Ego strength occupies a contested yet indispensable position across the depth-psychology corpus. In its most straightforward formulation, drawn from Murray Stein’s exposition of Jung, the term designates the ego’s capacity to integrate, direct, and hold large quantities of conscious content without succumbing to impulse or dissociation—a strong ego navigates deliberately; a weak one founders before affect and complex. Christian Roesler’s empirical dream-series research operationalizes this definition clinically, tracking how the dream ego’s agency—its ability to confront threatening figures, execute plans, and accomplish aims—serves as a measurable index of therapeutic gain. James Hollis situates ego strength within a developmental arc: it must first be consolidated in youth before it can be reflectively relinquished in midlife. The most provocative challenge to straightforward valorization of ego strength comes from the archetypal school. Hillman reads the heroic ego ideal—courage, endurance, self-reliance—as itself a cultural symptom, the contemporary form of a hero cult, and argues that only a non-heroic ego can dissolve its strengths enough to permit genuine imaginal engagement. Samuels, mediating between developmental and archetypal camps, argues for multiple ego styles rather than a single heroic norm. Edward Edinger complicates the developmental picture further: the very preoccupation with personal strength that early ego consolidation requires must ultimately yield to a transvaluation in which weakness and suffering acquire their own dignity. The term thus sits at the intersection of clinical pragmatics, developmental theory, and archetypal critique.