Conditioning occupies a foundational yet contested position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as an explanatory mechanism, a therapeutic modality, and a site of theoretical tension. The behaviorist tradition — Pavlovian classical conditioning, Thorndikean and Skinnerian operant or instrumental conditioning — is represented extensively through detailed technical exposition: stimulus-response pairings, extinction, generalization, discrimination, second-order hierarchies, and the Rescorla-Wagner information-processing model. LeDoux’s neuroscientific contribution complicates this picture by situating conditioning within defensive survival circuits, where the conditioned stimulus acquires threat valence through amygdalar and insular mechanisms, and extinction emerges not as erasure but as inhibitory new learning. Schore extends the framework into developmental and relational territory, proposing that dopaminergic systems undergo emotional conditioning through early attachment dyads, thereby linking classical associative learning to affective neurobiology. Verdejo-Garcia and Paulus apply conditioning models to addiction, demonstrating how interoceptive cues acquire motivational salience through associative histories. Payne’s somatic-experiencing perspective raises a methodological dissent, arguing that conditioning models, however well established neurophysiologically, remain insufficient for explaining the complex feedback architectures governing autonomic regulation. Taken together, the corpus reveals conditioning not as a settled datum but as a generative conceptual instrument whose boundaries are perpetually renegotiated across behavioral, neuroscientific, clinical, and somatic traditions.