"Is It 'Natural'?"

 

There seems to be a fairly clear theoretical line between what Ekman and Tomkins think about shame.

That said Ekman clearly holds Tomkins in high esteem and always had/has his picture in his office.

"We", those that follow Tomkins, clearly think that if you understand "interest" as central to our emotive life and then "shame" as a consequence of interrupting that central feeling, well, just about everything becomes much clearer in life and in lying and truth-telling.

The ending of this week's show was fascinating as a cliffhanger. I doubt that Dr. L. is going to blurt out that it was Silvan Tomkins that taught him everything. If you remember we learn evidently that "The Natural" learned from being abused and then the camera turns to Dr. L. and we are left hanging as to what motivated him to learn this material. The stories of Tomkins' overwhelming influence on Dr. Ekman's career are well documented. A good place to pick up some of this history is Mike Galdwell's "Blink."

A comment on this is that if Torres learned from being abused then all of her "gift" was not acquired so "naturally."

Here in this line, I am now amending this comment with the knowledge gained from the episode where we learn of Dr. L's mother's suicide. That in conjunction with reading and being reminded of Dr. Ekman's own mother's suicide now reminds me that it certainly was not all Tomkins that influenced Ekman.

I thought, by the way, this was the best episode so far in some ways. I am not sure why. I wish the whole thing went a little more smoothly and felt a little less like a class. That said I believe they had to "bore" us a bit with the didactic part upfront. Take that risk otherwise, people would be lost. That is they first taught us a good bit about what these people were doing and now they can shift a bit more to the storyline.

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