Shame and Its Sisters

by Silvan S. Tomkins, Adam Frank (editor), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Editor)

The question of affect is central to critical theory, psychology, politics, and the entire range of the humanities; but no discipline, including psychoanalysis, has offered a theory of affect that would be rich enough to account for the delicacy and power, the evanescence and durability, the bodily rootedness and the cultural variability of human emotion.Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) was one of the most radical and imaginative psychologists of the twentieth century. In Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work published over the last thirty years of his life, Tomkins developed an ambitious theory of affect steeped in cybernetics and systems theory as well as in psychoanalysis, ethology, and neuroscience. The implications of his conceptually daring and phenomenologically suggestive theory are only now—in the context of postmodernism—beginning to be understood. With Shame and Its Sisters, editors Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank make available for the first time an engaging and accessible selection of Tomkins’s work.
Featuring intensive examination of several key affects, particularly shame and anger, this volume contains many of Tomkins’s most haunting, diagnostically incisive, and theoretically challenging discussions. An introductory essay by the editors places Tomkins’s work in the context of postwar information technologies and will prompt a reexamination of some of the underlying assumptions of recent critical work in cultural studies and other areas of the humanities. The text is also accompanied by a biographical sketch of Tomkins by noted psychologist Irving E. Alexander, Tomkins’s longtime friend and collaborator.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, Academia, Grad School

280 pages, Paperback

First published October 24, 1995

About the author

Silvan Solomon Tomkins

Reviews

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Freud (as described by the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman), Silvan Tomkins was "not doing science ... that was a mistake he made." What he *was* doing is practically unclassifiable: essayistic (but epic-sized) meanderings through the combinatorially generated diversity of human types? Not Freud (whom Tomkins periodically shoots down with respectful impatience) but Proust is his nearest intellectual ally, albeit with the tasteful precision swapped out for a kind of nerd-in-his-mother's-basement earnestness; the contraption he cobbles together may work only fitfully as an explanation of the psyche, but ranks among the best descriptions of it.

[Lisa]

Tomkins provides an account of an 'affect system' operating autonomously from any Freudian notion of sexual drives. In light of Foucault's debunking of a repressive hypothesis, Tomkins' work is particularly interesting for the unhinging of shame from sexual repression.

[Jackmcintyre3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

In terms of psychoanalysis, Tomkin's ideas are way more plausible to me than Freud's.

[Nat Baldino]

I have no idea what to rate this book because I have no idea how to articulate what i learned from it, this was a worse read than any of the most dense philosophy Jesus Christ