The term 'particle' occupies a contested and philosophically generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning less as a settled physical category than as a pressure-point at which the boundaries between matter, mind, and field repeatedly break down. The most sustained treatments appear in McGilchrist, Simondon, Pauli, and von Franz, each approaching the concept from a different disciplinary vantage while converging on a shared conclusion: the particle, far from being the ultimate building block of reality, is a secondary, derivative, or perspectival phenomenon arising from continuous underlying fields. McGilchrist marshals quantum field theory to argue that 'particles' are ripples in fields, a thesis he recruits in service of his broader hemispheric argument against the left brain's tendency to carve reality into bounded, discrete objects. Simondon, working from a philosophy of individuation, reconceives the particle not as a substance but as a modality of relation — its identity constituted by discontinuous quantum exchanges rather than by spatial location. Pauli engages the particle with full technical precision, exploring exclusion principles, particle-antiparticle conjugation, and the formalism of field quantization. Von Franz extends the particle into the domain of synchronicity, invoking the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox to suggest that particles participate in a non-local 'absolute knowledge.' Schwartz, most unusually, maps wave-particle duality onto the Self-parts distinction in Internal Family Systems. Together, these voices render 'particle' a liminal concept between discreteness and continuity, substance and relation, locality and wholeness.
In the library
22 passages
'All particles are waves in a universally distributed continuous shared field that envelops each and all of us: values in the field change with space and time.' Wave and particle are two modes of being of the same field phenomenon.
McGilchrist, following Tong and de Broglie, argues that 'particle' is not a fundamental ontological category but a secondary appearance of continuous fields, making the wave-particle dipole a universal structural feature of reality.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
'The building blocks of our theories are not particles but fields: continuous, fluidlike objects spread throughout space … The objects that we call fundamental particles are not fundamental. Instead they are ripples of continuous fields.'
McGilchrist cites Tong to establish that 'fundamental particle' is a pedagogical fiction, and that discreteness is molded from underlying continuity — a thesis he aligns with right-hemispheric perception of reality.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
'No longer are there absolutely 'elementary' particles; everything that behaves like a particle is, to some extent, an emergent consequence of a network of interactions.'
Drawing on the Standard Model of Particle Physics, McGilchrist argues that what appears as a particle is always an emergent relational phenomenon, not a primitive substance — and that consciousness participates in its being.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
'No longer are there absolutely 'elementary' particles; everything that behaves like a particle is, to some extent, an emergent consequence of a network of interactions.'
A parallel passage reinforcing McGilchrist's claim that the particle-as-substance is replaced by the particle-as-emergent-relational-event, situated within a broader argument for process ontology.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
A particle is a particle not insofar as it occupies a certain place spatially, but insofar as it only exchanges its energy with other supports of energy in a quantum manner. Discontinuity is a modality of relation.
Simondon redefines the particle not as a spatially located substance but as a mode of discontinuous relational exchange, making quantum discreteness a property of how being relates rather than what being is.
Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
'A particle is a localised bounded object. It has edges, or perhaps, as some think, it is only a point. A particle exists in space and around it is empty space. A field, on the other hand, is something that exists everywhere as a property of space.'
McGilchrist, quoting Brooks, uses the particle-field contrast as the ontological correlate of the left-brain/right-brain distinction: the particle as bounded, isolated, local versus the field as everywhere-present and relational.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
'The difference [between fields and particles] lies in how we choose to perceive reality – the picture in our mind – and this difference is immense.'
The particle-field distinction is framed as fundamentally perspectival and mind-dependent, linking physics directly to McGilchrist's neurological thesis about hemispheric modes of apprehending the world.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
'An electron is nothing like, say, a tiny pea. An electron is simply an energy increment of a spread-out matter field.' Yet the electron is a real quantum of the field, that has an independent existence to a degree.
McGilchrist balances the anti-particle thesis with the acknowledgment that field quanta retain a relative, event-like independence, making the particle neither pure fiction nor primitive substance.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
'according to the most successful current model in physics, quantum field theory, there are in any case no particles. When a field collapses and is quantised, it looks like a particle – but isn't.'
McGilchrist cites quantum field theory's negation of the particle as a real entity, using this to reinforce Bergson's intuition that motion and continuity are ontologically prior to discrete things.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
We can enter that field through meditation, for example, and become part of that field and lose our particle-ness. We become nondual in the wave state. When the meditation is over, we particle-ize again.
