Vernon C. Kelly Jr. - The Upside of Shame: Therapeutic Interventions Using the Positive Aspects of a Negative Emotion

I N HIS BOOK Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, the poet David Whyte describes gratitude as arising from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Numerous people throughout our personal and professional lives have contributed to our learning and the information we offer in this book. Quietly, and with overwhelming gratitude, we recognize all of them.

I N SECTION I OF THIS BOOK, we presented the basic tenets of affect theory and script theory. These form the essential foundation of just two components of Silvan S. Tomkinss investigations into the formation of personality that he called human being theory. In Affect Imagery Consciousness, he went much further in his pursuit of answers to the question, What do human beings really want?

Human being theory is divided into three overall categories: motivation, cognition, and minding. Motivation is mostly explained by affect theory as it clarifies how affects and emotions arise and how they promote survival by directing attention and motivating behavior. Tomkins described cognition as a system that duplicates and transforms information into conscious reports or images that are meaningful. Cognition involves a complex mediation between perception, motor (body) control, memory, and feedback systems. He considered minding or caring as the final piece of the puzzle in personality formation. It is through minding that the brain organizes and automates information into scripts so we do not have to relearn everything every day, hence providing a further survival advantage. Scripts represent the how and why we mind or care about everything we do or think. Scripts give us goals, whereas affects give us motives.

Taken as a whole, human being theory is the most comprehensive theory of personality yet developed. It includes methods of explaining what motivates us at this second, this minute, and this day as well as in the establishment of life goals; what motivates various healthy and unhealthy behaviors, both in individuals and in groups; what motivates attention and impulsive actions; what motivates the desire to be in relationships; and what motivates the formation of larger groups of people and the various social behaviors that arise in these groups. It is, furthermore, a theory that provides a clear link to the primary motivation of our species to survive and reproduce ourselves.

The purpose of this appendix is to present a somewhat fuller synopsis of human being theory. We first briefly review Tomkinss theory of the function of cognition. Then we examine in more detail the types of scripts outlined by Tomkins and conclude with a discussion of minding.

Cognition

Transformation and duplication of information are the primary functions of the cognitive system. Tomkins considered consciousness to be a unique type of duplication by which some aspects of the world reveal themselves to another part of the same world (1992, p. 115). Duplication of self and information about changing conditions is a critical necessity for the preservation of our species. This is true whether it is old cells that need replacing by duplication in order to preserve the bodys physical integrity or the need to create entirely new organisms by duplicating the genetic material for reproduction or information about the world that needs to be duplicated in order to replace information that is no longer relevant. In order for information to be duplicated by the neurons in the cognitive system, it must be transformed in some fashion that is biophysical or biochemical in nature. This process turns unconscious information into messages that become conscious reports.

Exactly how such transformation of information takes place is yet to be determined, but it should be noted that the process of duplication does not operate as if the cognitive system is a high-grade copy machine. In fact, the information is not duplicated exactly. What one becomes aware of is information in the form of conscious reports that are analogues of what our senses perceive. Tomkins used the term images to clarify this distinction. A simple analogy is to imagine that you are looking at a rose. The image you perceive contains nothing of the physical characteristics of the rose. For that to happen, the atoms of the rose would have to be transported into your brain tissue. Obviously, this does not occur. Instead, what the cognitive system has done is duplicate the rose and transform information about it into a conscious report that includes the color, texture, movement, smell, and many other aspects of the rose. It is, however, by no means an exact copy. Images are representation. They can include visual perceptions but do not have to. They may, for instance, be primarily auditory or olfactory or motoric in nature. An image can be thought of as a dream we learn to have. The important question is not whether the image is true, but whether it provides information sufficient for our needs and survival. In summary, cognition is the process of transforming information, including affect, into imagery. Tomkins used the word imagery as an umbrella term for how cognition, through a complex of subsystems involving perception, motor control, memory, language, and feedback, transforms general motivation into specific ways of learning about the world. Images can include aspects of objects and events as well as such phenomena as ideas, concepts, plans, affects, and more.

Tomkins theorized that a subcortical area of the brain acts as the site for consciousness. He called this area the Central Assembly to signify its executive function of putting together messages from both external and internal sources to create conscious reports in the form of images. The mechanisms of the central assembly are composed of:

Perceptual: sensory nerves, sensory receptors with effector muscles, and cortical receiving areas

Motor: cortical sending area, motor effectors (muscles), and sensory receptors in the muscles

Memory: short-term reverberating circuits, receptor areas for longer-term storage, and afferent and efferent nerves between areas

Each of these systems contains feedback circuitry connected with the central assembly as a whole. Messages entering the central assembly compete for the limited channel of consciousness in ways similar to how stimuli compete for recognition in the affect system. Selection is based on the density of neural firing, which can be increased by affect, cross-sensory summation, and memory recruitment. Those messages with the greatest density are transformed into conscious reports. Bois summarized Tomkinss concept of

the central assembly as the transmuting mechanism (it transmutes messages in the nervous system into conscious reports) plus those components of the nervous system which are functionally connected with the transmuting mechanism at a given moment. This central assembly is not strictly anatomical; it is not limited to a neural feedback firing in reverberatory circuits, cell assemblies, and phase sequences. It integrates, at a more comprehensive level of existence, the various aspects of our semantic transactions: thinking, feeling, self-moving, electrochemical, environmental, past and anticipated future. (1996, pp. 264265)

Central Image for Motivation

The consequence of having an affect system with inherently rewarding and punishing affects, combined with our cognitive abilities to analyze, remember, and create images of what we want, all act as a feedback that work together like four sections in an orchestra, one sometimes more prominent than the others, depending on circumstances, but all always playing a significant part: