Charlotte Selver

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Charlotte Selver , b. Wittgenstein (born April 4, 1901 in Ruhrort , † August 22, 2003 in Muir Beach , California ) was a German educator .

Life

In the 1920s, Charlotte Selver met Elsa Gindler in Berlin , who, in her courses, together with her students, researched how human beings can develop their natural abilities in adulthood. In the mid-1920s she met Heinrich Selver , with whom she was officially married on December 22, 1926 in Leipzig. Charlotte Selver also founded her first gymnastics school in Leipzig, but the couple had been living in separate apartments since mid-November 1927. The marriage was divorced on March 13, 1931.

The contact between the two ex-spouses was never broken. In 1935 she moved to the grounds of the private forest school Kaliski run by her ex-husband and from 1936 lived with him again. There she was able to give gymnastics and occasionally swimming lessons to individual students and whole classes.

Until she was forced to emigrate to New York in 1938, she studied with Elsa Gindler and the music teacher Heinrich Jacoby and re-established contact in the 1950s.

In 1971 the "Sensory Awareness Foundation" was brought into being, a foundation whose aim is to preserve and document Charlotte Selver's life's work. In 1995 the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco awarded her an honorary doctorate.

Charlotte Selver died on August 22, 2003 at the age of 102 in her home in Muir Beach, California with her closest friends and students.

Sensory awareness

Sensory awareness goes back to the work of the gymnastics and movement teacher Elsa Gindler (1885–1961) and the Swiss music teacher Heinrich Jacoby (1889–1964). They never gave their 'work' a formal name. The basic objective of the Jacoby / Gindler approach is the development of the human being through conscious feeling (holistic development as development and growth into meaningful being). Charlotte Selver was Gindler's student in Berlin before she emigrated to the USA in 1938 and introduced this work there under the name Sensory Awareness.

Influences

The crux of Charlotte Selver's work is “experiencing through the senses”. Selver was convinced that the well-being of the individual, of society as a whole, as well as the concern for our environment depend on the extent to which we find a new trust in organic processes.

In the early 1950s she taught students at the New School for Social Research. In 1957 she was a speaker at the conference Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis together with Erich Fromm, Richard DeMartino and Daisetzu Suzuki in Mexico. Together with Alan Watts, she gave workshops on Zen and Sensory Awareness.

With her work " Sensory Awareness ", Charlotte Selver exerted a decisive influence on the "Human Potential Movement", which also came from the Esalen Institute , where she taught from 1963. In doing so, she also exerted influence on humanistic psychology and the therapies based on it.

A number of personalities were inspired by it, such as Erich Fromm , Alan Watts and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki , Carl Rogers, Ida Rolf and Moshe Feldenkrais and Fritz Perls . Wilhelm Reich also researched this work on the whole person in his formative years. Since 1966, Carter Seymour was also her student. He remained her student until her death in 2003.

Charlotte Selvers influenced people from various professional groups. Although she was not a psychologist herself, her work strongly influenced psychotherapy. Doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists (including Goerge Downing) got to know their work and passed this knowledge on to their own clients.

Aspects of her work, in particular consciously feeling one's body and following body sensations (Sensory Awareness), flowed into many of the methods of body work , body therapy, body psychotherapy and psychotherapy that exist today .

literature

  • Charles Brooks: Experience through the Senses. DTV, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-423-15085-8 .
  • William C. Littlewood, Mary Alice Roche: Waking Up. The Work of Charlotte Selver. Author House, Bloomington 2004, ISBN 1418493759
  • Charlotte Selver: Every moment is a moment In: German Yoga Forum, 3/2005
  • Sensory Awareness - on the working method of Charlotte Selver In: Feldenkrais Forum, 4/2005

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hertha Luise Busemann: The headmaster - Heinrich Selver , in: Hertha Luise Busemann, Michael Daxner, Werner Fölling: Insel der Geborgenheit. The private forest school Kaliski 1932 to 1939 , Verlag JB Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1992, ISBN 3-476-00845-2 , pp. 127–199; here: pp. 175–177
  2. ↑ Hertha Luise Busemann: The headmaster - Heinrich Selver , p. 192
  3. ↑ Charlotte Selver on sensory-awareness.eu, accessed on July 10, 2017
  4. ↑ Wilhelm Reich on judythweaver.com, accessed on July 20, 2017
  5. ↑ Carter Seymour at centerforpersonalgrowth.typepad.com, accessed July 20, 2017 (English)
  6. ↑ About the work Goerge Downing at www.vit-downing.com, accessed on July 20, 2017 (English)
personal data
SURNAME Selver, Charlotte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wittgenstein, Charlotte (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German educator
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Ruhrort
DATE OF DEATH August 22, 2003
Place of death Muir Beach . California