Annihilation occupies a charged and multi-valent position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as an anxiety to be defended against, a threshold to be consciously crossed, and a cosmological or soteriological necessity. Klein establishes the term’s clinical foundation: the threat of annihilation by the death instinct constitutes, in her view, the primordial anxiety—prior to all sexual or superego anxiety—and it is the nascent ego’s first task to deflect this threat outward through projection. Winnicott extends the terrain: impingements that penetrate maternal defenses threaten the isolation of the true self and give rise to psychotic anxiety, a near-equivalent of annihilative dread at the ontological level. From a more cosmological register, Zimmer and Campbell situate annihilation within the cyclical destruction-and-recreation mythologies of India, where it names the universe’s dissolution into the divine before reconstitution. The mystical traditions handled by Corbin, Armstrong, and Jodorowsky reframe annihilation soteriologically: in Sufi fana, in Buddhist anatta, and in Tarot symbolism, self-annihilation becomes the necessary passage through which the divine becomes accessible. The political dimension surfaces in Hannah’s treatment of Arendtian thought, where nuclear annihilation poses a categorical break with all prior forms of political catastrophe. These perspectives do not resolve into consensus; the clinical and the mystical employ the same word to name, respectively, the ground of neurosis and the gate of liberation.