Psychoanalytic therapy occupies a contested and generative position within the depth-psychology corpus, ranging from Freud’s foundational insistence that making unconscious aetiological processes conscious is the curative sine qua non, through Jung’s pluralist vision of individualized, phase-sensitive treatment that moves from reductive analysis toward synthetic-dialectical work, to contemporary empirical researchers who subject long-term psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapy to rigorous meta-analytic scrutiny. The corpus reveals at least three major axes of tension. First, the question of efficacy: de Maat, Leichsenring, and Shedler marshal controlled-trial and meta-analytic evidence demonstrating that long-term psychoanalytic therapy produces durable structural personality change beyond symptom reduction, while insisting that such gains require a treatment duration and intensity (minimally fifty sessions over a year) that distinguishes them categorically from briefer modalities. Second, the question of method and individualization: Jung explicitly resisted the imposition of a single technique, arguing that Freudian transference analysis and Adlerian social reductionism each address genuine but partial truths, and that archetypal or mythological material demands a shift to synthetic, anagogic procedure. Third, the question of what therapy aims at: Freud locates the goal in psychosynthesis and ego rationality; Horney, in self-realization against neurotic pride; Winnicott and Samuels, in relational provision and regression as a vehicle of development; Hillman, in re-evaluation rather than cure. These tensions are not resolved in the corpus but productively held, making psychoanalytic therapy one of the central organizing debates of the entire tradition.