Contraries occupies a structurally pivotal position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a logical category, a psychological dynamic, and a metaphysical principle. The tradition divides, broadly, into two orientations. The first, traceable through Aristotle and the Stoics, treats contraries as mutually exclusive terms within a system of predicates and transformations — food nourishes by being contrary to the organism it feeds; propositions admit contraries that formal logic must adjudicate. The second, far more consequential for depth psychology proper, treats contraries as generative poles whose tension — never their cancellation — is the condition of psychic life. Freud notes that the dream-work simply disregards contraries, collapsing them or representing them as identical, a discovery that points toward the unconscious as a domain where logical opposition loses its force. Blake, as read by Abrams, elevates the creative strife of contraries into a cosmogonic principle: not the bland mediocrity of equilibrium, but the ‘intellectual war’ that alone sustains imaginative vitality. Aurobindo, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pascal each wrestle with the irreducible mixture of contraries in human experience — good and evil, life and death, faith and doubt — resisting their dissolution into a false synthesis. McGilchrist, drawing on Heraclitus and Schleiermacher, insists that the Golden Mean is not a flaccid midpoint but a taut dynamic equipoise between forces that must remain contrary to remain alive. The term thus marks the fault-line between a logic that would dissolve tension and a psychology that requires it.