Deprivation occupies a contested but consequential position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a clinical diagnosis, a developmental category, and an etiological principle. Winnicott provides the field’s most precise taxonomy: he distinguishes deprivation — the loss of something once possessed, experienced by a child capable of perceiving environmental failure — from privation, the original absence of adequate provision. For Winnicott, this distinction is clinically decisive: deprivation is the point of origin of the antisocial tendency, in which the deprived child’s compulsive wickedness represents not moral failure but locked-up hope for environmental repair. Bowlby inherits and complicates this framework through the concept of maternal deprivation, which his biographers note was itself a misnomer — his WHO report addressed privation more than deprivation proper, yet the concept became a revolutionary paradigm reshaping social psychiatry for four decades. Klein approaches deprivation through the lens of object relations, arguing that even inadequate feeding conditions can trigger envious attacks, since deprivation intensifies greed and persecutory anxiety. Von Franz amplifies the phenomenology of the insatiably deprived child, describing an abyss-like hunger that no provision can fill. Across these traditions a key tension persists: whether the damage of deprivation is reversible through corrective relational experience, or whether the gap left by environmental failure inscribes itself indelibly in psychic structure.