Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Building’ operates across at least three distinct registers that must be held simultaneously: the literal architectural structure, the symbolic-mythological act of construction, and the procedural or therapeutic metaphor of assembling psychological capacities. Rank offers the most psychologically dense treatment, tracing building and city-founding to the hero’s compensatory response to the loss of maternal containment — the city as substitute womb, the temple as spiritualized body — while resisting a reductive biologism that would collapse architecture into mere uterine symbolism. Bosnak’s dreamwork demonstrates how an actual building encountered in the nocturnal image-world carries autonomous affective weight: granite heaviness, civic seriousness, the administration of justice. Moore, from a soul-care perspective, extends the concept outward, arguing that buildings, like persons, may exhibit narcissism — a failure of self-love made visible in their design. Ogden’s sensorimotor framework domesticates the term entirely, employing ‘building blocks’ as a clinical scaffolding for the five dimensions of present-moment experience. Benveniste’s Indo-European philology grounds the entire constellation etymologically: the root *dem- links construction, domestication, and dominion, revealing that to build is primordially to establish a household and thereby a social order. The tensions are productive: between building as symbolic projection of the psyche and building as literal civic or sacred space; between construction as creative individuation and as compensatory defense.