The concept of inhibitory emotion occupies a significant, if often implicit, position across the depth-psychology and neurobiological corpus. Rather than naming a single discrete affect, the term designates a class of emotional states whose functional signature is the downregulation, arrest, or suppression of prior high-arousal activation — whether sympathetic, behavioral, or relational. Allan Schore’s neuropsychoanalytic project provides the most sustained treatment: shame emerges as the paradigmatic inhibitory emotion, functioning as a psychobiological brake on the elated hyperarousal of the practicing toddler, shifting the organism from sympathetic-ergotropic to parasympathetic-trophotropic dominance via orbitofrontal-vagal pathways. Schore situates this inhibitory function within a developmental teleology — phase-appropriate shame transactions are necessary catalysts for orbitofrontal structural maturation and the internalization of self-regulatory capacity. Iain McGilchrist approaches the territory from hemispheric neurodynamics, locating inhibitory control over emotional arousal in the right frontal cortex, and treating the capacity to inhibit as integral to emotional sophistication rather than its suppression. A notable tension runs through the literature: inhibitory emotion is simultaneously adaptive (regulating grandiosity, enabling socialization) and pathogenic (producing conservation-withdrawal, alexithymia, and insecure attachment) when chronically activated or maladaptively consolidated. This dual valence makes the term central to any serious depth-psychological account of affect regulation, developmental trauma, and the neurobiology of the self.