Silvan Tomkins

Silvan Solomon Tomkins (June 4, 1911 – June 10, 1991) was an American psychologist and personality theorist who developed both affect theory and script theory. Following the publication of the third volume of his book Affect Imagery Consciousness in 1991, his body of work received renewed interest, leading to attempts by others to summarize and popularize his theories.

Biography The following is a summary based on a biographical essay by Irving Alexander.

Silvan Tomkins was born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish immigrants, and raised in Camden, New Jersey. He studied playwriting as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, but immediately on graduating he enrolled as a graduate student in psychology. However, he withdrew upon completing only the master's degree, finding the Penn Psychology Department's emphasis on psychophysics unfriendly to his interests. Remaining at Penn, he received his PhD in Philosophy in 1934, working on value theory with Edgar A. Singer, Jr.

After a year handicapping horse races, he relocated to Harvard for postdoctoral study in Philosophy with W.V. Quine. In time, he became aware of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and in 1937 he joined its staff, entering a particularly productive and happy period of his life. During this period, he published his first book, Contemporary Psychopathology, containing a survey of contemporary thought as well as his own contribution to it. He wrote a book about the projective Thematic Apperception Test, then developed the Picture Arrangement Test that combined elements of projection and forced choice.

In 1947, he married Elizabeth "BeeGee" Taylor; the marriage would last nearly three decades. The same year, he moved to Princeton University's Department of Psychology to take a position that would entail a large amount of frustration. First, he would work at the Educational Testing Service, which required him to submit documentation of the precise hours he worked in the building. At the same time, he worked for Princeton University, which never fully supported the graduate program in Clinical Psychology which he tried to establish.

During his Princeton career, he was able to spend a year at the Ford Center in Palo Alto, California, where he wrote what became the first two volumes of Affect Imagery Consciousness. At this point in his career, he began to have a mentoring relationship with two younger scholars—Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard—who would later become better known than Tomkins and whose early concepts of emotion owe much to Tomkins'.

After receiving an NIMH career research award, he left Princeton for CUNY Graduate Center in 1965, then in 1968 moved to Rutgers University, from which he retired in 1975 to work on his script theory.

Tomkins' theoretical constructs The title of Tomkins' four volume work Affect Imagery Consciousness (AIC) is a three-word summary of his entire "Human Being Theory." Affect stands for human motivation: 'why' do humans do what they do? Affect represents "amplified" (p. 6) body 'energy' and motivation by "care" (p. 10). Imagery stands for cognition, or the 'how' of human mental processes and the complex interactions between perception, body control, memory, and feedback systems, all within a "central assembly" (p. 53). But, as a 'Personologist,' the study of personality in the tradition of Harvard professor Henry Murray, Tomkins easily understood that biology was only a beginning factor for theorizing a complex set of processes comprising individual humans. Biology could never be a full determinant of human beings. With the release of Affect Imagery Consciousness volumes 3 (1991) and 4 (1992), almost 30 years later, he directly confronted the second issue, cognition: How do humans do what they do? Answering the why? and how? of 'human beingness' became the foundation for his Human Being Theory. However, as his ideas developed, he recognized a missing link. Tomkins needed a third concept as an intermediary between cognition-motivation and consciousness. Thus he imagined Script Theory, which is explored most in Affect Imagery Consciousness volume 3.

Affect theory Tomkins' affect theory is detailed most in volumes 1 & 2 of Affect Imagery Consciousness. He first presented affect theory in 1954 at the Montreal meeting of the International Congress of Psychology with his paper "Consciousness and the unconscious in a model of the human being." Chapter one of AIC volume one is an expanded version of that early paper. He begins by challenging Freud and Hull's drive theory which dominated psychology at the time. Tomkins argued that the drives are inadequate general motivators and their priority a misinterpretation, or a "misidentification of the drive 'signal' with its 'amplifier'" and Donald Nathanson (p. 76), and so has not yet learned to emote. Emotion is a "further step in affective maturation" resulting from joining feeling states "with experience to give personal meaning to complex concepts such as love, hate, and happiness" (p. 54).

