The term ‘autonomous’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along two partially overlapping but conceptually distinct axes. The first, rooted in Jungian and post-Jungian thought, designates psychic contents — complexes, fragmentary systems, affects — that operate with a will of their own, independent of and often in opposition to conscious intention. Jung’s formulation is foundational: autonomous complexes intrude upon consciousness as if possessed of independent agency, and their repression does not neutralize but merely distorts them, producing neurosis and collective psychic pathology. Hillman, Samuels, and Wilhelm’s commentary on the Golden Flower each extend this axis, mapping the autonomous as the quality that makes psychic contents both dangerous and therapeutically indispensable. The second axis — developed most elaborately by Evan Thompson following Varela — belongs to enactive cognitive science and systems biology: here ‘autonomous’ denotes an operationally closed system that self-referentially generates and maintains its own organization, standing in structural coupling with, rather than determination by, its environment. Simondon offers a third inflection, locating autonomy in the self-regulation of information storage and the capacity of an individual to develop according to its own law. Siegel’s developmental-psychological usage — the ‘secure/autonomous’ AAI category — marks yet another register: a narrative coherence that signals earned relational freedom. The tension between autonomy as systemic self-organization and autonomy as threatening psychic independence gives the term its particular depth-psychological charge.