Confession occupies a privileged position in the depth-psychological canon, functioning simultaneously as a clinical technique, a spiritual rite, and a structural moment in the process of individuation. Jung treats it as the first of four stages of psychotherapy—alongside elucidation, education, and transformation—arguing that the disclosure of a hidden secret dissolves the moral isolation that underlies neurosis and creates the transference bond necessary for therapeutic work. William James, approaching it phenomenologically, identifies confession as the movement from sham to veracity: the penitent ‘exteriorizes his rottenness’ and rejoins the community of shared human reality. Hillman complicates the Jungian account by insisting that confession alone is therapeutically insufficient; without the subsequent movement toward prayer or imaginal devotion, it degenerates into addictive autobiography. The spiritual literature of the corpus—Cassian, Climacus, Augustine—treats confession as the sine qua non of the ascetic life, linking concealment of thought directly to compulsive repetition and shame-bound captivity. McCabe’s Jungian reading of the Twelve Steps maps confession explicitly onto Steps Four through Nine, noting that Jung’s own prescriptions—written inventory, disclosure to another, and restitution—anticipate A.A.’s structure with uncanny precision. Across these positions a consistent tension emerges: between confession as cathartic discharge and confession as relational act, between its power to liberate and its tendency, when arrested at the personal level, to deepen rather than dissolve self-enclosure.