Sam Keen, a pop psychologist and philosopher whose best-selling book “Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man” urged men to get in touch with their primal masculinity and became a touchstone of the so-called men’s movement of the 1990s, died on March 19 in Oahu, Hawaii. He was 93.
His death, while on vacation, was confirmed by his wife, Patricia de Jong. The couple lived on a 60-acre ranch in Sonoma, Calif.
Mr. Keen, who described himself as having been “overeducated at Harvard and Princeton,” fled academia in the 1960s for California, where he led self-help workshops and wrote more than a dozen books. He became a well-known figure in the human potential movement of that era.
In the 1970s, he delivered lectures around the country with the mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. He also gave workshops at two of the wellsprings of the New Age: Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., and Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. Mr. Keen’s specialty was helping middle-class seekers slough off the expectations of family and society, and discover what he called their “personal mythology.”
A long conversation that the ruggedly handsome Mr. Keen had with the journalist Bill Moyers, broadcast on PBS in 1991, brought him national exposure the month that “Fire in the Belly” was published. The book spent 29 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.
Mr. Keen told Mr. Moyers that he had spent much of his early life trying to meet expectations about masculinity, especially those placed on him by women. “They were the audience before whom I dramatized my life,” he said, “and their applause and their approval was crucial for my sense of manhood.”
In “Fire in the Belly,” which was partly inspired by a men’s discussion group he belonged to, Mr. Keen argued that men must discover a new kind of manhood apart from the company of women.
“Only men understand the secret fears that go with the territory of masculinity,” he wrote.
“Fire in the Belly” and an earlier, bigger best seller, “Iron John” (1990) by the poet Robert Bly, became the twin handbooks of the men’s movement, a psychological response to the gains made by feminism.
The movement’s principal authors and workshop leaders claimed that modern men had become “feminized” by demands that they get in touch with their feelings, seek consensus rather than lead, and become domesticated rather than follow their warrior spirit.
From the men’s movement, Mr. Keen went on to become a guru of the flying trapeze, encouraging men and women to overcome their psychological fears by learning to swing from a circus bar 25 feet off the ground.
Samuel McMurray Keen was born on Nov. 23, 1931, in Scranton, Pa., the second-oldest of five children of J. Alvin Keen, the director of a Methodist church choir, and Ruth (McMurray) Keen, a teacher.
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