Engagement and disengagement constitute one of the most structurally consequential polarities in the depth-psychology corpus, appearing across registers as distant as neurophysiology, motivational therapeutics, mythopoetic individuation, and attachment theory. In the clinical literature represented by Miller’s Motivational Interviewing, engagement names the relational foundation upon which all subsequent therapeutic work depends — a fragile condition easily shattered by assessment traps, premature focusing, or the subtle violence of nonmutuality. Disengagement is not merely its absence but a patterned response to felt threat, autonomy violation, or mis-attunement, and the corpus is equally attentive to reengagement as a recoverable therapeutic arc. In Schore’s developmental neurobiology, the engagement-disengagement rhythm is primordial: it structures the earliest dyadic exchanges between caregiver and infant, with cycles of social gaze and withdrawal directly shaping autonomic, neurochemical, and hormonal regulation. Porges and Dana extend this into polyvagal terms, mapping engagement onto ventral vagal safety and disengagement onto sympathetic mobilization or dorsal vagal collapse. Price’s somatic approach to interoceptive awareness treats body-level disengagement as a trackable clinical event requiring deliberate re-entry. Campbell and Noel introduce a mythopoetic axis, in which voluntary disengagement from collective identity becomes a vehicle for individuation and depth encounter. The entire field thus treats this polarity not as failure versus success, but as a rhythmic, regulatable, and meaning-laden oscillation central to psychological life.