The term ‘particular’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along two intersecting axes: the ontological and the ethical-practical. Ontologically, the question is how the particular relates to the universal — how a singular being, event, or instance stands in relation to type, form, or law. Simondon argues with remarkable precision that the type belongs to the particular being rather than the reverse, making individuality irreducible to classification. Plotinus distinguishes two phases of Intellect, separating that which has no contact with particulars from that which unfolds into them. Aurelius reads the particular fate as a coherent expression of cosmic destiny rather than mere accident. The ethical-practical axis runs through Nussbaum’s reconstruction of Aristotelian practical wisdom: moral perception, she shows, is precisely the capacity to grasp the salient features of the concrete particular, a form of insight altogether different from deductive knowledge. Abram locates the particular in linguistic and ecological embeddedness — a language shapes not just thought but the very texture of sensory contact with a particular terrain. Across these traditions, the particular functions as both problem and solution: it resists reduction to abstract law while remaining the only site at which wisdom, individuation, perception, and fate become real.
We should never consider a certain particular being as belonging to a type. The type is what belongs to the particular being just as much as the details that singularize it the most
Simondon inverts the classical relation of type and instance, arguing that the type inheres in the particular being rather than the particular being subsisting under the type.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
the crucial prerequisite for practical wisdom is a long experience of life that yields an ability to understand and grasp the salient features, the practical meaning, of the concrete particulars. This sort of insight is altogether different from a deductive scientific knowledge
Nussbaum presents Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom as essentially oriented toward the concrete particular, distinguishing this perceptual-ethical capacity from abstract, rule-governed cognition.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
The features belonging to her antecedent general conception are discovered by and in a response to the particular and are important primarily as they illuminate, for her, its salient features.
Through Hecuba, Nussbaum illustrates how general moral conceptions function not as rules applied to particulars but as preparations that enable genuine perception of the particular situation.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
two phases of Intellect, in one of which it may be taken as having no contact whatever with particulars and no Act upon anything; thus it is kept apart from being a particular intellect
Plotinus distinguishes pure, universal Intellect from intellect-as-particular-intellect, positing that contact with particulars marks a secondary, unfolded phase of noetic life.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
The distinction between First and Second Substances, between Fire and a given example of fire, entails a difference of a peculiar kind — the difference between universal and particular.
Plotinus maps the universal-particular distinction onto Aristotle’s categorical framework, treating the difference between species and instance as ontologically unique rather than merely formal.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
as the whole world is made up of all the particular bodies of the world, one perfect and complete body, of the same nature that particular bodies; so is the destiny of particular causes and events one general one
Aurelius conceives destiny as a whole composed of particular destinies, framing the individual particular as a microcosmic expression of universal providential order.
, Meditations, 180supporting
Any particular language or way of speaking thus holds us within a particular community of human speakers only by invoking an ephemeral border, or boundary, between our sensing bodies and the sensuous earth.
Abram argues that particular languages constitute the perceptual boundaries through which communities inhabit and simultaneously limit their felt contact with a particular terrain.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
all things come from one beginning; either all severally and particularly deliberated and resolved upon, by the general ruler and governor of all; or all by necessary consequence.
Aurelius frames every particular event as either a direct expression of divine deliberation or a necessary consequence of universal law, leaving no ontological room for the merely accidental particular.
, Meditations, 180supporting
geographic sites of particular abundance were commonly crossed by more than one Dreaming — having figured in the adventures of more than one Dreamtime Ancestor — and were thus sacred to several totemic clans.
Abram shows that among oral indigenous peoples, sites of particular material and spiritual abundance attract the convergence of multiple mythic lineages, linking the particular place to overdetermined sacred significance.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
equipoise pertains to a specific client and situation. Like change talk, equipoise is only definable in relation to a particular decision or change goal.
Miller insists that therapeutic equipoise is inherently particular — constituted only in relation to a specific person and a specific choice — rather than a general disposition.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
particular technical terminology with precise meanings, particular ways of doing experiments, particular techniques of measurement, and particular ways of ensuring that results can be replicated
Fogel notes that scientific method is itself constituted by particular, disciplinary practices, foregrounding the embeddedness of knowledge-production in specific procedural forms.
, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009aside
What is the particular group event and what are the dynamics that have led to the current set of responses for a particular member or members within the group setting at this particular moment?
Flores deploys ‘particular’ as a clinical-diagnostic modifier, directing therapeutic attention to the specificity of group events, individual responses, and momentary interpersonal dynamics.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997aside