The Critical Parent figures across the depth-psychology corpus primarily as an internalized psychic structure — the introjected voice of dysfunctional, shaming, or perfectionistic caregiving that continues to operate within the adult psyche long after the original relational context has dissolved. The Adult Children of Alcoholics literature (ACA WSO, 2012) furnishes the most systematic treatment, positioning the Critical Parent as a dominant internal mode of self-relation that must be consciously identified, engaged, and ultimately integrated rather than simply eliminated. The ACA framework insists on a dialectical resolution: the Critical Parent carries vestigial survival value but requires subordination to a newly cultivated Loving Parent capable of genuine attunement to the Inner Child. Flores (1997), writing from an object-relations and Kohutian frame, illuminates how the critical, demeaning internal object reproduces itself interpersonally — subjects unconsciously recruit others into enacting the criticizing role, perpetuating the original wound. Greene (1984) and Sasportas (1985), working within psychological astrology, locate analogous dynamics in the archetypal imago of the cold, Saturnine parent selectively perceived by the child. Bowlby’s attachment corpus offers empirical grounding: parental irritability, scolding, and moralizing produce the anxious, self-reproaching personalities most vulnerable to internalized criticism. Across all traditions the term marks a nodal problem — the conversion of external critical treatment into an autonomous inner authority that perpetuates developmental arrest.