The eighth and final installment in our 2023 lecture series will feature Dr. Phil Rose, President of the Tomkins Institute. Please join us on Tuesday, December 12th at 7:30 PM EST for
"I Feel, Therefore I Am":
Reviewing the Thought and Work of
Silvan Tomkins
The bulk of Silvan Tomkins' life's work can be found in the four volumes of his Affect, Imagery, and Consciousness. In this session, Dr. Rose will outline the major elements of Tomkins' work, including his descriptions of the primary innate affects, their role in human motivation, and the distinctions he draws between the phenomena of affect, feeling, and emotion. In addition to concepts such as ideo-affective postures, and their importance to elucidating our contemporary politics, Rose will also discuss Tomkins' affect script theory, which has considerable relevance for clinical psychologists, as Virginia Demos' 2019 book The Affect Theory of Silvan Tomkins for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy attests.
Phil Rose (PhD, Communication and Culture) is a Canadian scholar, teacher, writer, and speaker. He has taught at a number of Canadian universities, published in several international academic journals, and is editor of the volume Confronting Technopoly: Charting a Course Towards Human Survival (2017). A performing musician, he is also author of the books Roger Waters and Pink Floyd: The Concept Albums (2015), Radiohead and the Global Movement for Change: 'Pragmatism Not Idealism' (2016), and Radiohead: Music for a Global Future (2019). A former President of the Media Ecology Association, Rose is currently President of the Tomkins Institute, an organization devoted to exploration of the work of the American personality theorist Silvan Tomkins. Rose has sought to demonstrate the general relevance of Tomkins’ affect-script theory to communication and cultural theorists, and his 2016 work represents the first application of Tomkins' theories to the analysis of musical communication. In 2019, the Media Ecology Association awarded him its Edmund S. Carpenter Award for Career Achievement in Editing in the Field of Media Ecology..
The lecture will be held via Zoom. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Registrants will receive the Zoom link in advance of the lecture.