Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Combat’ operates on at least three distinct registers, each generating its own cluster of interpretive positions. At the mythic-cosmological level, combat appears as a founding ontological event: Eliade’s treatment of the Babylonian akitu ceremony reads the battle between Marduk and Tiamat as a ritually reactualized cosmogony, the passage from chaos to ordered cosmos mimed annually by human actors. In the Homeric and Hesiodic texts, combat is the primary arena in which heroic identity, divine favor, and the concepts of kudos and kratos are constituted and contested — a domain as much theological as martial. The second register is psychopathological: Judith Herman’s foundational clinical work demonstrates that combat exposure produces measurable, graduated neuropsychological damage, with 200–240 days of continuous exposure sufficient to collapse even the most resilient soldier. Herman further tracks the convergence of early-life adversity and heavy combat exposure as the most reliable predictor of chronic PTSD, including persistent suicidality and moral injury from participation in war crimes. A third register is therapeutic and post-traumatic: Shapiro’s EMDR research addresses combat veterans as a primary clinical population, while Keltner’s awe-science frames combat experience as a site of dark, threat-charged awe — terror and transcendence coexisting — whose sudden absence upon return to civilian life generates a distinctive form of existential hunger. The tensions among these registers — mythic glorification, clinical devastation, and therapeutic redemption — constitute the term’s conceptual depth.