Patricide occupies a remarkably generative position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as historical crime, mythic prototype, developmental necessity, and symbolic transformation. Freud’s foundational hypothesis in Totem and Taboo locates patricide at the very origin of human morality, conscience, and religious sentiment: the sons’ murder of the primal father generates guilt, prohibition, and the totem feast as its memorial. Burkert extends and partially naturalizes this thesis, arguing that Oedipal inclinations toward patricide are ritually deflected through hunt, sacrifice, and war — confirming Freud’s intuition while relocating the event from historical fact to the domain of ritual symbol and psychic structure. Klein anchors patricide alongside matricide as the most fundamental unconscious sin, the deepest source of guilt and the terrifying primitive superego. Jung and Stein, by contrast, resist the Freudian framing: Stein notes explicitly that Freud’s theory of patricide as the basis of conscience was alien to Jung’s thinking, who held that culture develops naturally rather than through atonement. Hall, reading from clinical practice, reframes dreamed patricide as a symbolic transformation of the inner paternal imago. Hillman, drawing on Bachofen, situates patricide within the Oedipal complex as structurally enabled by the child’s ignorance of the father. The tension between literal and symbolic, between historical event and psychic metaphor, is the defining fault-line across the corpus.