Sam Keen, "a pop psychologist and philosopher whose bestselling 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 March 19, the New York Times reported. He was 93.
Keen left academia in the 1960s for California, where he led self-help workshops and wrote more than a dozen books, becoming a well-known figure in the human potential movement of that era. The Times noted that during 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."
A long conversation with journalist Bill Moyers on PBS in 1991 brought him national exposure the month that Fire in the Belly was published. Keen said 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, and their applause and their approval was crucial for my sense of manhood."
Fire in the Belly joined Robert Bly's Iron John (1990) as "the twin handbooks of the men's movement, a psychological response to the gains made by feminism," the Times wrote, adding that the men's movement of the 1990s might have sowed some early seeds of what became the current 'manosphere,' the world of misogynistic influencers who celebrate harassment and violence toward women."
Keen, however, embraced feminism, writing that women's liberation was "a model for the changes men are beginning to experience."
He went on to become a guru of the flying trapeze, encouraging men and women to overcome their psychological fears in his book Learning to Fly: Trapeze--Reflections on Fear, Trust, and the Joy of Letting Go (1999).
Keen was a freelance journalist earlier in his life, writing for Psychology Today and other magazines. His book To a Dancing God (1970) described his rejection of conservative Christianity and embrace of direct spiritual experience. Faces of the Enemy (1986), a study of the use of propaganda to prepare citizens for war, was made into a PBS documentary.