Within the depth-psychology and adjacent humanistic literature surveyed in this corpus, ‘Temperance’ operates on at least three distinct registers that rarely collapse into one another. In its oldest philosophical register, inherited from Plato’s Charmides and Republic, temperance denotes the ordering and harmonising of desires — a virtue closer to inner symphony than to mere restraint, distinguishable from justice only in degree rather than kind. In the Tarot literature — Nichols, Pollack, Banzhaf, Jodorowsky, Hamaker-Zondag, and Place — the card named Temperance becomes a rich archetypal image: the angel who pours between two vessels embodies the alchemical reconciliation of conscious and unconscious, the integration of opposites after the annihilating passage through Death. Here temperance is emphatically not mediocrity but the dynamic equilibrium that makes psychic wholeness possible. In the addiction and recovery literature — Kurtz, Alexander, Schaberg, the Big Book — the term carries a fraught historical burden: the Temperance Movement had perverted the classical virtue into coercive abstentionism, compelling Alcoholics Anonymous to rename the same underlying ideal ‘emotional sobriety’ and ‘serenity.’ Kurtz’s argument that A.A. recovered the classical meaning of temperance as balance — while avoiding the movement’s own intemperance — constitutes perhaps the most sophisticated rehabilitation of the concept across the entire corpus. The central tension, then, is between temperance as lived psychic integration and temperance as cultural-political programme.