Forgetfulness occupies a contested and richly differentiated position across the depth-psychology corpus. Far from designating mere cognitive failure, the term carries contradictory valuations that reveal fundamental tensions about the nature of psyche, memory, and the unconscious. Nietzsche’s foundational move — recasting forgetting as an active, positive faculty of repression rather than a passive inertia — anticipates the psychoanalytic tradition while offering its own affirmative claim: that the healthy psyche requires the capacity to close the doors of consciousness. Freud inherits this insight but reorients it diagnostically, reading forgetfulness as motivated concealment of counter-will, desire, or conflict; misplaced objects, forgotten anniversaries, and bungled intentions are not random failures but encrypted communications from unconscious purpose. Hillman, writing from the imaginal tradition, radicalizes the concept further by linking forgetfulness to Lethe and the underworld, arguing that dreaming itself is a process of forgetting — a withdrawal of dayworld attention that allows psyche to move below ego. The Philokalia tradition frames forgetfulness as the primary spiritual pathogen, the mother of ignorance and vice, against which vigilance, writing, and practice are deployed. Gnostic sources treat it as existential estrangement from the divine. Estés rehabilitates conscious forgetting as therapeutic agency — not erasure but disciplined disengagement from obsessive recollection. The field thus spans forgetfulness as virtue, pathology, ontological wound, and underworld process.