The dragon occupies a position of remarkable ambivalence across the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as obstacle, ally, double, and symbol of primordial energy. In the Jungian tradition, most influentially through Neumann, the dragon anchors the hero-myth as the adversary to be overcome in the founding act of ego-consciousness: to slay the dragon is to wrest selfhood from the devouring embrace of the uroboric maternal unconscious. Yet Jung himself insists on the fraternal identity of hero and dragon — they are ‘brothers or even one,’ the man who masters the daemonic being himself daemonically touched. Hillman presses this paradox further, questioning whether the developmental framework that makes dragon-slaying a cultural ideal conceals an act of self-mutilation. In alchemy, as Abraham and Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis demonstrate, the dragon bifurcates into winged quicksilver and wingless sulphur — the separated masculine and feminine principles whose violent copulation produces the philosopher’s stone. The Chinese I Ching tradition, extensively treated by Wilhelm, Huang, and von Franz, offers a counterweight to the Western combat mythology: here the dragon is a wholly positive emblem of yang creative force, the ‘radiance of consciousness,’ cycling through concealment, manifestation, and flight. Von Franz’s readings of Chinese fairy tales extend this to show the dragon as a living figure of the unconscious’s own transformative dynamism. The term thus maps two largely distinct symbolic registers — Western mortificatory combat and Eastern creative vitality — whose tension makes the dragon indispensable to any comparative depth-psychological lexicon.