Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘blinding’ functions as a polyvalent symbol occupying the intersection of shame, punishment, heroic failure, and initiatory knowledge. The term’s richest elaborations emerge from mythological and tragic readings: Oedipus’s self-blinding stands as the paradigmatic case, examined by Cairns as a shame-response rooted in the inability to meet the gaze of others — a literal enactment of the aidos-impulse to avert the eyes — and by Williams as a self-imposed, excessive reckoning with erga that resists the progressive critic’s neat moral categories. Neumann frames blinding symbolically within the hero’s developmental arc: where dismemberment and castration represent failures at the Great Mother stage, blinding — like that of Samson and Oedipus — signals a higher form of defeat, one in which the ego is arrested precisely at the threshold of spiritual independence. Hillman, reading the Oedipal myth as a critique of psychoanalysis itself, interprets blinding as the ‘eye-opening truth’ that the analyst-hero is culprit rather than cure. A subsidiary register appears in clinical and mystical literature: the Philokalia identifies passion and avarice as causes of intellectual blindness; Corbin treats a ‘bedazzlement and blindness’ caused by excessive divine proximity as a paradox of visionary apperception; and Jung invokes deliberate self-blinding as a failure to recognize mythologem for what it is. The term thus traverses the tragic, the clinical, the mystical, and the epistemological.