Tristan occupies a singular position in the depth-psychological corpus as the preeminent mythic figure through whom Western culture first articulated the spiritual and psychological dimensions of romantic love as a force autonomous from, and often antagonistic to, social order. Joseph Campbell, the most sustained analyst of this material, treats Tristan not merely as a literary character but as the locus of a mythological mutation: the emergence of individual eros as a sacred category. Through Campbell’s close reading of Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan functions as the archetypal puer—charming, gifted, fated—whose passion for Isolde enacts what Campbell identifies as the love-death mystery, the dissolution of two wills into one. Thomas Moore situates Tristan within Jungian developmental typology, reading him as the puer aeternus whose naive brilliance renders him catastrophically vulnerable to entangling love. Otto Rank’s contribution is more structural, attending to Tristan’s birth mythology and the saga’s relation to the broader hero-birth pattern. The sword placed between Tristan and Isolde becomes, across these readings, the pivotal symbol: for Campbell it represents the sin against love itself, honor deployed against eros. The love potion, the rudderless boat, the lovers’ cave—each accretes a density of mythological, alchemical, and Jungian resonance that makes Tristan indispensable to any serious concordance of depth psychology and Western imaginative life.