Silvan Tomkins

Silvan Solomon Tomkins (June 4, 1911 – June 10, 1991) was a psychologist and personality theorist who developed both affect theory and script theory.

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'.

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’” (p.53).

The first half of his total formulation, presented in volumes 1 (1962) and 2 (1963) of Affect Imagery Consciousness, is the most phenomenological in focussing on physiology, drives, affects, and other “nonspecific amplification” (p. 1) systems within the biological body.

He was chasing the question, “What do human beings really want?” (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.

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.

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. 131), or more accurately “caring” (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. 287) of executive control.

Consciousness is to be human, or the result of the structures and processes comprising a human being.

The word denotes a uniquely human, non-specific ‘site’ of awareness, where information from motivation (affects, drives), cognitive (perception, motor, memory), and feedback subsystems is combined, duplicated, processed, and reported, or made conscious.

While Tomkins began with an interest in determining the essential motivations of humans as animal, he also needed to consider how people did what they did, and in turn, where consciousness fit in the puzzle.

Initially, he divided his human being theory into two major halves.

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.

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.

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.

Tomkins’ affect theory is detailed most in volumes 1 & 2 of Affect Imagery Consciousness.