History and Organization of the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute

Silvan Solomon Tomkins was born 4 June 1911 in Philadelphia and died 10 June 1991 at the nearby New Jersey shore he loved so deeply. He’d entered the University of Pennsylvania with the intent to become a playwright, earned an MA in psychology, and left in 1934 with a doctorate in philosophy. The topics of his dissertation – logic and value theory – remained central throughout his career. Unable to find scholarly employment during this period of the Great Depression, Tomkins spent the next two years in New York City gainfully employed as a handicapper for a racing syndicate, success he attributed both to his remarkable ability to “read the faces” of race horses and the willingness to assemble and study detailed records on horses, jockeys, and the tracks they raced. In 1936 he began postdoctoral study in philosophy at Harvard University, where he became fascinated by the pioneering work on personality emerging from the Harvard Psychological Clinic under the leadership of Henry A. Murray and Robert W. White. The red thread connecting all of these seemingly disparate scholarly interests was a core interest in the question “What do human beings really want?”

The Tomkins-Horn Picture Arrangement Test (PAT) was devised in the early 1940s, and despite its avowed purpose to study worker absenteeism, it served to alert Tomkins and many others to the importance of emotion as a motivating force. His 1946 book on Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) remains a classic approach to the study of personality. In 1947 he began an 18-year tenure in Princeton University’s Department of Psychology, where his interest in the relation between emotion (which he came to call “affect”) and personality formation became the defining theme of his career. Enthralled by Norbert Weiner’s early work on cybernetics, Tomkins saw immediately that what we know as the adult human was the result of several interdependent systems working together through developmental sequences that had until then been poorly studied. By luck, his son was born during the year of his sabbatical leave, offering an unparalleled opportunity to watch how the affects developed in a “subject” he could not but find fascinating.

The Psychology of Affect and Script

With the 1962 and 1963 release of the first two volumes of his masterpiece, Affect Imagery Consciousness (AIC), Tomkins broke with mainstream psychology to declare the primacy of the affect system as the motivating force in human life. He did this in an era dominated by Freudian drive theory, and maintained his position in the face of the increasing popularity within academic psychology of cognition and behavior. Interest in the formation of the adult personality became unpopular at Princeton, and he withdrew into the study of the affective nature of ideology, of commitment, and of the addictions. The first scientist to receive a Career Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), in 1965 he established the Center for Cognition and Affect at the City University of New York. Three years later he moved to Livingston College of Rutgers University, where he remained until his formal retirement in 1975. The final two volumes of AIC were completed just before his death in 1991, and expanded his earlier work on personality formation in the language of Script Theory.

Honors

In addition to the Career Scientist Award from the NIMH, Tomkins received the Bruno Klopfer Distinguished Contribution Award of the Society for Personality Assessment, The Distinguished Contribution Award from Division 12 of the American Psychological Association (APA), and the Henry A. Murray Award of APA’s Division 8. His work on innate affect (the neural programs postulated to govern the physiological basis of the nine families of emotion he described throughout his work) and the psychology of script formation (the way each of us learns to manage our emotional, intellectual, and interpersonal life) has become of increasing importance throughout science and art. Understandable to any who knew him well, Tomkins counted among his favorite post-retirement honors the day when the local track named a race “The Professor” and allowed him to present a trophy to the winning owner and jockey. Wherever he lectured, worked with research teams, or chatted with colleagues, it became clear to all that they were in the presence of genius.

Genius or not, Tomkins was constitutionally unable to write in a way that could be understood by all but those few scholars who relished the dense prose of 19^th century philosophy. He believed that later generations would take AIC as an integrated whole and forgive him for refusing to provide a bibliography until the entire series was completed (30 years after release of Volume I!) Searching for “completeness” in every written document, conversation, or lecture, he allowed sentences to extend beyond the patience of the average student and relished allusions that drew an audience far from his point. Often he said “There are not 12 people alive who really understand my work,” but did little to reduce their perplexity. Rather than allow those who truly celebrated his genius to gather and trade ideas, he fomented intense and unpleasant competition among his followers, making each more than a little suspicious that the others really didn’t understand Tomkins.

When, in the late Spring of 1991, it became clear that Silvan Tomkins would soon succumb to small cell lymphoma, he was forced to accept that his career had ended and others would be left with the responsibility to explain his ideas. Many began to speak of an Institute organized in his name, and he wondered aloud what such an organization would or could do. Of the small group he trusted, most were psychologists whose careers were fully organized as an established program, or too early in their careers to allow such a responsibility. Most thought it impossible or useless to organize any type of Institute without financial backing in the range of several million dollars, a goal well beyond even the imagination of a racing fan.

