Description
Book Synopsis"An accessible guide to the work of American psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tomkins"--
Trade Review"Taking a cartographic approach to Silvan Tomkins’s considerable volumes of work, Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson extend the reach and significance of his theories of affect into new territories, problems, concepts, and tantalizing ways of approaching the ‘strange status of subjectivity.’ Unique, persuasive, and illuminating, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook is essential reading for advancing the field of affect studies beyond psychological individualisms of all kinds."—Lisa Blackman, author of Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science
"Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson beautifully demonstrate the distinctiveness, suppleness, complexity, and generativity of Silvan Tomkins’s writings and concepts. The handbook makes vividly and urgently clear how much there remains, in the twenty-first century, to unearth and think through in relation to this distinctive twentieth-century psychologist and to models of affect and subjective experience more broadly."—Felicity Callard, University of Glasgow
Table of ContentsContents
Note on Quotations
Introduction
Part I. Affect
1. Drives
2. The Face
3. Evolution
4. Freedom
5. The Positive
6. The Negative
Interlude: Tomkins and Spinoza
Part II. Imagery
7. Images
8. Theory, Weak and Strong
9. Scenes and Scripts
10. Ideology
Interlude: Tomkins and Darwin
Part III. Consciousness
11. Psychoanalysis at the Harvard Psychological Clinic
12. Cybernetics
13. The Psychology of Knowledge
14. The Minding System
Acknowledgments
Chronology of Tomkins’s Life and Work
Bibliography of Tomkins’s Published Writings
References
Index
