Across the depth-psychology corpus, drowning operates as one of the most semantically dense threshold images available to the psyche. It is never merely a representation of physical peril; it is the ego’s confrontation with dissolution — the terrifying prospect of losing bounded selfhood to the undifferentiated waters of the unconscious. The alchemical tradition, extensively mined by Jung and Edinger, encodes drowning within the solutio operation: the immersion and apparent destruction of a fixed form as the precondition for regenerated life. Here the motif carries genuine ambivalence — it is simultaneously nigredo and baptism, annihilation and renewal. Eliade supplies the cosmological coordinates: immersion in water signifies regression to the pre-formal, dissolution of the individuated, followed by a new cosmogonic emergence. Hillman, working from Heraclitean fragments — ‘to souls, it is death to become water’ — argues that the dream of drowning belongs properly to the underworld perspective, where moistening signals the soul’s entrance into the opus of dying. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis situates the king’s drowning within the hierosgamos, an act at once erotic and fatal. Clinical voices — Woodman, Hollis, Greene — translate the motif into living symptomatology: the body filling with water, a patient nearly drowning in a murky pond, the youthful spirit at risk of permanent submersion. The tension that animates all these readings is whether drowning presages transformation or obliteration, and whether the ego can survive its own dissolution.