Emotion concepts occupy a contested and generative position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as cognitive tools, cultural constructs, and socially negotiated realities. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s constructionist account dominates the field’s contemporary treatment: emotion concepts are not biologically fixed fingerprints but goal-based, culturally transmitted population structures that the brain deploys predictively to categorize interoceptive and exteroceptive input. On this view, the very experience of fear, anger, or liget depends upon whether the relevant concept exists in a person’s repertoire — a claim that dissolves the classical dichotomy between ‘real in nature’ and ‘illusory.’ The corpus also foregrounds the cross-cultural dimension: different languages carve the affective space into distinct emotion concepts, and cultures vary not only in their specific concepts but in whether they recognize ‘emotion’ as a unified category at all. The corollary for psychological health is consequential — emotional granularity, the richness of one’s emotion-concept vocabulary, correlates measurably with physical health outcomes. Counterpoint arrives from classical and ancient sources, most notably Konstan, whose philological examination of Greek passion-terms exposes the fragility of assuming cross-historical conceptual continuity. Together, these voices establish emotion concepts as the pivot point between neuroscience, cultural anthropology, developmental psychology, and philosophical ontology.