Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘family of origin’ functions as a foundational diagnostic and therapeutic category — the primary relational matrix from which character, compulsion, and psychological wounding are understood to proceed. The term’s weight varies significantly across schools. Recovery literature (ACA, Dayton, Courtois) treats it as the locus of traceable dysfunction: generational addiction patterns, abandonment ruptures, shame transmissions, and the defenses adult children carry into present relationships. Here, mapping the family of origin is not merely retrospective but actively curative — Step One work in ACA explicitly prescribes diagramming it to reveal systemic patterns. Courtois extends this further, demonstrating that family-of-origin characteristics — failure to provide security, consistent affection, and autonomy-promotion — render offspring vulnerable to abuse regardless of whether the abuser is a family member. Hillman mounts the most searching critique of this paradigm, arguing that the contemporary therapeutic fixation on parents as the primary instruments of fate constitutes a ‘parental fallacy’ that forecloses the soul’s relation to daimonic calling and non-familial influences. Moore occupies a mediating position, honoring family as the ‘nest in which soul is born’ while acknowledging its shadow. Greene reads family fate through astrological and mythological lenses, tracing archetypal complexes across generations as a kind of psychic inheritance. The term thus marks a fault line between developmental-trauma models and archetypal-teleological ones.