Two very different minds. Silvan Tomkins (1911-1991) is considered by many to be the Einstein of emotional science. His theory of emotion defines a core set of indivisible neurobiological elements – “affects” -whose innate and learning conscripted behaviors aggregate to explain the entire universe of human emotion. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) also viewed humans through a biological lens. His writings transformed the struggles of ordinary, marginalized people into profound, mythic struggles for human dignity. The following is one outcome of the these two minds crossing paths.
On September 26th 2026, I had the opportunity to present my work to the members of the Silvan Tomkins organization. It began with how my story led to my learning with Drs. Gary David, Donald Nathanson, and Silvan Tomkins and how their work led my learning into the role of shame in how human beings learn to become themselves. The Q&As (41:46) are my favorite parts. Below the video I share additional background details followed by links to more information on the topics touched on.
Slides used: Tominks 92626
For the first decade or so of my learning work I thought of shame like most people do: a pain in the self. I thought of shame as a response to judging yourself or being judged by others as “not good enough”, which of course is one way to look at it. What I didn’t understand was that, far more than just an outcome of one’s or another’s judging, shame could also be the judge that directs outcomes.
Dr. Gary David, a gifted jazz vocalist, epistemologist, philosopher, affect theorist-therapist introduced me to and mentored me into the work of Dr. Silvan Tomkins. He was a long time friend and mentor of my wife, at that time, who became our marriage counsellor. His mission wasn’t to save the marriage, it was to help us learn into what was right for each of us wherever that led us. Rather than indulge us in ventilating our stories, Gary worked to channel our learning into how we were emotionally participating. He used his own practice-adapted and enhanced version of Tomkins’ work to reveal the emotional habits beneath the surface of our behavioral conflicts. Inevitably, rightly, the marriage ended, but over the course of the ordeal I developed such respect for Gary’s goodness, his deep dialogue skills, and his interest in carefully learning together that we continued to deepen our friendship and collaboration which continues to this day.
After the marriage counselling phase, Gary and I continued to explore the theoretical correlations between his and Tomkins affect-work and my learning-work. Beyond the theoretical bridges, Gary also challenged me to apply Tomkins to learning about the affective functioning implicitly motivating all thought and feeling. Learning through Tomkins’ lens into how shame’s precursory biology affects attention, changed my understanding of how human beings learn to become themselves.
Perhaps coincidentally, while I was still learning to recognize affect as an operating system, my daughter began to “shame out of reading”. Just as my son Daaron had once revealed the bizarre confusions involved, my daughter revealed the emotional danger involved.
It was painful and frightening to watch my innately wise, brightly alive daughter spiral downward into what I call mind-shame.
One day at a garage sale, back when the danger she was in was still dawning on me, she found the book “The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights”, by John Steinbeck. As she put the book in my hands, she asked me if it would be a good one for me to read to her.
I will never forget the power of the first words of the book’s preface:
“Some people there are who,
being grown, forget the horrible
task of learning to read. It is
perhaps the greatest single effort
that the human undertakes, and
he must do it as a child.”
It hit me like a sign should (more). These were Steinbeck’s opening words to the preface of a book he wrote for his own kids. All at once, they connected the dots between the cognitive-linguistic challenge my son Daaron revealed, the emotional downward spiral my daughter was experiencing, and the learning disabling effects of shame that I was, with Gary’s help, learning to understand.
Deanna’s shame, understood through Tomkins lens and my work on learning, led me to understand that:
- Most of our kids can’t help but learn, to various degrees, to become ashamed of their minds – can’t help learning to avoid the shame they experience when learning is chronically confusing.
- Chronic reading shame isn’t just a consequence of early protracted reading difficulty it becomes the main impediment to reading improvement.
- Though learning-shame is common across many dimensions of life, it is most insidiously dangerous when learning requires working through artificial info-tech confusions faster than one can think (reading).
- Not only is society oblivious to Steinbeck’s “greatest single effort” in terms of the artificial complexity involved, we are unaware that the ways we contextualize the emotional experience of learning to read is directly responsible for a population scale learning disability.
These realizations motivated the beginnings of the Children of the Code documentary project. When I shared the idea of creating a documentary that would include exploring the effects of shame on learning to read with Gary he suggested I reach out to Dr. Donald Nathanson. Dr. Nathanson was the Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College, and the founding Executive Director of the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute.
