Reviews for Shame and its sisters

The average rating for Shame and its sisters based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-11-19 00:00:00 Scott Becker Like Freud (as described by the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman), Silvan Tomkins was "not doing science ... that was a mistake he made." What he *was* doing is practically unclassifiable: essayistic (but epic-sized) meanderings through the combinatorially generated diversity of human types? Not Freud (whom Tomkins periodically shoots down with respectful impatience) but Proust is his nearest intellectual ally, albeit with the tasteful precision swapped out for a kind of nerd-in-his-mother's-basement earnestness; the contraption he cobbles together may work only fitfully as an explanation of the psyche, but ranks among the best descriptions of it.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-06-04 00:00:00 Michael COLEMAN Tomkins provides an account of an 'affect system' operating autonomously from any Freudian notion of sexual drives. In light of Foucault's debunking of a repressive hypothesis, Tomkins' work is particularly interesting for the unhinging of shame from sexual repression.