Sophistic trickery occupies a contested yet generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a historical phenomenon, a philosophical foil, and a psychological category. The primary axis of tension runs between two interpretive traditions: one, following Plato’s sustained polemic, treats the sophist as an impostor — a juggler of appearances, a hunter of wealthy youth, a manufacturer of false belief — whose art is the shadow-image of genuine philosophical inquiry; the other, traceable through Burkert, Detienne, and López-Pedraza, recognises in trickery and deception a mythologically sanctioned mode of intelligence, related to Hermetic cunning and archaic apate. Plato’s Sophist and Euthydemus provide the corpus’s most detailed phenomenology of sophistic deception: the former employs the method of diaeresis to expose the sophist as a practitioner of image-making and ‘juggling of words,’ a creator of simulacra rather than knowledge; the latter stages eristic in dramatic action, showing how verbal sleight-of-hand paralyses genuine inquiry. Burkert and Sharpe situate the movement historically within fifth-century democratic Athens, where rhetorical mastery was civic power. The deep psychological significance lies in what Plato identifies as the sophist’s primary weapon: the manufacture and exploitation of the condition in which ‘a person supposes that he knows, and does not know’ — a false self-knowledge that, in depth-psychological terms, is the very structure of unconscious inflation.