Psychic incest occupies a distinctive and contested position in the depth-psychology corpus, operating simultaneously as a clinical diagnosis, a developmental concept, and a symbolic-archetypal motif. Marion Woodman, whose voice is most directly associated with the term in its contemporary clinical register, defines it as ‘unboundaried bonding’—the pathological dynamic in which a parent, rather than mirroring the child, recruits the child to mirror the parent’s own unmet needs. Woodman insists that such psychic abuse, though leaving no physical mark, inflicts profound ego-dissolution, numbing the child’s access to inner life. Jung himself treated the incest motif on multiple levels: as literal psychopathology, as the projection-laden ‘kinship libido’ binding family systems, and above all as a symbolic impulse toward endogamous self-union—the psyche’s attempt at individuation through reunion with its own unconscious depths. Samuels and Stein document how Jung deliberately parted from Freud by refusing to reduce incest to a repressed literal wish, insisting instead on its spiritualising, transformative potential when encountered symbolically. Kalsched amplifies the clinical stakes, tracing how father-daughter psychic enmeshment, even absent physical abuse, colonises the daughter’s autonomous life. Hillman, characteristically, argues that the archetypal dimension of incest cannot be dissolved into any single explanatory framework—biological, sociological, or developmental. The term thus spans a spectrum from concrete relational harm to the grand symbolics of self-fertilising libido.