Rock Bottom occupies a pivotal structural position in the depth-psychological literature on addiction and recovery. Far from a mere colloquial expression, the term names a precise psychodynamic threshold: the moment at which the addicted ego exhausts its repertoire of denial, rationalisation, and self-directed willpower, and collapses into a condition of radical openness. Jung’s influence is foundational here — his correspondence with Bill Wilson and his treatment of Roland H. established that spiritual transformation requires total defeat of the ego’s pretensions to self-sufficiency. What the Twelve-Step literature calls ‘hitting bottom,’ McCabe reads as the death of the false material ego necessary to individuation; Addenbrooke frames it as the ‘ego collapse at depth’ Jung described, a cognitive and affective rupture that strips away protective defences. Grof situates it on a transpersonal axis, arguing that the ‘depths of spiritual bankruptcy’ harbour transformative potential — the bottom as the anteroom of rebirth. Schoen goes furthest in insisting that without this prior demolition of the ego-under-the-Addiction-Shadow-Complex, all subsequent recovery work remains futile. Adult Children of Alcoholics literature extends the concept beyond substances, cataloguing relational, emotional, and existential bottoms. Von Franz provides the alchemical counterpoint: the bottom of hell is where solid rock begins — a paradox of groundlessness becoming ground. The term thus condenses several major tensions of the field: defeat versus surrender, destruction versus initiation, passivity versus the precondition of agency.