Possession occupies a complex and contested terrain within the depth-psychology library, traversing at least four distinct registers: the clinical-psychological, the anthropological-shamanic, the neurological-historical, and the philosophical-ontological. Jung and his heirs treat possession primarily as the ego’s involuntary subordination to an autonomous psychic content — a complex, an archetype, or a partial personality — that commandeers consciousness without consent. Stein, summarizing Jung, frames the eruption of complexes as their capacity to ‘take possession of the ego’s functions,’ a formulation that preserves the phenomenological gravity of the concept while grounding it in structural psychology. Eliade brings a comparative-religious dimension, distinguishing classical shamanic ecstasy (soul-flight) from the more diffuse and historically variable phenomenon of spirit-possession, noting that ‘embodiment’ by spirits represents a later innovation in Central Asian religious complexes. Jaynes pursues a neurological hypothesis, proposing that spontaneous possession activates the speech areas of the right, non-dominant hemisphere — the same mechanism he attributes to the oracular voices of the bicameral mind. Karl Abraham redirects ‘possession’ toward libido theory and its anal-erotic substrates, revealing how the drive to own, retain, and control objects encodes archaic psychosexual dynamics. Across these positions, the core tension is between possession as pathological intrusion and possession as legitimate — even revelatory — encounter with dimensions of the psyche or cosmos that exceed the ego’s ordinary jurisdiction.