Psychic survival occupies a contested but vital nexus in depth-psychological literature, where it designates the constellation of intrapsychic maneuvers by which the self—or some irreducible kernel of it—persists through conditions that would otherwise annihilate coherent experience. The corpus reveals at least three major registers in which the concept operates. First, in the trauma literature anchored by Kalsched, Ferenczi, and Herman, psychic survival names the emergency dissociative economy: the psyche suspends its normative integrative function and deploys archaic, archetypal defenses whose short-term efficacy paradoxically becomes a long-term prison. Second, in somatic and developmental traditions (Ogden, Heller, Levine), survival is coded into bodily schema and adaptive ‘survival styles’ that crystallize around unmet developmental needs, functioning as frozen competencies requiring therapeutic thaw. Third, in transpersonal and evolutionary frameworks (Aurobindo), psychic survival extends to the question of the soul’s persistence across death and rebirth. Ferenczi’s most radical formulation—that hallucination itself can maintain organismic life in total somatic collapse—bridges all three registers, positing psychic survival as an almost literal biological substrate. The central tension across the corpus is between survival as achievement and survival as impediment: what saves the personal spirit in extremis becomes, unchallenged, the very mechanism that forecloses individuation.