Castration occupies a contested and layered position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a clinical concept, an archetypal symbol, a mythological motif, and a philosophical metaphor. Freud and his immediate heirs — Abraham, Rank, and Lacan — treat it primarily within the psychosexual register: castration anxiety organises male development, while the female castration complex drives the vicissitudes of libidinal life in women, producing penis envy, oral and anal displacements, and characteristic neurotic formations. Abraham’s meticulous clinical papers extend and refine these positions with detailed case material. Yalom, approaching from existential psychiatry, critiques Freud’s prioritisation of castration over death anxiety, arguing the emphasis distorts the evidential record. Jung, in correspondence with Neumann, refuses to deny the castration complex yet insists on supplementing it with the concept of sacrifice, broadening the semantic field. Neumann himself undertakes the most ambitious symbolic elaboration, distinguishing matriarchal from patriarchal castration as twin poles of the uroboric, tracing self-castration through Attis, Osiris, and gnostic religion, and refusing any reduction of the motif to personalistic developmental history. Burkert and Onians ground the concept in actual sacrificial ritual and archaic physiological belief. Giegerich deploys it metaphorically: reductive psychologising is itself a castration of real phenomena. The term thus traverses clinical theory, myth, ritual anthropology, and epistemological critique.