented in the CD series for Sounds True entitled, Shaking: The Original Path to Ecstasy and Healing.
Keeney presently is utilizing what he has learned from the arts and sciences across diverse cultural traditions to espouse a way of recursive knowing and acting that avoids totalizing ideologies, overly rigid framings, hegemonic forms of expression, and categorical modeling in favor of honoring the wisdom of complexity that includes absurdity, play, ecstasy, extreme creativity, outside-the-box improvisation, transformative paradoxes, and the logics of the illogical.
Transformative
Leadership |
