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Jul 7, 2010 · Working within the traditions of both Darwin and Freud, Silvan S. Tomkins fused evolutionary and psychodynamic concepts to describe the specific kinds of affects, their mechanism of action, and...
Silvan Tomkins, a psychologist and playwright, developed Affect Theory from the 1960s until his death in 1992. He understood our feelings & emotions are biologically-based and wrote Affect Imagery Consciousness. This 4-volume work explains how we form our personality, develop strategies to survive, and alter our responses to life as needed.
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?”
- Smoking and Addiction
- Ideology
- Major Contributions to The Study of Personality and Individual Differences
Tomkins conducted a 10-year course of study on smoking behavior for the American Cancer Society based upon his affect/script theory. One particularly powerful discovery he made was that addiction driven by positive affect was much easier to cure than addiction derived from the desire to mask negative affect. The Department of Health, Education, and...
Dr. Tomkins’ research in the field of ideology was extensive and produced the Polarity Scale, 53 paired statements for which the person completing the scale can choose either one, both, or neither. The resulting score establishes the degree to which the person is either normative or humanist in their ideology. This scale has been used extensively i...
Tomkins’ seminal work related to the study of personality is the four-volume series Affect Imagery Consciousness (Springer Publishing Company 1962a, 1962b, 1991, 1992). AIC is a comprehensive and groundbreaking development of what Tomkins calls Human Being Theory. It represents the closest thing we have to a unified field theory of human motivation...
A crucial innovation in the Tomkins–McCarter experiment was Tomkins’s frankly admitted decision to preselect photographs of posed expressions that best illustrated his theories about the nature of the primary affects and to eliminate those that did not satisfy his criteria.
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.
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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.
