Throughout much of his professional life Silvan Tomkins organized his work around the central concern of understanding human motivation, or as he expressed it, in the lead paper of this section on affect theory, he was engaged in a love affair with an idea: “What do human beings really want?”

In “The Quest for Primary Motives: Biography and Autobiography of an Idea,” Tomkins describes the history of this search in American psychology and in his own thinking, focusing primarily on his contribution to our understanding of human motivation, namely, his theory that affects are the primary motivators. However, as he takes the reader on this journey, he touches briefly on his elaborations of the other areas that, for Tomkins, were related to this central idea, such as ideology, the role of the face in affect experience, script theory, and human being theory. These topics constitute the other main sections of this book. Beginning the volume with this article, therefore, serves a dual purpose. It provides a comprehensive retrospective account of Tomkins's work up to 1981, with an excellent presentation of the main tenets of his affect theory, and at the same time, it provides a preview of the contents of this volume of his selected writings by briefly pointing to the interconnectedness of these other topics to his central concern with motivation and affect. As both a retrospective account and a preview, the article is densely packed with ideas, many of which will be explored more thoroughly later in this volume.