The term ‘archetypal defense’ names a class of psychic operations that operate below the level of the personal ego, marshaling transpersonal—specifically Self-level—energies in response to trauma severe enough to threaten the annihilation of the personal spirit. The concept was introduced by Leopold Stein (1967), who drew on immunological analogy to argue that the Self, as a ‘commonwealth of archetypes,’ executes defensive actions more fundamental than any ego-level mechanism. Donald Kalsched’s 1996 monograph constitutes the systematic elaboration of this framework, articulating how such defenses manifest as an internal ‘Protector/Persecutor’ figure—a daimonic caretaker who simultaneously shields and imprisons the traumatized personal spirit. The central clinical tension in the corpus is paradoxical: archetypal defenses are life-preserving in inception yet life-denying in their chronic operation, generating dissociation, addiction, depression, and suicidality in their relentless effort to forestall re-traumatization. Patricia Berry, from within archetypal psychology proper, explores a cognate but distinct trajectory, arguing that defenses carry the very content from which they defend—thus containing a telos pointing toward individuation. James Hillman gestures toward archetypal underpinnings of ego-defensive structure without foregrounding trauma. The literature is thus divided between a clinical-developmental axis (Kalsched, Stein, Fordham, Beebe) and a mythopoetic-imaginal axis (Berry, Hillman), each illuminating different registers of the same underlying phenomenon.