Resilience occupies a contested but indispensable position within the depth-psychology corpus. The term is not treated as a static trait but as a dynamic, multi-leveled capacity whose origins, mechanisms, and limits are vigorously debated. Dayton draws on the Wolin and Wolin lineage to frame resilience as a fundamentally relational achievement: children from troubled families develop it not in isolation but through the active recruitment of mentors and the refusal to internalize blame, countering what the literature calls the ‘damage model’ of traumatic determinism. Levine grounds the concept somatically, arguing that spontaneous autonomic discharge — trembling, undulation, the ‘shaking off’ of arousal — constitutes the physiological substrate of what he terms ‘emergent resilience.’ Porges extends this neurophysiological reading through Polyvagal Theory, defining resilience as the efficient recovery of autonomic function to a ventral vagal state that supports social engagement, co-regulation, and health restoration. Dana translates these principles into practice, positioning resilience-building as the deliberate cultivation of layered autonomic routines. Lanius and colleagues interrogate resilience from a neurobiological and genetic vantage, identifying HPA-axis regulation, prefrontal cortical integrity, and specific polymorphisms as moderating variables, while simultaneously raising an ethical caution: the very demand that a child be resilient in the face of abuse deserves critical scrutiny. Across all these registers, resilience names not the absence of wounding but the organism’s — and the relationship’s — capacity to return.