Schwartz maps wave-particle duality directly onto the psychotherapeutic distinction between Self (field/wave state) and parts (particle-ized, bounded selfhood), making quantum ontology a model for internal psychological structure.
particle B 'knows' instantly and without any communication (slower than the speed of light at least!) what change has been undergone by particle A, with which it was initially connected.
Von Franz invokes the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox to argue that particles share a non-local 'absolute knowledge,' drawing a direct analogy with Jung's concept of synchronicity and the unus mundus.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
A particle can no longer be thought of as a three-dimensional object (like a marble or a speck of dust) situated in space. It has become more abstract in our mind. Electrons, for example, can be called 'dynamic four-dimensional bodies in space-time' or 'waves of probability.'
Thich Nhat Hanh reads the physics of the particle through Buddhist philosophy, arguing that nuclear particles — like the 'speck of dust' in the Avatamsaka Sutra — combine space and time and dissolve the ordinary concept of located material substance.
Nhat Hanh, Thich, The Sun My Heart, 1988supporting
a corpuscle which cannot be characterized by a rigorously fixed mass representing the substantiality of an unchangeable matter … the whole set of principles of atomist thought that seeks the inductive clarity of corpuscular structures is called into question by Lorentz's law.
Simondon demonstrates that the Lorentz transformation destroys the classical atomist conception of the particle as a fixed, self-identical substantial unit, since mass itself becomes variable and relational.
Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
the electrons in atoms aren't tiny material particles or little balls, which run around atomic nuclei like planets around the sun, but they are standing waves: when an electron enters an atom, it ceases to be a material particle and becomes a wave.
Ponte and Schafer, situating Jungian psychology within quantum physics, argue that the particle-to-wave transformation of the electron at the atomic level discloses a non-material, probability-structured foundation to physical reality.
Ponte, Diogo Valadas; Schafer, Lothar, Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century, 2013supporting
'The mathematical formalism of field theory suggests that these lines can be interpreted in two ways, either as positrons moving forward in time or as electrons moving backwards in time.'
Von Franz examines time-symmetry in subatomic particle physics — specifically the indistinguishability of forward and backward temporal trajectories — as evidence for the psychoid nature of time at the microphysical level.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
'It is a general feature of the laws of nature governing the various 'elementary particles' and their interaction that to each particle there belongs an antiparticle.'
Pauli articulates the particle-antiparticle conjugation symmetry as a foundational feature of physical law, establishing that no particle exists without its mirror-opposite — a polarity with significant resonances in Jungian enantiodromia.
Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting
In the case of the exclusion principle there can never exist a limiting case where such operators can be replaced by a classical field.
Pauli demonstrates that particles governed by the exclusion principle resist the classical field limit entirely, marking a fundamental divide between quantum discreteness and classical continuity.
Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting
For centuries we have labored to locate and identify the so-called elementary particle—the fundamental building block of material existence.
Conforti frames the centuries-long search for the elementary particle as the background against which an archetypal field theory must be understood, positioning field over particle as the more psychologically and scientifically adequate concept.
Conforti, Michael, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche, 1999supporting
'wave' and 'particle' perspectives are essential to make sense of certain physical phenomena.
Panksepp invokes wave-particle complementarity as a methodological analogy for the need to hold multiple, apparently contradictory conceptual frameworks simultaneously in the study of emotion.
Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998aside
the corpuscle-singularity as being subject to a 'quantum potential' that was precisely the mathematical expression of the reaction of the wave on it.
Simondon elaborates de Broglie's pilot-wave interpretation, in which the particle is a singularity guided by a quantum potential — making the wave the primary ontological medium and the particle its mobile center.
Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
simultaneously in the mind (for example, the position of a particle and its velocity). The likeness of desire to ice in Sophokles' poem pulls you into such knowledge, a pull that splits your mental vision.
Carson uses Heisenberg's uncertainty principle — the impossibility of simultaneously knowing a particle's position and velocity — as an analogy for the irresolvable epistemic split produced by erotic desire.
Carson, Anne, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986aside
each kind of body has a particle of a different size from the rest, and there are several grades of each kind. This may be what is meant by inequality as the cause of heterogeneity.
Plato's Timaeus introduces differentiated particle sizes for each of the four primary bodies as the structural basis of material heterogeneity, representing the classical precursor to modern discrete-particle ontologies.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside