The term ‘ontological mode’ circulates through the depth-psychology corpus primarily as an inheritance from Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, where it designates the specific manner in which an entity has its Being — not what an entity is, but how it is. Heidegger’s Being and Time provides the conceptual architecture: entities can be present-at-hand, ready-to-hand, or existent (as Dasein), each constituting a distinct ontological mode irreducible to the others. The significance of this distinction for depth psychology lies in its pressure upon the concept of soul and image. Wolfgang Giegerich imports the tension most explicitly, arguing that imaginal psychology remains captive to a particular ontological mode — the substantializing, entity-like status conferred upon archetypal figures — and that genuine psychological thinking requires seeing through this mode toward the logical life of soul itself. James Hillman, from a different angle, recasts the psychological field by insisting that soul functions as a mode of being that encompasses the human rather than inhering within it. Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation extends the inquiry by treating relation itself as a ‘modality of being,’ dissolving the priority of the individual-substance paradigm. Paul Ricoeur enters from the side of selfhood and narrative, pressing the ontological bearing of attestation and ipseity. Together these voices reveal an abiding tension: whether the ontological mode proper to psychic reality is imaginal, logical, relational, or existential.