Autonomous agency occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, appearing at the intersection of biological theory, phenomenology, developmental psychology, and analytic practice. The term names, broadly, the capacity of a system — whether organism, psyche, or person — to originate action from internal principle rather than external determination. Its range of application is remarkable: from Varela’s autopoietic biology, where organizational closure constitutes the minimal condition of autonomous selfhood, to Gallagher’s neurological analysis of the sense of agency as a premotor phenomenon underwriting intentional movement, to Ricoeur’s philosophical account of the agent as arkhē — the originating principle of actions that ‘depend on the agent himself.’ In Jungian quarters, autonomous agency surfaces in the recognition that unconscious complexes and creative productions can operate with a quasi-independent force, as in Edinger’s reading of Nietzsche’s ‘almost autonomous production.’ Winnicott contributes a developmental register, noting how seduction by an external agency annihilates the child’s sense of existing as an autonomous unit. The deepest tension in the corpus runs between accounts that ground autonomy in organismic self-organization (Thompson, Varela) and those that locate it in the subjective, phenomenological capacity for self-initiated action (Gallagher, Ricoeur, Siegel). What unifies these positions is the shared conviction that autonomy is not a metaphysical given but an emergent, embodied, and relationally conditioned achievement.