Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘passage’ operates simultaneously as structural metaphor, phenomenological event, and developmental imperative. James Hollis furnishes the term’s most concentrated analytical treatment, framing the Middle Passage as a collision between the acquired personality and the demands of the individuating Self — a death-and-rebirth transit that is not merely crisis but vocation. Hollis insists this passage must be traversed consciously; avoidance forecloses authentic selfhood. Janusz and Walkiewicz, drawing on van Gennep’s rites-of-passage framework and Turner’s liminality theory, systematize the term across the life course, identifying three governing processes — sequential preservation, liminality-as-deconstruction, and integrative reincorporation — that render passage structurally analogous across puberty, illness, bereavement, and therapeutic transformation. Eliade contributes a hierophanic dimension: gates, bridges, and narrow ways are not merely spatial metaphors but ontological thresholds through which profane existence is transfigured, echoing Matthew’s ‘strait gate’ and initiatory imagery worldwide. Easwaran repositions ‘passage’ in a contemplative register — the scriptural passage as meditative vehicle through which the practitioner traverses inward terrain. Across these voices, a productive tension emerges between passage as imposed disruption and passage as disciplined practice, between the terror of psychological dissolution and the teleological promise of renewal. The term thus gathers liminality, individuation, initiation, and transformation into a single nodal concept of formidable hermeneutic scope.