Social supports occupy a contested but consistently significant position across the depth-psychology corpus. The term resists simple definition: Dana and Porges distinguish it sharply from social connection, noting that support may constitute an exchange relationship — information, advice, services — while genuine connection entails co-regulation and felt companionship; perceived support, studies suggest, correlates more strongly with well-being than support actually received. In the addiction-recovery literature, Laudet, Morgen, and White situate social supports as a cardinal ingredient of recovery capital — those internal and external resources a person marshals to initiate and sustain sobriety — alongside spirituality, life meaning, and 12-step affiliation, all functioning collectively as stress buffers and enhancers of quality of life. Worden’s grief scholarship frames social supports as a mediating variable in mourning, emphasizing that it is the degree of perceived emotional support, not its mere availability, that shapes bereavement outcomes. Dayton, drawing on Sapolsky, extends the argument to argue that humans command forms of social support no other primate can conceive — cognitive reframing of social roles, for instance — lending the construct a distinctly symbolic and meaning-making dimension absent from purely neurobiological accounts. The tension between quantitative availability and qualitative depth of support runs through every subdomain, making social supports one of the corpus’s richest sites of interdisciplinary convergence.