Tomkins' nine named affects are: interest-excitement and enjoyment-joy; surprise-startle; distress-anguish, anger-rage, and fear-terror; disgust, dissmell, shame-humiliation. Importantly, the last three labels are better understood as drive auxiliaries (disgust, dissmell) and an affect auxiliary (shame-humiliation) rather than affects per se. The hyphen in each label indicates the range potential for each affect, from mild to extreme. Affect is also multi-faceted: "At the neurological level, affect is correlated with density of neural firing. At the behavioral level, affect is primarily facial response and secondarily bodily and visceral response. At the phenomenological level, affect may be considered a motive" (Tomkins and Izard, p. 88).

The two positive affects are:

interest-excitement: optimal increasing neural density; and enjoyment-joy: decreasing neural density, the lower end of which Nathanson (1992) suggests can be thought of as "contentment"

Humans are born 'animal,' but also are, must be, and will be socialized into 'personae,' and script theory attempts to account for individual socializations within the bio-psycho-social complex of a lived life." (p. 75). 'Feminine' and 'masculine' are, therefore, social constructs. Tomkins is also clear that both individuals and cultures have scripts.

In volume 3 of Affect Imagery Consciousness, Tomkins labels and defines hundreds of possible scripts, but makes it clear that a full taxonomy of all possible scripts is impossible. Script variations are as iterative as there are people and their individual experience. This is, in part, why scholars Adam Frank and Elizabeth Wilson (2020) write, "What Tomkins offers, then, is a periodic table of affective elements that combine to become any number of emotional molecular structures or substances" (p. 4). Implicit in Tomkins' writings is an encouragement to researchers, therapists, and theorists to label and define scripts as necessary.

Nonetheless, Tomkins outlines some important major categories of scripts, including:

Affect scripts

control scripts: regulate consciousness of affects. management: invoked "when control is a problem, that is, when you have residual, backed-up affect that you do not know what to do with" (p. 69)—accrue on the over-magnified original nuclear scene. At best, they succeed only partially and temporarily, because "Nuclear scripts are inherently involved in idealized defenses against idealized threats to idealized paradises"

Human Being Theory Human Being Theory, so-called, is detailed in Volume 4 of Affect Imagery Consciousness. In cybernetics discourse, he found metaphors and signifiers for human cognition and mentation. Cybernetic vocabulary such hardware and software are common today in describing human mentation, but Tomkins embraced this terminology relatively early in its development.

According to Raymond Kurzweil (1990), Wiener is responsible for three major shifts in the human worldview (p. 190-98). The first shift is from prioritizing energy processing by an organism to an emphasis on the processing and using of information as an organizational control. (The second shift is from an analogue to digital accounting of that information. Third is a conceptual shift from theoretically reversible Newtonian time to irreversible Bergsonian time based on partial information destruction during energy processes.) All organisms must use energy to live, but the means of control became 'information' management.

Cognitive subsystems evolved, for Tomkins, to manage the infinitude of but indispensable transformations of information, or the transformation of perceptual, motor, memory, and feedback information into forms the organism can 'use.' Cognition as information management and transformation is a trait shared across the living, organic world and different only by degree of evolutionary complexity. As an evolutionary ground for motivation, the affect subsystems make urgent, or amplify, their triggers, and thus, as cognition deals with information management, so amplification is the energy to be managed.

This leads to Tomkins asking, "If we define cognition as those mechanisms that have the power to process and transform 'information' and oppose this system to the amplifier mechanisms of the reticular formation—drives, pain, and affects that are specialized for amplification of information—then what are we to call the higher-order mechanisms and processes whereby both affect and cognition are integrated into scripts?" (p. 26).

Queer theory In their paper Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins, Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Science and Technology Studies Professor Adam Frank examine the relevance of Tomkin's work for queer theory as well as poststructuralist theory more generally, arguing that Tomkins' work may provide important epistemological insights about the self.