Silvan Tomkins

Silvan Solomon Tomkins (born June 4, 1911 in Philadelphia , † June 10, 1991 in Somers Point , New Jersey ) was an American philosopher and psychologist. He became known for his affect theory and script theory . Following the publication of his book Affect Imagery Consciousness in 1991, interest in his theories conceived in the 1940s revived and summarizing and popularizing books about his work, which was difficult to read in the original, appeared.

Life

Silvan Tomkins was born in Philadelphia to Jewish-Russian immigrants and grew up in Camden, New Jersey . He quickly finished his training as a playwright to study psychology. After he was awarded his master's degree, he dropped out of psychology because he didn't like the biopsychology major at Pennsylvania State University . He continued to study philosophy and received a doctorate in philosophy in 1934. His dissertation with Edgar A. Singer dealt with a topic of value philosophy .

Since he could not find an academic job because of the recession, he worked for two years at horse racing fields, where he assessed the winning chances of horses for the bookmakers. He himself explained his unusual accuracy of the predictions by the fact that he was able to assess the "facial expressions of the horses" well.

In 1937 he went to Harvard to the psychological clinic. He published his first book, Contemporary Psychopathology , which in addition to a summary of the field of knowledge also contains his own contributions. He wrote another book on the Thematic Perception Test . He developed the Picture Arrangement Test himself.

In 1947 he married Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he remained married for almost 30 years, and moved to a position in the psychology department at Princeton University , which did not support his plans for a course in clinical psychology. He spent a year at the Ford Center in Palo Alto, California, where he wrote the first two volumes of his major work Affect, Imagery, Consciousness . Two of his students from this period, Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard , became better known for their theory of emotions and affects than Tomkins, on whose concepts they are based.

After receiving the Career Research Award from the National Institute of Mental Health in 1965, he left Princeton and received a professorship at Rutgers University in 1968 , which he held until his retirement in 1975. After retiring, he worked on his script theory .

Tomkins' theory of affects

At its core, Tomkins' affect theory says that all people have exactly nine different affects that are genetically programmed and not culturally acquired. The six earliest developed of these are described by Tomkins as two stages, with the second stage representing an increase in the first stage: interest / enthusiasm, pleasure / joy, surprise / shock, suffering / torment, anger / anger and fear / horror. Another couple is younger in terms of development: shame / humiliation. The last two are disgust for bad smell (Tomkins invented the word dismell for this ) and disgust for bad taste. Tomkins sees these nine affects as discrete and elementary, as opposed to emotions, which are complex and compound. The affects of man are sE related to those of higher animals and not to be confused with the drives according to Sigmund Freud . (See also section affect theory in the main article psychoanalysis )

According to Tomkins and his student Paul Ekman, there are characteristic and globally universal facial expressions for the affects. The fact that even children born blind display these characteristic facial expressions is cited as evidence of the innate nature of affects.

Fonts

• Affect Imagery Consciousness: Volume I, The Positive Affects . Tavistock, London 1962.
• Affect Imagery Consciousness: Volume II, The Negative Affects . 1963.
• Affect Imagery Consciousness Volume III. The Negative Affects: Anger and Fear . Springer, New York 1991.
• (with Bertram P. Karon) Affect, Imagery, Consciousness Volume IV . Springer, New York 1962-1992.
• Conscience, self love and benevolence in the system of Bishop Butler . University of Pennsylvania, 1934.
• (with HA Murray) Contemporary Psychopathology: A Source Book . Harvard University Press , Cambridge, Mass. 1943.
• (with Elizabeth J. Tomkins) The Thematic Apperception Test: The Theory and Technique of Interpretation . Grune & Stratton, New York 1947.
• (with John Burnham Miner) The Tomkins-Horn Picture Arrangement Test . Springer, New York 1957.
• (with John B. Miner) PAT interpretation: Scope and Technique . Springer, New York 1959.
• (with Samuel Messick) Computer Simulation of Personality: Frontier of Psychological Theory . Wiley, New York 1963.
• (with Carroll E. Izard) Affect, Cognition, and Personality: Empirical Studies Springer, New York 1965.
• Virginia Demos (ed.): Exploring affect - The selected writings of Silvan S. Tomkins. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Mass. 1995, ISBN 0-521-44832-8 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Joan Cook: Silvan Tomkins, 80, Psychologist Who Cited Power of Emotion, Dies . In: New York Times June 14, 1991
2. ^ Donald L. Nathanson, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self. WW Norton, London 1992
3. ^ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Adam Frank: Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Duke University Press, Durham and London 1995
4. ^ Virginia Demos: Exploring affect - The selected writings of Silvan S. Tomkins. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Mass. 1995, ISBN 0-521-44832-8 , p. 3 ( limited preview in Google book search).
5. ↑ Biography on the website of the Silvan Tomkins Institute, accessed January 5, 2010 ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ Irving E. Alexander: Silvan S. Tomkins: A Biographical Sketch. Pp. 251-263; In: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Adam Frank: Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Duke University Press, Durham and London 1995
7. ↑ Sample images for affects ( Memento of the original from May 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

Web links

• Silvan Tomkins Institute
• Anecdotes about Tomkins from Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (English)
• Brian Lynch, MD: Affect and Script Theory - Silvan S. Tomkins