Thales of Miletus occupies a liminal position in the depth-psychology corpus: he is invoked less as a biographical subject than as an inaugural symbol — the first figure to pose the question of a single arche, a primordial substance underlying all phenomena. Edinger reads this gesture psychologically, treating the Milesian project from Thales through Plotinus as early articulations of unconscious processes becoming conscious. The identification of water as the first principle recurs as a motif with archetypal resonance: Miller links it to the alchemical aqua vitae and Kerényi’s claim that ‘water is the most mythological of the elements,’ while Goethe’s Faust — where Thales leads the homunculus to a sea-goddess epiphany — demonstrates, for Edinger, how archaic symbols survive into modernity through the continuity of the collective psyche. Vernant and Detienne situate Thales differently, as a political as well as cosmological innovator whose proposal to centralize Ionian governance at Teos anticipates the rationalization of public space. Onians traces the deep roots of the water-doctrine in archaic beliefs about seed, moisture, and generation. Williams, in a provocative aside, employs ‘Thales’ as a name-placeholder for a figure whose gratitude for not being born a woman opens questions about luck, identity, and justice. Across these registers, Thales functions as a threshold figure marking the emergence of reflective, desacralized thought from mythic substrate.