Orpheus occupies a privileged position in the depth-psychological corpus as a mythic figure whose biography — musician, descender into the underworld, mourner of Eurydice, victim of dismemberment, singing severed head — furnishes an inexhaustible repertoire of psychological analogues. Romanyshyn develops the most sustained engagement, reading the Orphic myth as the archetypal backdrop for research conducted with soul in mind: the backward glance, the second loss of Eurydice, and the transformative mourning it precipitates model the researcher’s necessary surrender of ego-possession over the work. Hillman situates Orpheus within his polytheistic reimagination of Western culture, mourning the figure’s expulsion by Cartesian mechanism and Christian assimilation, while identifying residual Orphic presence in musical and ecological sensibilities. Burkert and Rohde provide the classical-historical frame, documenting the Orpheotelestai, the books of Orpheus and Musaios, and the Bacchic-Orphic mysteries promising afterlife liberation. Greene offers cursory mythographic notation. The central tension across the corpus is between Orpheus as cultural-religious phenomenon — founder of mystery traditions, poet-shaman, theological authority — and Orpheus as psychological paradigm: the figure who enacts descent, failed restoration, grief, and ultimate creative dissolution. Both registers inform the depth-psychological inheritance, and their interplay remains productively unresolved.