Ego defense occupies a contested and generative space within the depth-psychology corpus, drawing on Freudian structural theory, Kleinian object-relations, post-Jungian developmental thought, Buddhist critique, and archetypal reconceptualization. Freud’s structural legacy positions the ego as the primary agency mediating between instinctual pressure and reality, with defense serving as the ego’s instrument of self-preservation against both id and superego. Klein extends this into preverbal developmental territory, arguing that splitting, projection, and introjection are not merely pathological but constitute the ego’s earliest and most fundamental operations, arising before the Oedipus complex and persisting as scaffolding for object relations throughout life. Fordham’s post-Jungian synthesis rehabilitates defense still further, insisting that ego-defenses are markers of maturation rather than pathology, provided they remain flexible. Patricia Berry’s archetypal intervention is the most radical: she proposes that defenses express the very content from which they would defend, thereby carrying a teleological charge that can be therapeutically amplified rather than dissolved. Kalsched’s work on trauma introduces the concept of archetypal defense operating beneath or beyond ego-level mechanisms, a daimonic self-care system that protects the personal spirit at any cost. Welwood’s Buddhist lens challenges the entire edifice, reading ego-defense not as adaptive mechanism but as the structural expression of samsaric self-other splitting. The term thus marks a fault line between therapeutic traditions: one strand seeks to strengthen or restructure defenses, another to see through them, a third to honor their symbolic freight.