The Ekman Paradigm designates the research program, developed principally by Paul Ekman and colleagues from the 1960s onward, that posits a set of discrete basic emotions — typically anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise — each underwritten by a universal, biologically fixed facial expression and a distinctive autonomic signature. Within the depth-psychology corpus, the paradigm occupies a pivotal and contested position. Its foundational contributions — the cross-cultural studies with the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, the 1983 Ekman-Levenson-Friesen autonomic fingerprinting study published in Science, and the methodology of posed facial configurations as emotion elicitors — appear repeatedly as both landmark achievements and as objects of sustained methodological critique. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s constructionist challenge is the most systematic counter-voice in this corpus, arguing that the ‘basic emotion method’ introduced demand characteristics that manufactured the appearance of universality. Joseph LeDoux situates the paradigm within the broader affect-program tradition descending from Tomkins, while Dean Burnett surveys its internal contradictions. What makes the paradigm theoretically significant for depth psychology is its claim that emotion is a natural kind with cross-cultural neural substrates — a claim that intersects, with varying degrees of tension, with constructionist, psychoanalytic, and polyvagal frameworks.