AFFECT IMAGERY CONSCIOUSNESS: VOLUME 3. THE NEGATIVE AFFECTS FEAR AND ANGERJournal of the …, 1995
Krause, R. (1995). Affect Imagery Consciousness: Volume 3. The Negative Affects: Fear And Anger.: By Silvan S. Tomkins. New York: Springer, 1991, 592 pp., $74.00.. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 43:929-937. The first 108 pages of this 592-page book is a revision of the author's theory outlined in 1962 and 1963. A fourth volume edited posthumously has recently been published, covering affect and information processing and providing a bibliography (Tomkins, 1992). Silvan Tomkins, whom I had the good fortune to know personally, was a keen observer and creative thinker against the current of the Zeitgeist, doing research in the context of discovery, to use his wording. To make the impossible task come true, I shall attempt to describe his complete theory, his modifications, and his work on anger and fear. In his highly influential work, Tomkins stated that there are eight phylogenetically inherited primary affects: interest, enjoyment, surprise, distress, fear, shame, contempt/disgust, and anger. He considered them to be innate biological motivating systems overriding drive and pain signals. “Affects are sets of muscular and glandular responses located in the face and also widely distributed through the body, which generate sensory feedback which is either inherently ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’” (Tomkins, 1968, p. 326). The capacity to understand and produce each primary affect is genetically inherited and stored in subcortical centers. Affect is highly contagious because facial and voice patterns can elicit the complete pattern of affect. Since facial feedback was so important to his theory, Tomkins was the first in the Anglo-American post-Darwinian field to describe the facial responses so carefully and, in doing so, to inspire some very influential measurement techniques by his followers Izard (1977) and Ekman and Friesen (1969, 1978). Besides the affect from others, the temporal characteristics of stimulation are innate activators of affect with increase, decrease, and constant stimulation as significant determinants. Tomkins postulated as underlying hardware a process within the brain which he called “density of neural firing” (p. 56). Increase is correlated with interest, startle, or fear, depending on the steepness of the curve. High constant density is correlated with distress and anger, whereas decrease is related to positive affect. The affects of the first group are “emergency mechanisms,” which reset the ongoing activities of the organism. They are brief and highly efficacious (in his terms, “toxic”), whereas the second group with anger and distress requires a prolonged high amount of stimulation. The idea of connecting joy with the reduction of neural firing brings Tomkins close to Freud's Nirvana principle. The definition of affect through the temporal contour of stimulation led to a derivative concept which Tomkins called “ideo-affective density” (p. 432). The advantage of this widened concept is the applicability of the basic idea to all forms of human behavior. For example, constant high ideation, even if positive in content, should lead to distress if prolonged. Thus, happiness is by definition brief. Because of the high toxicity, Tomkins considered affects to be primary motives overriding all other motivational systems, including drive processes—especially sexuality, which he considered as “notoriously vulnerable to the learned recruitment of affect” (1968, p. 322). He considered drives to be those homeostatic circuits requiring external objects like food, air, and warmth for the fulfillment of the regulation process. They supply the organism with information about time, place, and response. Thus, hunger has inbuilt information about when to eat, which is the relevant organ, and what is the necessary response. However, drives—so Tomkins thinks—need amplification through affect, otherwise they would not be powerful enough to trigger action. This amplification is usually the case, but within mental disturbances especially, affect overrides drives, like the disgust reaction to the hunger drive of the anorectic patient. The history of the reception of Tomkins's works is very interesting, especially when the Anglo-American realm is contrasted with the German-language realm. Most of what Tomkins said was so contradictory of the academic psychology and psychoanalytic metapsychology of his time that he was not taken seriously for a long time. His pupils had a hard time getting empirical results published. In the meantime, some essential elements have been widely accepted, and one of his pupils, Paul Ekman, won the award of the American Psychological Association in 1992. - 930 - What were the obstacles and what do they tell us about metapsychology and academic psychology of those days? The latter employed an experiment of Schachter and Singer (1962) to define affect as a combination of cognition and nonspecific arousal. The psychoanalytic theory of