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.
In the library
19 passages
an autonomous system as a system that has organizational closure... autonomous systems must be thermodynamically far-from-equilibrium systems, which incessantly exchange matter and energy with their surroundings.
Thompson, following Varela, defines autonomy in systems-biological terms as organizational and operational closure combined with irreducible environmental exchange — the foundational technical definition for the enactive tradition.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
It appears as an autonomous formation intruding upon consciousness... the complex were an autonomous being capable of in[truding]
Jung establishes the clinical-psychological sense of autonomous: unconscious complexes that act as independent agents, displacing or distorting conscious intention and functioning as quasi-persons within the psyche.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
we even deny that these systems are experienceable. This entails a great psychic danger, because the autonomous systems then behave like any other repressed contents
Jung argues that the modern denial of autonomous psychic systems — fragmentary entities that persist whether acknowledged or not — constitutes a collective psychological crisis whose consequence is pathological symptom formation.
Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis
Autonomic psychic contents thus are quite common experiences for us. Such contents have a disintegrating effect on the conscious mood.
Wilhelm's commentary articulates the phenomenological ubiquity of autonomous psychic contents, linking their disintegrative effect on consciousness to the spectrum from ordinary affect to complex fragmentary personality systems.
Wilhelm, Richard, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931thesis
individuality can be presented as characterized by functional autonomy... self-regulation, the state of obeying nothing but its own law and developing according to its own structure
Simondon defines autonomy as the criterion of genuine individuality — the capacity of a being to regulate its own development by its own law, storing and acting upon information independently.
Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
they are not to project the one light of highest consciousness into concretized figures and dissolve it into a plurality of autonomous fragmentary systems.
Jung reads the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a warning against the psychic danger of allowing consciousness to fragment into autonomous subsystems — a danger that reflects the inherent dissociative tendencies of the human psyche.
An autopoietic system is a specific kind of autonomous system... but there can be autonomous systems that are not autopoietic if their constituent processes exhibit organizational closure in their domain of operation.
Thompson clarifies the relation between autonomy and autopoiesis: the latter is a species of the former, with autonomy defined more broadly by organizational closure irrespective of the molecular domain.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
as long as a living being does not disintegrate, but maintains its autonomous integrity, it is adapted because it is able to carry on its structural coupling with its environment
Thompson shows that biological autonomy — organizational self-maintenance — is the invariant condition underlying adaptation, subordinating fitness optimization to the more fundamental imperative of self-preservation.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
whether it is autonomous or heteronomous, is context-dependent and interest-relative... An organism dynamically produces and maintains its own organization as an invariant through change, and thereby also brings forth its own domain of interaction.
Thompson clarifies the heuristic status of the autonomy/heteronomy distinction, while insisting that the capacity of living systems to self-produce their organization is empirically observable and theoretically irreducible.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Information looks different from an autonomy perspective. Here the system, on the basis of its operationally closed dynamics and mode of structural coupling with the environment, helps determine what information is or can be.
From the autonomy perspective, information is not externally imposed but enacted: the operationally closed system co-constitutes what counts as meaningful signal in its environment.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
functioning autonomous networks are endowed with the capacity to be viable in the face of unpredictable or unspecified environments. The basic idea behind the concept of viability is that the behavior of the system is characterized by a set of possible trajectories rather than by a unique optimal one.
Thompson links autonomy to viability rather than optimality: autonomous networks do not converge on single solutions but maintain a range of trajectories sufficient for self-preservation.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
we may believe as much as we please in the doctrine of the 'unity of the ego,' according to which there can be no such things as autonomous complexes, but Nature herself does not bother in the least about our abstract theories.
Jung polemically defends the empirical reality of autonomous complexes against rationalist ego-unity doctrines, grounding their existence in observable psychological phenomena that theory cannot legislate away.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
The personification enables us to see the relative reality of the autonomous system, and not only makes its assimilation possible but also depotentiates the daemonic forces of life.
Hillman argues that personifying autonomous psychic systems is not regressive but therapeutically necessary: it renders the autonomous visible and thereby allows its integration rather than its continued unconscious dominance.
Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting
each phase of development becomes an autonomous content of the psyche. In adult patients, images relating to infancy derive from autonomous complexes with a personal and archetypal dimension
Samuels, citing Jung via Newton, extends the autonomous-complex concept developmentally: each phase of early life becomes sedimented as an autonomous complex carrying both personal history and archetypal charge.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
their present state of mind with respect to attachment is rated as secure/autonomous... the attachment of children to parents in the 'earned' and 'continuous' secure/autonomous categories appears to be indistinguishable.
Siegel employs 'autonomous' in the Adult Attachment Interview sense — a coherent, reflectively integrated narrative stance toward one's own history — showing that this state can be achieved through significant relationships even after insecure early experience.
Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
it is the internal self-production process that controls or regulates the system's interaction with the outside environment... the capacity for such regulation in turn entails that the system be not simply an internally self-producing system, but also an interactive agent in its environment.
Thompson clarifies the asymmetry within autonomous systems: self-production is ontologically prior and regulates the terms of environmental interaction, making agency a consequence of internal organizational control.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
an autonomous system's states are formed within (informare) the context of the system's dynamics and structural coupling. Therefore, if we wish to continue using the term representation, then we need to be
Thompson argues that autonomous systems enact rather than encode meaning, requiring a fundamental revision of representationalist cognitive science toward dynamically embodied, structurally coupled sense-making.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Each ACA group is autonomous, but t[he groups cooperate within a larger structure]
The ACA text applies 'autonomous' in an organizational-political register — group self-governance without external control — a usage that resonates with the depth-psychological principle of self-regulation at the collective level.
INC , ACA WSO, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012aside
Cognitive structures and processes emerge from recurrent sensorimotor patterns that govern perception and action in autonomous and situated agents.
Thompson invokes autonomous agents as the ground-level unit for enactive cognitive science, where autonomy refers to the self-organizing, environmentally situated character of living cognitive systems.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside