The via negativa — the route of negation, knowing by exclusion rather than assertion — surfaces across the depth-psychology corpus in three distinct but overlapping registers. First, it appears as a classical theological and apophatic method: the acknowledgment that ultimate realities (God, Being, the Absolute) exceed every positive predicate, so that honest speech must proceed by denial. Kurtz and Ketcham invoke it explicitly as a spiritual pathway, warning simultaneously of its pitfall in comparative judgment. Armstrong traces the tradition through Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Neoplatonic currents, positioning apophatic theology against Anselm’s positive ontology. McGilchrist recovers the logic structurally, arguing that a ‘primary act of negation’ — divine withdrawal, reciprocal inhibition, the Kabbalistic tzimtzum — is constitutive of creation itself. Second, the via negativa functions in depth psychology as an epistemological principle: Edinger notes that foundational concepts such as ‘individual’ and ‘integer’ can only be defined by negation of their opposites. Third, and most programmatically, Giegerich radicalises the route of negation into the very logical form of genuine psychological discourse, demanding an ‘accomplished negation’ — a negation that negates itself — as the only authentic entrance into the soul’s life. Hillman invokes it more briefly but tellingly in the alchemical context, reading the double negative of ‘do not act out / do not hold in’ as a mercurial via negativa that dissolves both imperatives. The tension among these deployments — spiritual practice, epistemic humility, and dialectical logic — gives the term its considerable generative power within the literature.