Within the depth-psychology and addiction-studies corpus, ‘abstinence’ occupies a contested and multivalent position, functioning simultaneously as clinical outcome measure, spiritual discipline, psychological threshold, and ideological battleground. The dominant tradition, rooted in Alcoholics Anonymous and twelve-step philosophy, treats total abstinence as the necessary foundation for genuine recovery — not merely the cessation of use but the precondition for the deeper personality transformation that constitutes sobriety’s real work. Flores articulates this most rigorously: abstinence is a staging condition for psychotherapeutic change, never the terminus. A second axis of discourse, represented by White and Benda, disputes whether abstinence-based recovery should be privileged over moderated or harm-reduction approaches, foregrounding empirical evidence that stable recovery takes multiple forms. Pharmacological literature (Antonelli) treats abstinence as a quantifiable endpoint — rates, durations, relapse thresholds — instrumentalizing what other authors frame as an existential achievement. Maté introduces the sharpest phenomenological distinction: the difference between abstinence as mere behavioral restraint and sobriety as transformed interiority. Shaw grounds abstinence in a biblical ‘expediency principle,’ importing a theological warrant that sits uneasily alongside secular clinical models. Najavits complicates the picture for dual-diagnosis populations, arguing that insistence on total abstinence may be contraindicated when PTSD dynamics are primary. Taken together, the corpus reveals abstinence as a necessary but insufficient category — a threshold concept that immediately raises the question of what psychological and spiritual transformation must accompany it.