Seymour Epstein

Seymour (Sy) Epstein was a personality psychologist who died in Amherst on 20 May 2016 at the age of 91. He is best known for Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST), an integrated theory of personality that grew out of his 1973 paper on the self-concept and that replaced the irrational, aggressive unconscious of Freud with an emotional, experiential system that is more adaptive and still essential to a fully integrated person. Science writers have credited his work as an important precursor of the dual-process accounts of thinking made famous by Daniel Kahneman, and Epstein himself felt late in life that his priority had been overlooked. His 1994 paper on the cognitive and psychodynamic unconscious carried the ideas further, and his 2014 book Cognitive-Experiential Theory, published by Oxford University Press, set out the finished theory. Beyond CEST, his research ranged over the cognitive mediation of classical conditioning, stress and coping, drive, conflict, psychopathology and the self-concept, and his work on the aggregation of measures strongly shaped the person-situation debate in personality psychology.