The Question Is How Tomkins' *Scripts* Apply to Systems

• Responses to First Learning about Affect Theory by Jim Duffy a.k.a. J.C.D., 2/28/97
  
  

This is the safest of the BOL forums in which to review the social dimension of our actions as psychotherapists, because we are practicing being skillful with shame here. Please help keep me on (the social dimension) track in my questioning----which is about "script" behaviors as described by Tomkins.

Vick, Don, what does Tomkins mean by "script" behaviors in the systems sense? I want to try to integrate Tomkins concept of script into Robert F. Allen's Normative Systems----not as an intellectual exercise, but to understand and encourage how we as therapists can be more effective change agents bringing Tomkins' focus on feeling into the mainstream. The sooner this happens, the better chance we have of surviving. As I said in my earlier post, engineers as a profession are a threat to our survival, because engineers' group enforced behaviors limit self review of their social impacts. Hopefully we as therapists can become more skillful extending the limits of our own group behaviors to be more effective in changing large systems.

Ed and everyone, thank you for helping me keep the systems focus, at least for the present, by allowing me to get an answer to my question about how Tomkins' concept of "scripts" applies to systems. This will help me see how we as psychotherapists may become even more strategic and powerful in working with systems than we are already.

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