Within the depth-psychology corpus, genetic predisposition occupies a contested middle ground between biological determinism and the relational, environmental, and epigenetic framings that characterize the field’s most influential voices. The term appears across neurobiological, attachment-theoretical, trauma-developmental, and addiction literatures, nowhere enjoying unanimous interpretive authority. Kenneth Blum and colleagues treat dopaminergic gene variants as primary causal agents in reward deficiency and ADHD, positioning inherited polymorphisms as foundational to psychiatric vulnerability. Eric Kandel situates genetic factors within a broader molecular neuroscience that has transformed neurology far more decisively than psychiatry. Against these biologistic readings, Gabor Maté mounts the most sustained critical challenge: adoption studies are epistemologically compromised, prenatal stress transmits vulnerability epigenetically, and the putative ‘alcoholism gene’ narrative collapsed under its own overreach. Daniel Siegel and the Lanius volume on early-life trauma chart a mediating position, foregrounding gene-environment interactions — particularly the diathesis-stress model, G×E research on serotonin transporter alleles, CRF-1 polymorphisms, and FKBP5 methylation — as the proper framework. Francine Shapiro and John Bowlby’s interpreters acknowledge predisposition without ceding determinism to it: predisposition raises risk but does not seal fate. The field’s operative tension is thus not nature versus nurture but the degree to which inherited susceptibility is modifiable by developmental experience, epigenetic reprogramming, and therapeutic intervention.