Dependency occupies a contested and richly layered position across the depth-psychology corpus, appearing simultaneously as developmental necessity, pathological fixation, relational risk, and spiritual condition. No single school holds an uncontested view. For Berger, working within the recovery tradition and drawing on Fromm, emotional dependency is the root disturbance underlying addictive and neurotic suffering: it is the structural inability to maintain one’s emotional center of gravity within oneself, making the self hostage to persons and circumstances. Fromm himself frames symbiotic dependency as an evasion of individuation — a submission to the ‘magic helper’ that forfeits selfhood for the illusion of security. Van der Hart’s trauma model distinguishes adaptive from maladaptive dependency in the clinical relationship, insisting that appropriate reliance on a therapist must always serve the patient’s internalization of functioning parts rather than perpetuate attachment-cry cycles. Hillman, characteristically, mythologizes the polarity: solitary independence and symbiotic dependency are not merely clinical categories but ‘radical extremes’ — two archetypal fantasies structuring the psyche’s imagination of relatedness. Signell offers the corrective that dependency in intimate relationship, dismissed by patriarchal culture, is in truth a necessary risk of genuine love. The AA tradition, as recovered by Kurtz, frames the alcoholic’s contradiction as a two-pronged quest for both dependence and independence — the spiritual drama from which recovery must emerge. What unites these positions is the conviction that dependency is never merely behavioral but is rooted in the deepest architecture of selfhood.