Phase-oriented trauma treatment stands as one of the organizing architectures of contemporary depth-psychological and trauma-clinical thought. Rooted in Pierre Janet’s nineteenth-century phased model of psychological treatment, it was elaborated through the twentieth century by Herman, Brown, van der Hart, Steele, and Nijenhuis, among others, and now constitutes what the field broadly accepts as the standard of care for complex PTSD and dissociative disorders. The model conventionally articulates three sequential phases: stabilization and symptom reduction; processing of traumatic memories; and personality integration with rehabilitation into ordinary life. What the depth-psychology corpus reveals, however, is that this sequential appearance is misleading — the phases are understood across the literature as recursive, spiral, and mutually interpenetrating rather than linear. Ogden’s sensorimotor tradition, the structural dissociation framework of van der Hart and colleagues, Courtois’s complex trauma protocols, and Rothschild’s body-centered revisions all converge on the primacy of Phase 1 stabilization before memory work, yet each nuances the transitions differently. A productive tension runs throughout: whether trauma memory resolution is clinically necessary for recovery, or whether robust stabilization and life-quality restoration can constitute sufficient treatment outcome. This debate, most sharply articulated by Rothschild, points to an epistemological fault line within the entire framework. The phases are simultaneously a clinical heuristic and a conceptual commitment about the nature of traumatic integration.