Silvan Tomkins

Silvan Solomon Tomkins (1911 to 1991) was an American psychologist born in Philadelphia who entered the University of Pennsylvania intending to become a playwright and left in 1934 with a doctorate in philosophy. After postdoctoral study at Harvard, where the personality research of the Harvard Psychological Clinic fascinated him, he spent eighteen years in the psychology department at Princeton from 1947. His interest in the relation between emotion, which he came to call affect, and personality formation became the defining theme of his career, and his volumes Affect Imagery Consciousness declared the affect system the primary motivating force in human life.