Identity occupies contested terrain across the depth-psychology corpus, where it is neither a stable possession nor a mere illusion but a locus of unceasing dialectical tension. Ricoeur provides the most technically precise treatment, distinguishing idem-identity (sameness, numerical and qualitative permanence through time) from ipse-identity (selfhood, the ‘who’ that holds itself answerable through promise and narrative). For Ricoeur, the concept of narrative identity mediates these poles, permitting the person to be understood as a character whose concordant-discordant story constitutes, rather than merely reflects, who one is. Welwood, approaching from a Buddhist-psychological vantage, treats the identity structure as a compensatory edifice erected against the primal fear of nonexistence: a conscious identity masking a subconscious deficiency, both requiring dissolution rather than consolidation. Jung earlier distinguished primitive family identity — an a priori participation mystique — from identification, a secondary, developmentally necessary but ultimately alienating process, locating authentic selfhood only at the end of individuation. Hillman resists reductive numerical accounts of individuality, insisting that uniqueness is qualitative, constituted by character’s ‘lasting sameness.’ Berry, reading through Narcissus, warns that psychology’s obsession with identity may itself mirror narcissistic self-enclosure. Jaynes positions the consciously constructed self as a late, fragile achievement of post-bicameral mind. The corpus thus holds identity as simultaneously indispensable and deceptive — a necessary fiction that must be inhabited, interrogated, and ultimately surrendered.