Addiction recovery occupies a contested but generative space within the depth-psychological corpus, where clinical, archetypal, and trauma-theoretical perspectives converge without fully coalescing. William L. White insists that the field’s failure to define recovery with precision undermines both research and practice, a nominalist problem that ramifies across every subsequent discussion. Judith Herman’s tripartite model—safety, remembrance, and reconnection—anchors trauma recovery as foundational infrastructure, one widely replicated and now enshrined in international treatment guidelines. Babette Rothschild and the complex-trauma clinicians foreground stabilization as the non-negotiable precondition before any deeper processing can begin, insisting that Phase 1 work is concerned with the quality of present life rather than excavation of the past. Stephanie Brown reframes addiction recovery for women not as restoration of a prior self but as the resumption of arrested developmental work, closer to origination than to cure. Stella Dennett, drawing on Jungian individuation theory and archetypal astrology, repositions recovery as a psychospiritual trajectory toward Self-realization, arguing that the 12-Step tradition already implicitly fosters this process. Mary Addenbrooke’s longitudinal narratives add phenomenological depth, revealing how self-awareness, relational honesty, and the retrieval of creative capacity characterize genuine long-term recovery. Running beneath all these positions is a shared tension: whether recovery is primarily a clinical state to be defined and measured, or an existential transformation that exceeds clinical categories.