Torture in the depth-psychological corpus occupies a remarkable double register: it appears simultaneously as a literal historical and political fact — the deliberate infliction of suffering upon bodies by coercive power — and as a symbolic-alchemical motif signifying the necessary ordeal through which psychic transformation is achieved. Jung’s extended treatment in the alchemical writings establishes the ‘motif of torture’ as structurally ambiguous: it is the prima materia, the artifex, and sometimes the investigator who suffers, and this tripartite ambiguity is, in Jung’s words, no accident. Edinger, Hillman, and von Franz inherit this symbolic reading, mapping torture onto mortificatio, the torments of Eros upon Psyche, and the double aspect of neurotic suffering as either transformative question or interminable compulsion. In marked counterpoint, Judith Herman and the trauma literature insist on torture’s literal political meaning — as systematic technique of coercion, disempowerment, and identity destruction deployed in domestic captivity, political imprisonment, and war. Nietzsche contributes a genealogical axis, noting that punishment regimes, including torture, were historically constitutive of conscience and memory. The tension between torture as initiatory symbol and torture as concrete violation defines the term’s productive instability within this library, and any adequate reading must hold both registers in view simultaneously.