Within the depth-psychology corpus, Sleeping Beauty functions as a remarkably durable symbolic vehicle, pressed into service across several distinct but overlapping interpretive projects. Jung reads the tale as the psyche’s own self-description: the sleeping child’s identification with Briar-rose reveals an unconscious complex structured around seasonal expectation — the earth bound by winter, awaiting vernal liberation. Otto Rank repositions the motif within his birth-trauma framework, reading the hedge of thorns, the enclosing spell, and the heroic penetration as symbolic defloration and a pleasurable re-modelling of the return to the mother. Joseph Campbell situates the story within the global refusal-of-the-call pattern, where an entire world falls into arrested suspension until a hero restores waking consciousness. James Hillman, by contrast, extracts from the tale an archetypal principle of psychological creativity itself: the sleeping soul awakened through eros is, for him, the founding myth of analytical work. Rachel Pollack’s tarot commentary recuperates the figure as an emblem of neurotic withdrawal — a princess whose fence of thorns is the defensive apparatus of a damaged personality. What unites these readings is the core polarity of sleep as unconscious captivity and awakening as psychic liberation, with the precise agency of awakening — eros, heroism, seasonal nature, or the analytical encounter — constituting the central interpretive tension.