Suffocation occupies a remarkably varied conceptual space within the depth-psychology corpus, traversing neurobiological, psychoanalytic, archetypal, and somatic registers. At the neurobiological pole, Panksepp and LeDoux attend to Donald Klein’s ‘suffocation alarm’ — a primitive brainstem reflex triggered by airway obstruction or hypercapnia that generates panic-like states potentially underlying clinical panic disorder; here suffocation designates a physiological threshold event with cascading emotional consequences. Rank translates this threshold into prenatal terms: neurotic breathing disturbances, including asthma, repeat the feeling of suffocation as direct reproductions of birth trauma, making suffocation the inaugural somatic memory. Jung extends the register further: asthma is read as a ‘suffocation phobia’ generated by repressed family sexuality and the cloud of suppression that accumulates in relational atmospheres. In the Jungian social critique of Two Essays, suffocation becomes metaphor for what collective conformity does to individuality — the differentiating element is smothered, and what survives retreats into the unconscious as destructive potential. Von Franz, reading alchemical imagery, identifies suffocation as the death of the prima materia in the sealed vessel — a transformative mortificatio that mirrors the imprisonment of Osiris by Seth. López-Pedraza employs the term diagnostically: hysterical existence constitutes a ‘paralyzing suffocation’ from which the psyche must be wrested by mythic-underworld violence. Janet catalogues suffocation among the somatic tics of hysteria. Ferenczi, in his most speculative mode, proposes that hallucinated breathing can sustain life even under ‘total somatic suffocation.’ Across these positions the term consistently marks a crisis of containment — biological, relational, symbolic — at the boundary between life and transformation.