Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘prey’ functions simultaneously as a biological category, a psychological metaphor, and a socio-political designation. In the trauma-body literature — Levine, Ogden, Nijenhuis — prey names the creature whose nervous system is organized around immobility, flight, and last-resort aggression; the argument is that human beings carry this phylogenetic inheritance intact, so that traumatic collapse re-enacts the tonic immobility of the hunted animal. Levine extends this to the claim that the ‘genetic memory of being easy prey’ actively shapes human ambivalence about action, distinguishing the human case from the impala, which ‘knows it is prey’ and responds without hesitation. Nijenhuis and Ogden map the full behavioral sequence — vigilance, flight, explosive escape, freezing — onto dissociative and somatoform symptomatology, treating predator-prey imminence as the template for traumatic response stages. LeDoux and Panksepp approach the same territory from neuroscience, charting how prey-position in the imminence gradient shifts threshold activation across freeze, flee, and fight circuits. In a sharply different register, Clarissa Pinkola Estés transposes predator-prey into intrapsychic topology: a woman who has been ‘prey, both in the outer and inner worlds’ must recognize and destroy the internal predatory complex. Schwartz deploys the term in a historical-political key: African Americans were ‘brought to the shores of America as prey.’ Nietzsche, finally, inverts the moral valence entirely, reading prey-ness as the originary site of ressentiment. The term thus maps an arc from neurobiology to mythology to liberation psychology.