Self abandonment occupies a complex and contested position within the depth-psychological corpus, appearing across clinical, developmental, existential, and recovery-oriented literatures with meaningfully distinct inflections. At its most fundamental, the term designates the psychic process by which an individual relinquishes authentic selfhood — its needs, boundaries, desires, and integrity — typically in response to environmental threat, relational trauma, or developmental arrest. Karen Horney maps the ‘abandoning of the real self’ as a cornerstone of neurotic structure, wherein the idealized self supplants genuine identity. Erich Fromm situates self-abandonment within a socio-psychological economy of escape, describing how the isolated individual dissolves the burden of selfhood through masochistic submission. The Adult Children of Alcoholics literature treats self-abandonment as a defining legacy of dysfunctional family systems — a survival-conditioned reflex that persists destructively into adult life and requires active spiritual recovery. Ingrid Clayton, writing on fawning, nuances the concept by distinguishing adaptive self-abandonment (survival intelligence in an abusive context) from its chronic, post-traumatic repetition. Wolfgang Giegerich introduces a philosophically ambitious reading, wherein self-abandonment as absolute negativity may carry transformative, even sacred, significance. The term thus functions as both symptom and, in certain traditions, paradoxical threshold toward authentic selfhood.