Affect Imagery Consciousness: Volume III: The Negative Affects: Anger and Fear and Volume IV: Cognition: Duplication and Transformation of Information

...brilliant..."--Malcolm Gladwell, Author of Blink The writings for which this essay is offered as a Prologue consumed him from the mid-1950s through the end of his life in 1991. Knowing it was his 'lifework,' Tomkins conflated 'life' and 'work,' reifying the superstition that its completion would equal death and refusing to release for publication long-completed material. He knew the risks associated with this obsessive, neurotic behavior, and the results were as bad as predicted. The first two volumes of Affect Imagery Consciousness (AIC) were released in 1962 and 1963, Volume III in 1991 shortly before he succumbed to a particularly virulent strain of small cell lymphoma, and Volume IV a year after his death. This last book contains Tomkins's understanding of neocortical cognition, ideas that are even now exciting, but until this current publication of his work as a single supervolume, almost nobody has read it. The bulk of his audience had died along with the enthusiasm generated by his ideas. Big science is now more a matter of big machines and unifocal discoveries as the basis for pars pro toto reasoning than big ideas based on the assembly and analysis of all that is known. Tomkins ignored nothing from any science past or present that might lead him toward a more certain understanding of the mind. Every idea, every theory deserved attention if only because significant observations can loiter in blind alleys."--From the prologue by Donald Nathanson, MD Volume 2 of Springer's deluxe new edition of Tomkins's masterpiece includes The Negative Affects: Fear and Anger and Cognition: Duplication and Transformation of Information.

Table of Contents:
Prologue by Donald L. Nathanson, MD VOLUME III—THE NEGATIVE AFFECTS: ANGER AND FEAR Dedication Biography Preface Part I: Modifications, Clarifications, and Developments in Affect Theory 24. Affect As Analogic Amplification: Modifications and Clarifications in Theory 25. Affect and Cognition: “Reasons” As Coincidental Causes of Affect Evocation 26. Affect and Cognition: Cognition As Central and Causal in Psychological Magnification Part II: Anger and Fear 27. Anger and Its Innate Activation 28. The Magnification of Anger 29. The Differential Magnification of Anger 30. The Socialization of Anger 31. Ideology and Anger 32. Anger-Management and Anger-Control Scripts 33. Anger in Affluence and Damage-Repair Scripts 34. Anger in Depressive Scripts 35. Anger in Disgust-Decontamination Scripts 36. Antitoxic Anger-Avoidance Scripts 37. Antitoxic, Anger-Driven Expressive and Counteractive Scripts 38. Antitoxic, Anger-Driven Power and Recasting Scripts 39. Antitoxic, Anger-Driven Destructive Scripts 40. Fear and Its Socialization 41. Fear Magnification and Fear-Based Scripts Epilogue VOLUME IV—COGNITION: DUPLICATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF INFORMATION Dedication Preface Acknowledgments 42. Introduction to the Second Half of Human Being Theory Part I: Cognition 43. Cognition: What Is It and Where Is It? 44. Varieties of Media Mechanisms: A Bottom-Up Perspective 45. Varieties of Information Gain and Script Formation: A Top-Down Perspective Part II: Memory 46. Memory: Defining Characteristics 47. The Storage and Retrieval of Imagery: The Nature of These Processes 48. The Possibility and Probability of Retrieving Stored Information 49. Implications for Human Development: Continuity and Discontinuity 50. Factors Governing the Activation of Early Memories Part III: Perception 51. Perception: Defining Characteristics—Central Matching of Imagery 52. The Lower Senses 53. The Higher Senses Part IV: Other Centrally Controlled Duplicating Mechanisms 54. The Central Assembly: The Limited Channel of Consciousness 55. The Feedback Mechanism: Consciousness, The Image, and the Motoric Epilogue: Rate Change and Dimensionality as Fundamental Axiom References—Volumes III and IV Author Index I-1 Subject Index I-5

About the Author :
Silvan S. Tomkins, PhD, (1911-1991) was one of the most influential theorists of 20th-century psychology and is generally considered the founder of modern affective science. From 1947 until his retirement in 1975, Tomkins taught at Princeton University, The CUNY Graduate Center, and Rutgers University.

Review :
"Silvan Tomkins may have been the best face reader there ever was. Tomkins was from Philadelphia, the son of a dentist from Russia. He was short, and slightly thick around the middle, with a wild mane of white hair and huge black plastic-rimmed glasses. He taught psychology at Princeton and Rutgers and was the author of Affect Imagery Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant."