Within the depth-psychology corpus, obesity is treated neither as a simple physiological surplus nor as a failure of will, but as a symptom bearing complex psychic, cultural, and neurobiological meaning. Marion Woodman’s foundational 1980 study remains the defining depth-psychological text, reading obesity in women as the somatic expression of the repressed feminine: a body that cannot be owned, a shadow that cannot be faced, a metabolism disturbed by unresolved psychic conflict. Woodman distinguishes primary from secondary obesity, insisting that the body actively defends its adipose tissue against dietetic correction when deeper homeostatic and psychological equilibria are unaddressed. Running in counterpoint, Gabor Maté situates obesity within a macro-cultural critique, tracing its pandemic spread to corporate food colonization and the toxic normalization of nutritional poverty. Jaak Panksepp supplies the neurobiological substrate, mapping hypothalamic regulation of energy balance, leptin signaling deficits, and VMH lesion-induced hyperphagia to show how the brain’s own architecture can predispose or produce obesity independent of conscious choice. A further strand, visible in Wiss and the addiction-recovery literature, links obesity to food-addiction circuitry, dopamine D2 receptor deficits, and cross-addiction dynamics in early substance-use recovery. Across these voices, obesity stands at the intersection of psyche, soma, society, and neuroscience — a polyvalent condition demanding integrative rather than reductive interpretation.