Silvan Tomkins

Silvan Tomkins (1911-1991) was one of the most comprehensive and imaginative psychologists of the twentieth century. He was an innovator in the truest sense of the word. His four volume work, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, was published over a thirty year period beginning in 1962. Tomkins "discovered" the affect system lying deep within the brain structure of creatures that move about in space, including us human beings. His theory of affect was grounded in a view of the whole human being. It was steeped in cybernetics and systems theory as well as in psychology, ethology and neuroscience. The implications of his daring formulations are only now beginning to be understood.

Tomkins describes nine innate affects, which comprise a system of motivation: two pleasant or positive, one neutral, and six unpleasant or negative. He puts each affect on a spectrum from mild to intense experiences of internally felt densities and gradients. The positive are interest-excitement and enjoyment-joy. The neutral is surprise-startle, and the negative are fear-terror, distress-anguish, anger-rage, dissmell, disgust, and shame-humiliation.

The Silvan Tomkins Institute is dedicated to understanding and promoting the work of this important pioneer. Its director is Donald Nathanson, whose own fine work can be read about in the Shame and Pride link in the Gateways below. The Institute also has a Tomkins Talk discussion list. The institute can be reached at: http://www.tomkins.org/

A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO AFFECT PSYCHOLOGY by Gary David

When I first started my relationship with J. Samuel Bois in 1964, I was studying academically as well as experimenting with my own humanness in terms of growth and development. One of the pioneers I came across was the psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins, although I really didn't get the deeper implications of Tomkins' work until a few years ago when I read Don Nathanson's book, Shame and Pride, I had read Tomkins, and others who wrote about his work, but the Nathanson book really spoke to me.

After absorbing the basics of Affect Psychology through the theories of Tomkins, and using those maps in working with myself and with others, I could no longer see the world of psychology (including my own psychology) as I did previously. A good theory helps to create a new lens through which the inexplicable takes on the luster of insight - that is, until a new theory supplants it. (The etymology of "theory" is [Late Latin theoria, from Greek, theoria from theoros spectator : probably thea, a viewing + -oros, seeing (from horan, to see).] So basically, to theorize is to be a spectator or an observer of a process. To be a full participant, though, is both a simpler and a more complex matter, and that's the theme of this piece.

How do we make meaning from messages we receive from others? Supposing I get negative feedback from someone. 'Negative' in this context means, "the meaning I make doesn't feel good." So where is the negative feedback coming from? From how I feel. I am getting feedback from a system that is an innate part of my brain function. It's called the affective system. It's this system that is co-assembling with the messages from others and amplifying their messages in ways that feel rewarding or punishing. If I am not able to listen to others, in a very real way I am not listening to myself.

So what is an affect? First of all, an affect is the biological process that leans to what we call a 'feeling'. We feel it as a 'good' or 'bad' sensation in the body. An affect makes good feelings better (rewarding), and bad feelings worse (punishing). If I have a pain, and I feel fear, the pain becomes amplified by the affect and becomes organismic rather than being limited to a specific site. Whatever the action of an affect is, it shows up most strongly on the face and skin as well as in body movement and vocal sounds. Internally, we feel its movement as various sensations of pressure, density, rising and falling almost like music throughout various areas of the body.

Affects are general in that they have no specific meaning. They are strictly biological, and they are global (receptors over the whole body). If I feel anger, there is nothing in the affect that tells me what I'm angry about. All it is doing is signaling me that something is important to me, and that it's a steady feeling. It may burst suddenly, but it burns steadily. Fear, on the other hand is sudden and rises steeply. So each affect has a moving 'signature'.

Affects are also abstract. They can combine with anything - a pain, the drives (hunger, thirst, sexual, etc.), a memory, a word - anything. What affects essentially do is to make us pay attention to anything, and in fact, we can't pay attention to anything unless it is first amplified by affect. They are different than drives which are specific. (If I'm thirsty I feel it in the mouth.)

There is a Stimulus, an Affect, and a Response - S-A-R. Most often, thinking (cognition) and acting are responses to, and follow from, affect. But it all happens so fast, the SAR overlaps in time, that we don't notice that the affect came before our response, and colored the stimulus as well as the response. Affects call our attention so that we can use cognition to decide what to do.

Currently, there are 9 basic affects that have been identified. Six of them are there at birth, and 3 more are auxiliary affects that develop soon after. Following Tomkins' lead, I put each affect on a continuum from mild intensity to strong intensity. Here are the basic 6:

Positive Affects: Enjoyment-Joy; and Interest-Excitement.
Neutral Affect: Surprise-Startle
Negative Affects: Fear-Terror; Anger-Rage; Distress-Anguish

Here are the 3 auxiliary affects, all negative in the sense of not feeling good:

Shame-Humiliation, which is auxiliary to the positive affects above. It's the only one dependent on an impediment to good feeling.
Dissmell
Disgust

The latter two were derived from the hunger drive, and were recruited as affects over evolutionary time. Bad smells temporarily cut off our appetites and keep us from eating something potentially harmful, and disgust is the response when we've eaten something that turns bad and the system wants to get rid of it. Dissmell can be seen as the basis of prejudice, for example, where you treat another as someone to be avoided - as if they smelled bad. Disgust can be seen at work in one's sense of being betrayed. "I trusted you (took someone in and gave them value), and you did something to make me want to get you out of my system. I'm disgusted with you."

What happens when an affect, which lasts only a few seconds, is triggered? Why do we have the experience that the feeling is prolonged over minutes, hours, days, even years? Tomkins says that cognition, among other things, involves the motor system, the perceptual system, and memory. Add language to the mix and you have a process whereby the affect is linked to past experiences, both by symbolic memory, muscle movement, and sense memory. The experiences that are affectively charged are linked into 'scenes'. When these scenes are evoked, they become 'scripted'. Basically, this is one of the techniques used by actors who studied at the Actor's Studio in New York.

When affects are scripted, a transformation takes place. The affect itself is not transformed, but the meaning is. The affect that is linked to past scenes in memory can be called an 'emotion'. Franz Basch put it this way: Affect = biology, emotion=biology+biography. When we have the experience of prolonged feeling, I see that as an emotion and involves images of the past even though we may not be aware of those images. In a way, an emotion is not a feeling, but a 'felt' as David Bohm calls it, or feelings we felt in the past acting in the present and that feel immediate because of the currently triggered affect.

Emotions involve scripts, which is a very complex aspect of affect psychology. Jeff Ellison, a contributing member of Tomkins Talk, a listserve of the Silvan Tomkins Institute wrote:

"Scripts have triggers or releasing conditions (people, places, affects). When a set of conditions is met a particular script is started. Once the script starts it tends to order affects and cognitions, especially in the form of expectations. This leads to bias in comprehension and "gap-filling" - you see or hear what you expect. This goes beyond a simple inference rule.

Scripts are cognitive structures (aka schemas). A person has a stable cognitive representation of each script (although not necessarily conscious). 'The difference between a script and a habit is that a script is a knowledge structure, not just a response program, and thus there is access to it symbolically as well as through direct experience.' I interpret this as the open door by which we may know our own scripts."

This is a rough sketch of some of the basics of Affect-Script psychology as proposed by Tomkins.

SHAME AND PRIDE

As Donald Nathanson says, shame is the precursor to misrepresentation, and lies provide more solace than reality. Are the lives of such people really a failure and under the veneer are they filled with a shame they cannot face? Is it that they cannot allow others to be intimate with them, to peek under their cover?'

Let us consider the emotion of shame and how our cultures respond to that particular affect. Shame can be triggered when there is a perceived impediment to any kind of enjoyment-joy or interest-excitement. There is a weakening of the neck muscles so that the head wants to hang, the skin may flush, the eyes averted, and a sinking sense in the center of the body. Of course, if you don't care about what you are experiencing, it won't trigger shame. So the urge to want the good feeling to continue is part of the conditions for the innate script of shame. If I want to kiss you, and you don't want to be kissed, and I care about that, shame - the affect - will be triggered. Remember, as an affect, shame has no content about the 'self'. What has happened, is that in our human ignorance of our own physiology, we have scripted shame to be about one's very self.

In a chapter titled, "A Brief History of Shame" in his book, Shame and Pride, Nathanson writes, "Sense of Self: What do I define as me? How clearly does an individual define his or her identity?" Then he goes through various ages of our culture and how that was given value. The sense of self in the Classic Age: partial and incomplete; Medieval Age: group rather than individual; Renaissance: increasing sense of individual identity; Modern Age: life in a full-length mirror. He does the same for closeness, which Brian mentions. This is the role of closeness in intimacy, the degree to which people developed what we might call a real emotional link. The Classic Age: of minor concern; banishment commonplace; Medieval: minor concern; wandering nomad common; Renaissance: begins to achieve importance; forced isolation to be feared; personal privacy begins to appear; Modern: major concern; banishment inconceivable, expatriate status extraordinary.

As I look at these progressions, I see a morphic development. It's the emergence of differentiation on the 'psychic' level of awareness. We are going through the awkward stages of that development, and shame is playing a major role that needs much further exploration.