Silvan Tomkins - Biography

Biography

The following is a summary based on a biographical essay by Irving Alexander.

Silvan Tomkins was born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish immigrants, and raised in Camden, New Jersey. He studied playwriting as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, but immediately on graduating, enrolled as a graduate student in Psychology. He withdrew, however, upon completing only the Master’s degree, finding the Penn Psychology Department’s emphasis on psychophysics unfriendly to his interests. Remaining at Penn, however, he received his PhD in Philosophy in 1934, working on value theory with Edgar A. Singer.

After a year handicapping horse races, he relocated to Harvard for postdoctoral study in Philosophy with W.V. Quine. In time he became aware of the Harvard Psychological Clinic and in 1937 joined its staff, entering a particularly productive and happy period of his life. During this period, he published his first book, Contemporary Psychopathology, containing a survey of contemporary thought as well as his own contribution to it. He wrote a book about the projective Thematic Apperception Test, then developed the Picture Arrangement Test that combined elements of projection and forced choice.

In 1947 he married Elizabeth "BeeGee" Taylor; the marriage would last nearly three decades. The same year, he moved to Princeton University's Department of Psychology to take a position that would entail a large amount of frustration. First, he would work at the Educational Testing Service, which required him to submit documentation of the precise hours he worked in the building. At the same time he worked for Princeton University, which never fully supported the graduate program in Clinical Psychology he tried to establish.

However, during his Princeton career he was able to spend a year at the Ford Center in Palo Alto, California, where he wrote what became the first two volumes of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. At this point in his career he began to have a mentoring relationship with two younger scholars—Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard—who would later become better known than Tomkins and whose early concepts of emotion owes much to Tomkins'.

After receiving an NIMH career research award, he left Princeton for CUNY Graduate Center in 1965, then in 1968 moved to Rutgers University, from which he retired in 1975 to work on his Script theory.