Autonomous purposiveness designates the capacity of a living system to generate and sustain its own ends from within, without recourse to an external designer, purpose-giver, or regulatory authority. In the depth-psychology and philosophy-of-life corpus canvassed here, the concept emerges principally through Thompson’s sustained engagement with Kant, Jonas, Varela, and Merleau-Ponty, where it is articulated as ‘immanent purposiveness’ — a constitutive, not merely regulative, property arising from autopoietic self-organization. The key tension runs between mechanist readings that dissolve teleology into efficient causation and those, following Jonas, that insist purposiveness is a genuine ontological character of living form, expressed in the organism’s conatus-like self-transcendence and identity-maintenance through metabolic turnover. Kant is both the problem and the resource: he recognized that organisms cannot be explained by external design, yet he could not naturalise intrinsic purposiveness without invoking either hylozoism or theism. Varela’s autopoiesis supplies the naturalistic resolution Thompson defends — purposiveness as an emergent relational property of operationally closed networks — while Jonas radicalises the claim by grounding it in existential phenomenology. The concept matters for depth psychology because it supplies a biological substrate for the idea that psychic processes, like organic ones, are self-directing rather than externally driven.