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Throughout much of his professional life Silvan Tomkins organized his work around the central concern of understanding human motivation, or as he expressed it, in the lead paper of this section on affect theory, he was engaged in a love affair with an idea: “What do human beings really want?”.
- E. Virginia Demos
- 1995
Tomkins’s investigations of affect, like Freud’s (and Spinoza’s, as we suggest in the first interlude), posit the psyche (or mind) as a dynamic domain of the not-yet-known.
Tomkins dealt with fundamental questions in a fresh and provocative way, establishing affect as a separate, biological system, and providing compelling data on discrete affect expressions.
- Silvan S. Tomkins, Brewster Smith
- 1995
Through the twin influences of Darwin and the new science of cybernetics, Tomkins proposed the existence of a limited number of universal "affect programs" or basic emotions, which he theorized as innately triggered responses that function independently of objects or cognitions.
Tomkins detailed the nature of affect itself and the triggers for each of the nine affects, demonstrating: 1) the nature, development, and transformations of the affect system; 2) its...
By this reckoning, an affect theory is a conceptual schema that explains to its readers how affects work, how we might best study and apprehend them, and how we might anticipate their transmission in the future. We can claim, unproblematically, that Spinoza has a theory of affect and that Darwin has a...
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Aug 28, 2020 · A Silvan Tomkins Handbook provides readers with a clear outline of Tomkins’s affect theory as he developed it in his four-volume masterwork Affect Imagery Consciousness. It shows how his key terms and conceptual innovations can be used to build robust frameworks for theorizing affect and emotion.
