The term ‘vertical’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along two principal axes—neurobiological and archetypal—each deploying the term with distinct but occasionally convergent force. In Daniel Siegel’s integrative neuroscience, ‘vertical integration’ names the linking of subcortical, limbic, and cortical strata into a coherent conscious experience; the body’s ‘wisdom’—cardiac, visceral, somatic—rises through brainstem and limbic relay stations to emerge as felt selfhood. This neurological verticality is fundamentally about hierarchy of organization and its therapeutic restoration. In sharp contrast, Hillman’s archetypal psychology invests verticality with the signature tension of the puer aeternus: an inherent tropism toward transcendence and flight that renders the puer constitutionally weak on the horizontal plane of earthly reality. For Hillman, verticality is both gift and wound—the direction of inspiration, Einfall, creative beginning, and equally the vector of Icarian hubris. Jung’s seminar on Zarathustra introduces the vertical as a spatial metaphor for the fourth dimension of the Self—a line at right angles to the plane of ego-consciousness, evoking Brahman and the transcendent axis. Von Franz’s ‘world clock’ vision articulates a vertical blue disc in dynamic polarity with a horizontal circle, crystallizing the Self’s synthesis of time-bound and timeless registers. Nichols and Hillman further extend verticality as a structural principle of symbolic reading—the vertical column of the Tarot map and the puer’s ascensional drive—while Merleau-Ponty demonstrates phenomenologically how the body constitutes and reconstitutes the vertical as perceptual ground of all spatial orientation.