The term ‘grip’ in the depth-psychology corpus operates across two principal registers that are, upon examination, etymologically and conceptually continuous. In Jung’s correspondence, grip is recovered as a root metaphor for cognitive apprehension itself: the English word is embedded within the German Begriff (concept) and the Latin conceptio, all of which designate the act of catching hold of something. To lose one’s grip — whether symbolised by the dream-loss of teeth or by the dissolution of self-control — is thus to lose one’s conceptual purchase on reality, on relationship, and on selfhood simultaneously. This philological insight ramifies throughout the Jungian tradition. In Quenk’s typological elaboration, ‘in the grip’ becomes the technical idiom for possession by the inferior function: the state in which stress precipitates a personality regression so total that the individual’s characteristic competencies collapse and an alien, archaic mode of functioning takes command. Quenk’s corpus furnishes the most sustained treatment, mapping grip episodes across all sixteen MBTI types, distinguishing acute from chronic forms, and tracing the paradoxical individuation potential latent within these experiences. McGilchrist, approaching from neurological phenomenology, independently rediscovers the deep alliance between grasping, language, and cognition, showing that ‘grip’ is not merely metaphor but expresses a structural relationship between hand, brain, and world. The term thus anchors debates about embodied cognition, the shadow of typological identity, and the psychodynamics of stress.