The Silvan S. Tomkins Institute (SSTI)

It was the decision of his son, Mark, to ask help not from any of the scientists who had worked with Professor Tomkins during his active career, but a clinician who had spent the past decade working with Tomkins on possible applications of the theoretical work that had occupied him more than 40 years. Donald L. Nathanson, MD, trained initially as an endocrinologist, then a psychiatrist, had committed himself to study the role of affect in every aspect of human life. Nathanson’s background in psychopharmacology encouraged him to reinterpret the action of psychoactive medications in terms of their interaction with the affect system, and a decade earlier he had initiated a Study Group through which he and other clinicians learned the psychology of affect. Nathanson’s first two edited books had established his reputation as a leader in the study of affect in normal life and psychopathology (The Many Faces of Shame (Guilford, 1987) and Denial: A Theoretical Clarification of Concepts and Research (Plenum, 1989.) Nathanson had worked closely with Tomkins during the two year gestation of his monograph Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self. Tomkins respected the amount of work expended to make his ideas clear to a wide audience, was grateful for the opportunity to go over every page of the manuscript to make sure it was free of errors, and expressed great respect that Nathanson had extended Tomkins’s work on affect and drive to develop a matching and interwoven theory of sexuality. Dedicated to Tomkins, this book was released early in 1992, some months after his death.

Professional Training

With the assistance of his long time colleague, psychiatrist Vernon C. Kelly, Jr., MD, a campaign was mounted to find other clinicians who shared their conviction that emotion deserved far more attention than it received at that moment. Dr. Kelly took the responsibility for all educational programs presented by the SSTI, and as its Training Director began to find new ways to gain an audience for these ideas. Using their own personal funds, they organized an October, 1993, public conference in Philadelphia that presented the basic tenets of Tomkins’s Affect Theory, Nathanson’s work on the psychology of shame and the relation between affect and psychopharmacology, and Kelly’s work with Tomkins on a blueprint for interpersonal intimacy leading to a new system of couples therapy that Dr. Kelly derived from this concept. More than half of those who attended joined the SSTI and took an active part in its work.

Dr. Kelly initiated a Study Group system for which they developed a curriculum based on selected passages from AIC and sections culled from Shame and Pride. Questions asked by Study Group members were answered by Dr. Kelly, and these interactions were folded into the formal program. In rapid succession, Dr. Kelly developed the complex manuals and protocols required to allow certification of both the annual conferences and the Study Groups for Continuing Education credit acceptable to all the major professional organizations. As the leadership of the Tomkins Institute began to study the recently released final volumes of AIC, a Second Year program was added to the Study Group syllabus. Under the leadership of New York based psychologist Melvyn Hill, a committee then developed a Third Year program concentrating on the management of clinical issues. A list of all the annual conferences may be found elsewhere on this site, for each of which an album of audiotapes may be purchased.

Between 1994 and 1997, Drs. Nathanson and Kelly produced a small journal featuring articles on theoretical and clinical matters called The Bulletin of the Tomkins Institute. Articles from this short-lived venture found their way into the Study Group syllabus. In 1996, Gilbert Levin, PhD, director of the highly regarded symposia produced for the Cape Cod Institute summer programs, initiated Behavior OnLine, the first Internet based site through which the lay public could address questions to professional psychotherapists. Dr. Nathanson was asked to open this series with an interactive offering called the Shame and Affect Theory Forum, which he led until mid-2002 when the SSTI began work on this present website. Through the kindness of Dr. Levin, the SSTI was also able to present an early version of a website, much of which has now been transferred here. For the past several years, all SSTI members capable of processing electronic mail have been linked through a listserv called Tomkins-Talk. Under the direction of editor John Brodsky, MD, the Tomkins Institute now produces a Newsletter featuring articles about affect and script based interpretations of sociocultural matters including feature films and current events. Members have given formal presentations to a wide range of scholarly and clinical organizations, consulted for many newspapers and magazines, advised organizations and local governments, and taught in a surprisingly large number of venues.

The SSTI has been fortunate to receive significant grants from a number of individuals and Foundations, and is a Donor’s Choice organization for the United Way. Among the Foundations that have supported our research and teaching have been the Prudential Foundation, The Tzadeka Foundation, The Carpenter Foundation, the Bank of America, and the Oxford Foundation.

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