Emptiness stands as one of the most philosophically generative and psychologically contested terms in the depth-psychology corpus, carrying simultaneously soteriological, phenomenological, and clinical valences that resist easy synthesis. The Buddhist śūnyatā—rendered variously as void, emptiness, or openness—anchors the term’s primary metaphysical register: Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way formulation, canonized in the Heart Sūtra’s paradox that ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form,’ is engaged by Trungpa, Epstein, Brazier, and Zimmer as the conceptual spine of non-dual awareness. Yet the corpus refuses to treat emptiness as a single phenomenon. Epstein’s pivotal clinical contribution distinguishes the pathological emptiness of the unformed self—rooted in Winnicottian object-relations theory—from the liberating emptiness extolled in Mahāyāna philosophy, arguing that therapy must work with the former to open access to the latter. Jung draws a structural tension between emptiness as destructive dissolution and as formative ground. McGilchrist situates emptiness within a cosmological framework linking śūnyatā, the Tao, and mystical apophasis as the creative ground of all becoming. Wilhelm’s Taoist reading and Hillman’s morphological observation that negative space governs organic form extend the concept beyond Buddhism into a broader onto-psychology of potentiality. The term thus traverses clinical psychology, contemplative epistemology, and metaphysics, with its central tension being whether emptiness is a pathology to be healed, a method to be practiced, or the ultimate nature of reality to be recognized.