Wounding occupies a structurally central position in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning not as mere damage but as a transformative threshold that the psyche must cross in order to individuate. The tradition, rooted in Jung’s alchemical studies and elaborated across clinical, mythological, and cultural registers, insists that wounding is archetypal—built into the very grammar of ego-formation rather than contingent upon circumstance. Edinger reads it through the alchemical encounter of ego and Self, where the first decisive meeting necessarily humiliates and breaks the ego open, echoing the Job motif. Hollis extends this into the specifically masculine domain, arguing that male wounding—whether through tribal initiation, relational loss, or existential confrontation—is both necessary and potentially appalling, a summons to consciousness rather than an accident to be avoided. Hillman complicates the picture considerably by distinguishing woundedness from the wounded healer, insisting that healing arises not from wholeness but from localized consciousness that breaks through dismemberment. Jung himself anchors the symbolism in alchemical and scriptural imagery—the pierced Christ, the bitten sun-god, Cupid’s arrows—situating wounding as the point at which spirit becomes matter, and consciousness becomes incarnate. Vaughan-Lee and Estés bring devotional and mythopoetic inflections, reading the wound as the aperture through which the divine enters and through which the individual is compelled to turn inward. The productive tension in the corpus lies between wounding as initiatory necessity and wounding as chronic impediment—a distinction that separates transformative suffering from wound-identification.