The concept of neural representation occupies a contested yet indispensable position across the depth-psychology corpus, traversing neuroscience, phenomenology, and developmental psychology. Damasio employs it as a technical cornerstone: maps, first-order and second-order patterns, and convergence-zone brokerage constitute his layered account of how body states and external objects are rendered knowable to the organism. Panksepp argues provocatively against the prevailing skepticism, insisting that a coherent neural representation of ‘the self’ does exist — anchored in subcortical motor and visceral substrates — and that such representation is prerequisite for affective feeling itself. Thompson, approaching from enactivist phenomenology, interrogates the very presuppositions embedded in the term: the objectivist notion of neural representation as feature-detection is challenged by an autonomy perspective in which the system participates in determining what counts as information. Siegel integrates representational levels — sensory, categorical, conceptual, linguistic — into a developmental hierarchy shaped by relational experience, while Craig traces a hierarchical representational sequence in the anterior insula that culminates in the sentient self. Gallagher foregrounds the body-schema as a site where neural representation is reorganized by absence, as in phantom-limb phenomenology. Collectively, these authors reveal neural representation not as a settled mechanism but as a zone of productive theoretical tension between mapping, embodiment, and emergent subjectivity.