The term ‘passions’ occupies a contested and multi-layered position across the depth-psychology corpus, bridging Stoic philosophy, Orthodox asceticism, and contemporary transpersonal psychology. In the Stoic tradition, as reconstructed by Inwood and Nussbaum, the passions are cognitive events — assents to false value-judgements — and thus fall entirely within the rational agent’s purview, making their governance a matter of moral responsibility rather than merely temperamental management. The Philokalic tradition, by contrast, deploys an elaborate taxonomy of passions distributed across the faculties of body, soul, intellect, and reason, treating them as ontological distortions that obscure the divine image and must be progressively purified through ascetic practice toward the goal of dispassion (apatheia). Here the passions are not sins per se but diseased conditions that, left unchecked, progressively enslave the person and dissolve personal identity. Welwood introduces a third position: that passion, rightly understood as unconditional resonance with being, contains the seed of its own transformation, pointing toward surrender and spiritual awakening. The fundamental tension running through the corpus is whether passions are to be extirpated, governed, or transmuted — a question that divides Stoic apatheia, Christian hesychasm, and Buddhist-inflected transpersonal thought in ways that illuminate the deepest disagreements in Western and Eastern psychologies of the soul.