The affective dimension, as it appears across the depth-psychology corpus, names the felt, evaluative, and motivational register of psychic life that is irreducible to cognition yet inseparable from it. Simondon situates affectivity within ontogenesis itself, treating affection and emotion as markers of a being’s relation to ongoing individuation — anxiety, for instance, signals a catastrophic inversion of that process. Panksepp grounds the affective dimension in subcortical evolutionary architecture, arguing that basic affective-cognitive interactions such as wanting and not wanting constitute the most primal layer of subjectivity shared across mammalian species. Schore locates the affective dimension developmentally, showing how early dyadic interactions shape representational worlds through affect-laden exchanges between infant and caregiver. Gallagher, following Husserl’s phenomenology, identifies an ‘affective tonality’ implicit to the retentional-protentional stream of consciousness, prior to any reflective knowing of oneself as affected. Menninghaus maps the affective dimension across aesthetic experience, emphasizing that aesthetic emotions span the full arousal spectrum and that their valence — positive, negative, or mixed — operates within an asymmetrical pleasure bias. Sedgwick, writing from a Jungian clinical standpoint, speaks of a ‘mutative affective experience’ as the transformative core of therapeutic encounter. Taken together, these voices reveal a fundamental tension: whether the affective dimension is primarily biological substrate, phenomenological structure, relational achievement, or ontological index.