Self-worth occupies a contested and layered position across the depth-psychology corpus. The literature does not treat it as a fixed psychological endowment but as a developmental achievement — one that is won, damaged, or excavated through relational, traumatic, and spiritual processes. Philip Flores, reading Kohut, locates the fragility of self-worth at the core of addictive pathology: even high-achieving individuals betray a fundamentally precarious sense of their own value, vulnerable to shame and humiliation beneath the surface of apparent success. The Adult Children of Alcoholics tradition frames self-worth as the survivor’s hard-won reclamation — something systematically eroded by shaming and neglect, recoverable only through grief-work, reparenting, and affirmation. Thomas Moore and James Hollis offer a counterpoint, questioning whether the modern preoccupation with self-esteem is itself a symptom of narcissistic culture; Moore identifies low self-esteem as paradoxically indicating an absence of genuine self-love, while Hollis dismisses the entire ‘self-esteem industry’ as a poverty of priority. McGilchrist, drawing on Baumeister’s recantation, delivers the sharpest critique: unconditional self-esteem leads to mediocrity, and a better construct would tie felt worth to ethical behaviour and genuine achievement. Howard Sasportas, reading through an astrological-psychological lens, argues self-worth is the precondition for recognising the worth of others. What unites these positions is the understanding that self-worth is not self-evidence — it must be earned, reconstructed, or received.