16 Facts About Silvan Tomkins

Silvan Solomon Tomkins was a psychologist and personality theorist who developed both affect theory and script theory.

Silvan Tomkins was born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish immigrants, and raised in Camden, New Jersey.

Silvan Tomkins studied playwriting as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, but immediately on graduating he enrolled as a graduate student in psychology.

Silvan Tomkins wrote a book about the projective Thematic Apperception Test, then developed the Picture Arrangement Test that combined elements of projection and forced choice.

But, as a 'Personologist,' the study of personality in the tradition of Harvard professor Henry Murray, Silvan Tomkins easily understood that biology was only a beginning factor for theorizing a complex set of processes comprising individual humans.

Silvan Tomkins needed a third concept as an intermediary between cognition-motivation and consciousness.

Silvan Tomkins begins by challenging Freud and Hull's drive theory which dominated psychology at the time.

Silvan Tomkins' nine named affects are: interest-excitement and enjoyment-joy; surprise-startle; distress-anguish, anger-rage, and fear-terror; disgust, dissmell, shame-humiliation.

Silvan Tomkins is clear that both individuals and cultures have scripts.

Implicit in Silvan Tomkins' writings is an encouragement to researchers, therapists, and theorists to label and define scripts as necessary.

Silvan Tomkins held degrees in play-writing, psychology, and philosophy.

Silvan Tomkins' affect theory is contained within his script theory which is contained within human being theory.

Silvan Tomkins chose the label 'human being theory' to differentiate his formulation from psychology in general and the dominance of traditional psychoanalysis, and to distinguish human psychology from general animal psychology.

Cybernetic vocabulary such hardware and software are common today in describing human mentation, but Silvan Tomkins embraced this terminology relatively early in its development.

Cognitive subsystems evolved, for Silvan 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.

In effect, Silvan Tomkins describes a 'dialogue' between the outside world, the medium of containment or the 'ground' of human action, and the inside world, or the 'figure,' that moves within the medium, and the manifestation of that dialogue in a neural feedback loop.