Animal consciousness stands at one of the most contested intersections in the depth-psychology corpus, engaging neuroscience, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, and archetypal psychology in sharply divergent ways. The neuroscientific wing, represented most forcefully by LeDoux, insists that consciousness should only be attributed to non-human organisms when behavioral evidence cannot be explained by non-conscious processes, warning against the ‘argument from analogy’ that projects human interiority onto animals simply because their behaviors resemble ours. Damasio occupies a more graduated position, proposing a continuum from core to extended consciousness on which many nonhuman species plausibly occupy the lower registers. Panksepp grounds animal consciousness in subcortical affective systems shared across mammals, arguing that affective consciousness has deeper evolutionary roots than the neocortical apparatus privileged by cognitivist accounts. McGilchrist, drawing on Godfrey-Smith, presses furthest, maintaining that consciousness was never absent but merely transformed during evolution, with multiple independent origins in crabs, cephalopods, and vertebrates alike. Hillman and archetypal psychology reframe the question entirely: the animal is not merely a biological organism to be tested for sentience but a psychic presence whose self-display constitutes its inwardness. Levine, from a somatic-trauma perspective, treats survival instinct as the evolutionary engine on which all consciousness is built. The term thus opens onto irreducible tension between scientific operationalism and the imaginal, between graduated continuity and categorical distinction.