Attention regulation occupies a pivotal position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a neurobiological substrate, a developmental achievement, and a clinical target. The literature surveyed here refuses any simple definition: for Schore, attention is inseparable from arousal regulation, its early architecture laid down through dyadic mother-infant transactions that literally sculpt orbitofrontal circuitry. For Porges, the vagal brake mediates the trade-off between internally directed and externally directed attention, with RSA suppression indexing the capacity to sustain focused engagement. Garland reconceptualises attention regulation as the linchpin of the addiction-recovery interface, arguing that mindfulness-based interventions recruit a frontoparietal metacognitive network to interrupt automatic drug-use schemas and reorient attentional bias away from substance-related cues. McGilchrist, approaching from neuroanatomy and philosophy, distinguishes alertness and sustained attention as the ‘intensity axis,’ grounding them in hemispheric asymmetries that reach beyond technical function into the fabric of human being-in-the-world. Rubia’s pharmacological work on ADHD shows that methylphenidate normalises fronto-striato-parieto-cerebellar attention networks, revealing that dysregulated attention is a circuit-level phenomenon amenable to pharmacological as well as psychotherapeutic intervention. Running through all these positions is a common tension: whether attention regulation is primarily top-down (prefrontal, volitional) or bottom-up (interoceptive, autonomic), with the most sophisticated accounts arguing that the two are dynamically coupled through predictive coding.