Conflict occupies a central and irreducible position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as pathology, catalyst, and ontological necessity. The literature refuses any simple negative valuation: Yalom insists that conflict’s absence in therapeutic groups signals developmental impairment, not health, while Nichols, drawing on Jung, names conflict ‘the essence of life and the necessary prerequisite for all spiritual growth.’ The Jungian lineage — Hoeller, Nichols, Ulanov, von Franz — understands psychic conflict as the tension of opposites that generates libido and, when held rather than resolved by elimination of one pole, becomes the prima materia of individuation. This stands in sharp contrast to approaches that treat conflict primarily as a behavioral or relational problem to be managed: Levine and Heller’s attachment-science framework, Scott’s DBT protocols, and Brown’s recovery model all address conflict as something to be navigated skillfully, if not dissolved. The I Ching tradition, represented by Wilhelm, Anthony, Huang, and Wang Bi, offers a third position: conflict (Sung/Contention) is cosmologically inevitable but ethically dangerous when pursued to exhaustion, demanding prudential withdrawal rather than either suppression or triumph. Across these traditions the recurring question is not whether conflict will arise but how it is held — whether it collapses into acting-out, escalates into destruction, or is suffered through to transformation.