the time was very similar to Schachter and Singer's view, separating the free-floating “quota of affect” from the cognitively defined representations. Tomkins clearly stated that there was no such thing as an affect without internal representations. He accused Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) of evincing a cognitive bias in denying the presence of “affect” in earliest infancy by declaring the expression as “reflex-like” precursors, or by contrasting emotional expression with “experience” requiring the caregiver's verbal responses in addition. Tomkins thinks that infants have no reflex-like affect expression, but are capable of and probably perceptually biased toward making distinctions between self and environment, including other human beings, right from the beginning. Thus he is very close to Daniel Stern (1985) and myself (Krause, 1983), who claim that the psychoanalytic developmental concept of an initially global, undifferentiated entity developing into discrete functions is an adultomorphization stemming from generalization of psychopathology processes, mainly the incapability of the severely disturbed to differentiate self and other for defensive purposes (Krause, 1990). The original state could be much better interpreted as a multiple personality centered around different states. Since affects can be considered as wishes for the partner to behave in a very specific way, this means, in terms of developmental psychology, a priority of object relations over drives with the following consequences: the relation between “lust” as the psychic correlate of drive satisfaction within the erogenic zones and affect is not fixed; in fact, we find “Angst-Lust” (thrill; Balint, 1959), “disgust-lust,” and “anger-lust” in some perversions (Krause, 1993). Frequently, a consummatory action from a drive process is used to sedate a toxic affect. Thus, drive theory as an essential element of psychoanalytic metapsychology has been subsumed under the theory of affective exchange, or object relations. It seems clear by now that the readiness to generate affect in general, and certain specific affects like fear or anger, is highly genetically determined, and we have to alter our theories on “somatisches Entgegenkommen” (somatic accommodation) to include the inherited differences in the affect system itself, as Kernberg (1983) has claimed concerning aggression. - 931 - Despite the fact that the general outline of the theory has been well received in the meantime, some essentials of Tomkins's reasoning are held to be highly controversial. In the first part of his new book he responds to this criticism. 1. The temporal characteristics as a necessary prerequisite to elicit affect is now changed in such a way that only one piece of the integral ideo-affective pattern has to be specific in its temporal characteristic. 2. The performance of the affective muscular-acts within the face and the voice are still considered important for the experiencing of affect, but the skin proprioception, including thermoreceptors and others still to be discovered, play an important role in addition to the musculature. 3. Most adult affects that are heard or seen do not follow the inherited muscular patterns, but follow a controlled form less contagious for others. Tomkins calls this “backed up affect” and discusses the consequences of “backing up” for the experiencing of affect as well as for stress and psychosomatic disturbances. 4. The pair of continuous affect called “contempt/disgust” is separated into two different affects. What follows is a more extensive discussion of the script theory, which does not really contradict the older versions in Volumes 1 and 2. The internal representations of the coassembled ideo-affective-perceptual-memorial-action-affect scenes are called scripts. They are part of the societal “role,” but there is an inbuilt tension between the two, because of the higher conservatism of the scripts. The theory of scripts is taken from computer science and elaborated much further than in the first two volumes. This theory is used in many different fields under different names. Within psychoanalysis, Pfeiffer and Leuzinger-Bohleber (1992), Modell (1984), and Stern (1985) use very similar models, probably independently. Tomkins comes close to psychoanalytic thoughts on repetition compulsion by introducing “nuclear scripts.” He thinks of an information-seeking process filling out the unknown according to the nuclear script, and, by doing so, re-creating variants of it over and over again. In addition, he thinks that there are nuclear scripts which are never terminated, remaining to be redone over and over again as human basic tasks. One is the affect script around death and dying, the other around triangulation. - 932 - For psychoanalysis, the part of Tomkins's work dealing with the specificity of the affect system, including that of specific signals, seems to me the most important part of his thinking for the clinical praxis. This means that the ideas on complementary and concor...
Charles Spezzano
