The founder
Dr. Moshé Feldenkrais
Regarding the development of Dr. Moshé Feldenkrais his companion and translator of several of his books Franz Wurm writes:
„Moshé Feldenkrais, born in 1904 in Slawuta (Ukraine), was a physicist. As a fifteen year old boy – the first World War had just been ended – he emigrated to Palestine, has, after a study at Sorbonne, worked with Langevin and at the Paris Institut with Pasteur and Joliot-Curie, that (1938) completed the first splitting of the atom in France, founded the first Judo-club in France and (also 1938) postulated first working hypothesis as to the rational explanation of acupunture, which soon led him to neurophysiology. He studied eastern practices and translated them into our terminology to develop a behavioural science in the spirit of experimental physics. He worked on the artificial induction of radioactivity, together with Joliot-Curie...!
Dr. Moshé Feldenkrais was a research scientist and athlete. Induced by his own knee-injury, he researched in the following years the connection in the human being with the focus on functional movement and the associated effects on a mental and emotional level, as well as the foundation of human behaviour.
Feldenkrais presented the results of his research about the theory an practice of applied behavioural science initially 1943 in a series of lectures that he held in front of the Association of British Scientific Workers in Fairlie (Scotland) and this was the fundament for his book „Body and Mature Behaviour“ but also for the book „The Potent Self“, which he wrote simultaneously.
In the late 60´ies Feldenkrais was proposed to receive the Nobelprice for Medicine by Ben Gurion [then the Iraely Prime-Minister, author´s note]. Ben Gurion got the answer that Feldenkrais never published in medical journals, and was furthermore not a doctor and therefore he could not be awarded.
Feldenkrais agreed with the Nobel Prize Committee. „He taught“, said he „while doctors treat and heal. The effects were quite often the same but they were reached by different ways and therefore not as similar as they may seem. Moreover – neither the doctors nor he knew what „illness“ is – with the difference that he knew that he didn´t know“....(Franz Wurm 1995)
Dr. Moshé Feldenkrais passed on his knowledge to his pupils until he died in 1984.