Happiness occupies a contested and richly stratified position across the depth-psychology corpus. The tradition refuses any single definition, instead mapping the term across at least three distinct registers: the hedonic (pleasure-seeking, physiological reward), the eudaimonic (self-actualization, virtuous living, daimonic fulfillment), and the philosophical-ontological (happiness as a mode of being rather than a possessable state). Functional emotion researchers such as Storbeck, Wylie, and Lench trace happiness through its cognitive, physiological, and social consequences — broaden-and-build theory, resource accumulation, the ‘undo hypothesis’ — while acknowledging its dysfunctional shadows: distraction, mindlessness, and narcissistic bonding. McGilchrist mounts a civilizational critique, arguing that modern hedonic pursuit entraps subjects on a ‘treadmill’ of unfulfilled desire, whereas eudaimonic happiness, rooted in other-centered virtue, yields genuine vitality. Plotinus and the Stoics (via Long and Sedley) insist that true happiness is timeless, constituted entirely by virtue, and complete at any moment — a position sharply at odds with empirical incremental models. Nietzsche ruptures even this by locating the highest happiness in a fleeting, almost wordless encounter with the eternal present. Hillman, characteristically, returns to the Greek root: eudaimonia as a well-pleased daimon, arguing that consumer culture’s ‘pursuit of happiness’ is a parental and civilizational fallacy that suppresses the soul’s code. The central tension in the literature runs between happiness as an achievable functional state and happiness as something one can only enter, never possess.