Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Valley’ functions as a charged topographic symbol standing in deliberate opposition to ‘peak,’ ‘mountain,’ and ‘height’ — the traditional figures of spirit, transcendence, and abstract elevation. The term’s most theoretically consequential articulation belongs to James Hillman, who, drawing on Keats’s phrase ‘vale of Soul-making,’ establishes the valley as the privileged locus of psyche: depressed, suffering, shadowed, and generative precisely because it is low. The vale of tears, the valley of the shadow of death, the lonesome valley of sacred song — these are not deficits to be overcome but constitutive conditions of soul-life. Against Maslow’s pneumatic ‘peak experience,’ Hillman erects the vale experience as psychology’s proper domain. Jung’s own use of valley imagery — in the Red Book’s desert ravines and in the East African dawn vista — sustains this polarity: the valley is the place where light enters from below, where the liminal and transformative are encountered. Von Franz elaborates the valley as a dream-landscape saturated with mother-complex imagery: stagnant water, non-reflecting ice, descent and collapse. In Sufi mysticism, filtered through Corbin, the ‘seven valleys’ map an interior itinerary culminating in the darkness of divine annihilation. Descartes’s famous logical pairing of mountain and valley as ontologically inseparable introduces a philosophical register that resonates, however differently, with depth psychology’s insistence that height and depth require one another. The valley, across these traditions, names the soul’s native terrain.