Skill occupies a contested and philosophically charged position across the depth-psychology corpus, ranging from the ancient Greek techne debates through Jungian reflections on technical mastery to contemporary clinical training literature. In the classical tradition, as Adkins, Vernant, and Snell illuminate, skill (techne) was tied to questions of arete, civic virtue, and the proper ordering of human capacities: whether a skill served the polis, whether its possessor understood the telos of what was made, and whether political genius constituted a genuine moral skill. McGilchrist reframes skill as deeply imitative and hemispheric: imitation is ‘the meta-skill that enables all other skills,’ a right-hemisphere gift that paradoxically liberates human beings from genetic determinism. Jung introduces an ethical shadow to technical mastery, warning that ‘technical skill has grown to be so dangerous’ that the central question is no longer what may be achieved but who holds and exercises that power. Clinical literature — particularly Miller on motivational interviewing and Scott on DBT — treats skill instrumentally and developmentally, specifying criterion-based proficiency levels, module selection, and the progressive acquisition of therapeutic competencies. The tension running through the corpus is thus between skill as embodied, imitative, and emergent versus skill as learnable, codifiable, and measurable — a tension that maps broadly onto the right-hemisphere/left-hemisphere divide McGilchrist finds constitutive of Western intellectual history.