2002-07-26 T19:41 | From: David Boulton dboulton@implicity.org | To: nathanson@tomkins.org | Subject: Children of the Code – PBS series – (shame) Nathanson 1
Hello Dr. Nathanson,
We have a mutual friend in Dr. Gary David who has, I believe, shared some of my work with you in the past.
I am currently engaged in research for an upcoming PBS mini series on the history of the English writing system. The “Children of the Code” is a 3 episode PBS project currently in pre-production. It will begin with the story of the history of writing and end in an examination of the role the English writing system plays in the process of learning to read.
One aspect of the final segment will explore the downward spiraling relationship between shame and cognitive shock in the context of learning to read. I realize you are not a reading specialist – we will establish the shame dimensions of learning to read through other researchers. However, I would very much like to interview you about the general consequences to our
cognitive processes of shame.
The producers of this series believe that the “Children of the Code” series will help foster a new understanding and appreciation for the history of our written language and its effects upon our consciousness.
Please let us know if we may interview you about the remarkable relationship between shame and how our minds learn to read.
Thank you very much,
David Boulton
…learning to learn, as if, how well we learn is more important than what we learn…
2002-07-27 T03:27:32Z | From: Donald Nathanson nathanson@tomkins.org | To: dboulton@implicity.org |Subject: Re: Children of the Code – PBS series – (shame) Nathanson 1
To be a friend of Gary David is to live with significant advantage over the rest of the world. He stands at the top of my list of people with whom I’d love to be trapped for several days. So you and I have a lot in common.
The other day, he sent me something that involved you and I ran the links to get the flavor of your world. My greatest surprise is that we’ve not been in contact before. Both of us want to change one apparently small part of our culture in order to shift it to another track in ways we hope are too subtle for many to notice.
I look forward to consulting with you and presenting my schools program based on teaching little kids about innate affect, the Compass of Shame, and a conferencing system through which children learn to talk with their peers about what upsets them. Currently I’m working with a team to produce a DVD teaching working clergy my basic premise that all explosive violence is a reaction to perceived humiliation, and helping them teach these principles to youth and adult groups.
Incidentally, when we talk about the way chronic shame interferes with any form of study because the affect itself turns off critical thinking, I’d like to mention as well that for generations, most people studied in order to prevent the embarrassment at being exposed as “stupid”. What a great way to start talking.
Don Nathanson
After those initial messages we engaged in dozens of other emails conversations as well as two days of interviews and two nights of dialogue – one in DC and another much later at his home. Don continued to be a supporter and wrote one of the most beautiful endorsements:
2003-06-29 T14:09:05Z From: Donald L. Nathanson, MD nathanson@tomkins.org To: dboulton@implicity.org – subject: revision
As a scientist and clinician working in the field of human emotion and cognition for 25 years, I have been vitally interested in the problem of getting people to change incorrect but closely held beliefs. Like most scholars, until awakened by the “Children of the Code ” project, I took intake through reading as much for granted as eating and drinking. Very few of us had paid sufficient attention to the specific emotions triggered in children as they begin to read. We took for granted that every child learned to read as a rite of passage that became insignificant once completed, and that the pride triggered by fluency and success can make reading and writing a joy. Yet any impediment to mastery of the confusing and illogical code that connects spoken and written English must trigger shame, the emotion that stops all useful thought. So painful does shame become in the public arena of the schoolroom that our children swiftly divide into two streams and two futures purely on the basis of their response to the shame that accompanies the struggle to decode our written language. “Children of the Code ” merits the serious attention of anyone interested in the future of America.
Donald L. Nathanson, M.D.
Donald Nathanson passed in 2017.
Through Gary David, Donald Nathanson, and Silvan Tomkins, and through my own first-person inside-out learning with my daughter, myself, and everyone I encounter, I continue learning into how shame’s precursory biology motivates both healthy and unhealthy learning. The role of emotion in learning, particularly the consequences of the preconscious manipulation of attention by our shame aversions (mind-shame), is one of the most important domains of my life and work.
Thank you John Steinbeck and Drs. Gary David, Donald Nathanson, and Silvan Tomkins.
