Following the publication of the third volume of his book Affect Imagery Consciousness in 1991, his body of work received renewed interest, leading to attempts by others to summarize and popularize his theories.

However, he withdrew upon completing only the master's degree, finding the Penn Psychology Department's emphasis on psychophysics unfriendly to his interests.

In time, he became aware of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and in 1937 he joined its staff, entering a particularly productive and happy period of his life.

The same year, he moved to Princeton University's Department of Psychology to take a position that would entail a large amount of frustration.

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.

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.

The word denotes a uniquely human, non-specific ‘site’ of awareness, where information from motivation (affects, drives), cognitive (perception, motor, memory), and feedback subsystems is combined, duplicated, processed, and reported, or made conscious.

While Tomkins began with an interest in determining the essential motivations of humans as animal, he also needed to consider how people did what they did, and in turn, where consciousness fit in the puzzle.

But, as a ‘Personologist,’ the study of personality in the tradition of Harvard professor Henry Murray, Tomkins easily understood that biology was only a beginning factor for theorizing a complex set of processes comprising individual humans.

Tomkins names nine ‘affects’ and they are universal, bio-chemical, neuro-physiological mechanisms and processes of the body that amplify triggering information.

Tomkins’ nine named affects are: interest-excitement and enjoyment-joy; surprise-startle; distress-anguish, anger-rage, and fear-terror; disgust, dissmell, shame-humiliation.

This is, in part, why scholars Adam Frank and Elizabeth Wilson (2020) write, “What Tomkins offers, then, is a periodic table of affective elements that combine to become any number of emotional molecular structures or substances”[16] (p. 4).

Inherited from “a civilization, a nation, a religion, a gender, an age, an institution, a class, a region, a family, a profession, or school,” ideological scripts represent “the various faiths by which human beings live and, alas, die”[5] (p. 353).

No person lives without ideological scripts, or ‘idea systems,’ because they “conjoin the three major functions of orientation, evaluation, and sanctions, and above all, because they endow fact with value and affect”[5] (p. 353).

At the time he began articulating his human being theory, much of the related theorising continued around what Antonio Damasio (1994) calls ‘Descartes’ Error,’ the disconnection of the mind from the body.

Cybernetic vocabulary such hardware and software are common today in describing human mentation, but Tomkins embraced this terminology relatively early in its development.

By blending verb and noun forms in the gerund ‘minding,’ he declares that not only is information being processed, but a person both thinks about and cares about their experiences in real time, retroactively, and proactively.

Tomkins’ specific definition of imagery is: reports made conscious and “created by decomposition and synthesis of sensory and stored messages” [7] (p. 14) within the central assembly.

The affects, by their very nature, make humans care, so if an idea-system, an ‘ideology,’ interests or excites or infuriates or disgusts no person, it cannot and will not prosper.

Depending on individual ideo-affective resonances, people must constantly, both individually and collectively, negotiate and re-negotiate idea orientations for daily life, which is a central function of ideological scripts as they “attempt to provide general orientation of the place of human beings in the cosmos and in the society in which they live, an account of their central values, guidance for their realization, sanctions for their fulfillment, their violation, and their justification, and celebration of how life should be lived from here to eternity” [5] (p. 353).

Inherited from “a civilization, a nation, a religion, a gender, an age, an institution, a class, a region, a family, a profession, or school,” ideological scripts represent “the various faiths by which human beings live and, alas, die” [5] (p. 353).

No person lives without ideological scripts, or ‘idea systems,’ because they “conjoin the three major functions of orientation, evaluation, and sanctions, and above all, because they endow fact with value and affect” [5] (p. 353).

As idea-systems developed in Western thought, argues Tomkins, an ubiquitous polarity between Protagoras’ suggestion that “man is the measure of all things” versus Plato’s “Ideas and Essences as the realm of reality and value” [5] (p. 117).

The polarity is also presented in question form—“Is man the measure, an end in himself, an active, creative, thinking, desiring, loving force in nature?

This either-or dichotomy is atypical of Tomkins’ mode of theorizing, which typically involves long lists of contingencies—if this, so that; but if this other, so that other; if another, so this third other, and so on—or what Sedgwick and Frank (1995) call his “alchemy of the contingent” (p. 6) [21].

In fact, while he often emphasizes the extremes to demonstrate his points, ideo-affective postures, and dynamic interactions of ideology and affect, exist as a polarized continuum.

Kant’s philosophy epitomizes this fusion: “How could one synthesize a foundation for morality which was personal and subjective and at the same time universal and objective?

ultimately produced the now universal bifurcation, polarity, and stratification of the innate affects into excitement, surprise, anger, disgust, and dissmell versus enjoyment, distress, shame and fear.

Lucas (2018, p. 63), for example, in a footnote to a discussion of Tomkins’ ideo-affective polarity, points to the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib of American soldier Lynndie England with Iraqi prisoners on a leash and belittling their ‘manhood’ to demonstrate this socialized ‘inversion’ as US military training conditions some young women to be warriors, or to be ‘men.’ Many of his claims around about the polarity, especially if taken out of context, would provoke the ire of critics in modern day humanities and social sciences for the binary structure of the analysis and conclusions.

But Tomkins himself points to Michael Nesbitt’s 1959 article “Friendship, Love and Values” as the first empirical study of the polarity theory which appears to confirm many of the conclusions [5] (p. 138).