The descent into the unconscious stands as one of the most architecturally significant motifs in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as a phenomenological description, a therapeutic injunction, and a mythological inheritance. Jung anchors the term within a vast comparative framework, reading the katabasis of Odysseus into Hades, the hero’s encounter with the monster, and the alchemical nigredo as successive cultural articulations of a single psychic necessity: that the ego must relinquish its sovereign position and submit to powers larger than itself. In the Zarathustra seminars, Jung is explicit that ‘the descent into the unconscious has always been thought of as a descent into that other world, a reestablishment of the lost connections with the dead’—a formulation that binds archaic ritual, mythological narrative, and analytic practice into one continuum. Neumann frames the same dynamic structurally, mapping the tension between ego-consciousness and the maternal unconscious as the engine of cultural evolution. Edinger, drawing on Symbols of Transformation, articulates how the hero’s confrontation with or descent into a monster illuminates a guidance function latent in the unconscious itself. Hillman redirects the vertical metaphor toward soul-making and the underworld perspective, insisting that depth psychology’s proper orientation is chthonic rather than transcendent. Across these positions, a central tension persists: whether the descent is a temporary ordeal from which the strengthened ego returns, or an ontological reorientation that permanently displaces ego-sovereignty as the psyche’s organizing principle.