The Seba library treats Spectrum in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including Hillman, James, Yaden, David Bryce, Hart, Onno van der).
Jung places images and instinct on a psychological continuum, like a spectrum (CW 8: 397–420). This spectrum, or color band, ranges from an infrared end, the bodily action of instinctual desire, to the ultraviolet blue end of fantasy images.
Hillman articulates Jung’s core model in which the spectrum trope organizes psyche as a graduated continuum between instinct and image, explicitly contrasting this with Freud’s sublimation hierarchy.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
The designation ‘self-transcendent experience’ (STE) works best for our purposes because it captures a spectrum of intensities in addition to remaining neutral regarding secular or spiritual connotations.
Yaden argues that the spectrum concept is the appropriate frame for self-transcendent experience precisely because it accommodates variation in intensity while remaining phenomenologically and theologically neutral.
, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017thesis
Van der Kolk and colleagues (1996) suggested a spectrum of traumarelated symptoms, including symptoms of PTSD, dissociative symptoms, affect dysregulation
Van der Hart cites Van der Kolk’s proposal that trauma-related disorders be understood along a diagnostic spectrum, linking PTSD, dissociation, and affect dysregulation as a continuous field rather than discrete categories.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentthesis
Without any solution of continuity, it is possible to pass from the most penetrating gamma rays to the longest waves of wireless telegraphy. The knowledge of the unity and diversity of this phenomenon, which is thoroughly spread out on a numerical scale, is one of the most noteworthy successes of this transductive method
Simondon uses the electromagnetic spectrum as the paradigm case for the transductive method, demonstrating that radical diversity of phenomena can be grounded in an unbroken continuum — an epistemological model relevant to his theory of individuation.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
the Greeks and Romans did not divide up the visible spectrum like we do, and it seems that human perception has been modified towards the extremity of the spectrum situated on the side of short wavelengths
Simondon observes that the segmentation of the visible spectrum is historically and culturally variable, using this to illustrate that conceptual divisions of a continuum are artifacts of perception and technique rather than natural joints.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
The continuous energy spectrum of beta rays, discovered by J Chadwick in 1914, immediately raised difficult problems of theoretical interpretation. Was it to be ascribed directly to the primary electrons emitted by the radioactive nucleus, or to secondary processes?
Pauli presents the continuous beta-ray spectrum as an exemplary theoretical crisis that forced physics to revise its categories, illustrating how a continuous distribution can resist binary interpretive schemes.
, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting
it soon became manifest that classical mechanics must already break down in the case of the helium spectrum, since the problem of two electrons does not lead to multiply periodic orbits
Pauli cites spectral anomalies as the empirical pressure that forced the abandonment of classical mechanics, positioning the spectrum as the decisive test-case for quantum theory.
, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting
With Bohr’s successful application of quantum theory to the explanation of the line spectra of the elements
Pauli notes Bohr’s application of quantum theory to atomic line spectra as the foundational step in quantum physics, invoking spectrum in its technical physics sense as a marker of theoretical progress.
, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994aside
providing a spectrum of invaluable and complex ‘secret
Schore uses spectrum colloquially to denote a broad range of forms of support, without theoretical weight; the term appears here as a rhetorical gesture toward inclusiveness rather than a conceptual claim.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994aside