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An AI proxy of Silvan Tomkins comments on the affect related points discussed in the video of the talk. The talk suggests that these affect-script dynamics do not merely influence the emotional consequences of learning; they participate in organizing the real-time attentional conditions under which learning proceeds. |
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Interviews with Dr. Donald Nathanson Written Transcript of first interview (no video) Clips: Cognitive Shock – Pay Attention to Shame – Track Look, Listen – Expectation of Shame – Wariness – Wouldn’t they be Stupid? – Shame Prevents Learning – Shame Prevents Learning 2 |
| Shame: The Dark Heart of Reading Difficulties
The main 8 chapter videos from the Children of the Code project that focus on the role of shame in perpetuating the decades old crisis in literacy learning. Clips: – 25 “experts” |
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Shame isn’t just an unpleasant side effect. For most who chronically struggle, shame anxiety and shame avoidance (conscious and not) become learning disabling. Just as interest affect varies at the frequency of letter and word recognition so too does shame. Without necessarily rising to the level of conscious awareness, reading shame disrupts, distracts, and chokes the cognitive processing necessary for learning to read in the first place. |
| Mind Shame
From the challenge of learning to read to learning challenges in general, what happens to children who chronically feel ashamed of their learning? Learning to avoid learning challenges in order to avoid feeling shame is the greatest acquired learning disability in the human species. |
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Acquired Learning Disabilities We need to differentiate learning disabilities acquired through learning from innately neurobiologically ordained or subsequent physical injury determined learning disabilities. See also: Emotional Aversions |
Thinking About How Shame WorksThe effects of affect are ultimately determined by learning even as affect determines the motivational focus of learning. |
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Learning into Unlearned Emotion Some aspects of our emotionality aren’t learned, yet all aspects of our emotionality that can be changed are changed by learning. Learning is where adaptation switches from being inherited to being individual. |
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Human learning makes animal emotionality human. Whatever is important is only important because it’s emotionally important. Whatever is emotionally important is only emotionally important because we learned it to be. Though emotion has is own biological logic, the context it’s operating within is always learned. |
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Learning into Unlearned Emotion Moebius Syndrome reveals the trans-somatic plasticity of emotional learning – the virtuality of emotional learning. |
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Instinctually Learned Emotionality Human learning makes animal emotionality human. Whatever is important is only important because it’s emotionally important. Whatever is emotionally important is only emotionally important because we learned it to be. Though emotion has is own biological logic, the context it’s operating within is always learned. |
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Hormesis and Affect Theory
A dialogue between AI proxies of Silvan Tomkins (affect-script theory) and Edward Calabrese (hormesis) is a distilled synthesis of how each would translate the other’s domain into their own logic, and what their combined framework might look like. |
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An AI proxy of Silvan Tomkins (affect-script theory) critiques Edward Calabrese’s Hormesis Psychology Paper. An AI proxy of Edward Calabrese responds. |
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What is Pain?
A dialogue between AI proxies of Silvan Tomkins (affect-script theory) and Edward Calabrese (hormesis) is a distilled synthesis of how each would translate the other’s domain into their own logic, and what their combined framework would look like. |
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AI’s proxies of Silvan Tomkins (affect-script theory) and Edward Calabrese (hormesis) critique Dr. Todd Strong’s video on Strong Toxic Emotions. |
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The Role of Affect in Tangent Migrations
AI’s proxies of Silvan Tomkins (affect-script theory) and Edward Calabrese (hormesis) explore “tangent migrations”. When the charge on an emotion of a memory evoked in the stream of consciousness overpowers the emotions motivating the stream it affectively repurposes attention and memory according to relevance with it (the evoked memory) rather than to the original context, stream, purpose that evoked it. |
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Tangent Migrations & Artificially Conventionalized Learning
We are the only species that artificially conventionalizes learning. To be inwardly healthy we need to learn to be differently outwardly interfacing with the artificial dimensions of human life. |
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Co-implication is the mutually defining interdependence between elements in a system, such that each element derives its meaning, role, or effect not in isolation, but in active relation to all others in context. Co-implication and affect theory converge at the point where meaning, relevance, and action readiness emerge from dynamically evolving internal and external conditions. |
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Other topics touched on:
Slides used: Tominks 92626