Autonomy appears in the depth-psychology corpus across several distinct registers, each carrying its own theoretical weight. In the developmental tradition — represented most forcefully by Herman, Schore, and Heller — autonomy designates the emergent capacity of the self to regulate its own functioning, express its own point of view, and maintain separateness within relationship; its disruption by trauma, overcontrolling parenting, or developmental failure is understood as one of the foundational injuries treated in depth-psychological work. Heller’s NARM framework constructs an entire ‘Autonomy survival style’ around the developmental wound inflicted when appropriate self-assertion is met with shaming or conditional love, producing a split between public compliance and secret resistance. In the philosophical register, Ricoeur engages the Kantian principle of autonomy — self-legislation — as both the apex of moral selfhood and a site of aporia, questioning whether autonomy itself can remain autonomous given the passivity lurking within the very structure of respect. Thompson, drawing on Varela’s biological framework, recasts autonomy as a systems concept: the organizational closure of a living being that generates its own domain of interaction, replacing the voluntarist subject with an enactive, self-producing whole. Finally, twelve-step literature employs autonomy in an ecclesial-structural sense — group autonomy as a tradition safeguarding decentralized fellowship governance. These divergent usages converge on a shared concern: the conditions under which any system, psychic or biological, can be genuinely self-determining.