Silvan tomkins biography

This post describes the profound impact Silvan Tomkins had on our understanding of human emotions.

Silvan tomkins biography

It was written in collaboration with Donald Nathanson, M.D.

"We do not possess a systematic statement of the psychoanalytic theory of affects" (Rappaport, 1953, p. 476).

"Tomkins began a limited revolution—a paradigm shift, in Kuhnian terms" (Knapp, 1987, p 221).

Freud"had no satisfactory hypothesis to account for affectivity in general...

Adequate explanations were finally proposed by Tomkins" (Gedo, 2005, p. 90).

Working within the traditions of both Darwin and Freud, Silvan S. Tomkins fused evolutionary and psychodynamic concepts to describe the specific kinds of affects, their mechanism of action, and their development.

Tomkins detailed the nature of affect itself and the triggers for each of the nine affects, demonstrating: 1) the nature, development, and transformations of the affect system; 2) its virtually unlimited ideo-affective structure; 3) the importance of af