Within the depth-psychology corpus, the skeleton functions not as a mere anatomical remnant but as a charged symbolic complex evoking the irreducible ground of existence beneath the flesh of persona, affect, and narrative. The most sustained engagement appears in Estés’s mythological-psychological reading of the Inuit figure Skeleton Woman, where the skeleton is personified as the Life/Death/Life force itself — a psychological reality that lovers, and indeed all psyches, must confront and untangle if authentic intimacy is to be achieved. Here the skeleton is not morbid but generative: the bony structure is the minimum truth from which new life must be sung. Eliade’s shamanic studies supply the archaic substrate: contemplation of one’s own skeleton is a discrete initiatory technique in Eskimo shamanism, dissolving the initiate’s sense of embodied selfhood until only the essential form remains, a practice with clear parallels in Tantric and Tibetan Buddhist visualization. In alchemical symbolism, Edinger maps the skeleton onto the mortificatio/putrefactio phase — the stripping away of everything corruptible to expose the incorruptible core. In Tarot commentary, Nichols and Jodorowsky read the skeletal figure of Trump XIII as an androgynous, cosmically energized agent of transformation rather than terminus. Children’s intuitive personifications of death as a skeleton, documented by Yalom, ground the symbol in developmental psychology, confirming its archetypal ubiquity. The skeleton is, across traditions, the structural truth that outlasts dissolution.