Prospective Function

The prospective function is Jung‘s term for the forward-looking tendency of the unconscious: the capacity of dreams, symptoms, and autonomous images to anticipate a development of the personality that has not yet occurred and, by anticipating it, to prepare the conscious ego for it. The thesis stands at one of the principal points of Jung’s divergence from Freud, for whom the material of the unconscious is characteristically retrospective — residues of the repressed past, returning.

Jung does not deny the retrospective dimension; he adds the prospective. A dream may disclose a childhood memory that organizes present symptoms; it may also, quite distinctly, present an image of what the personality is in the process of becoming, in advance of the ego’s recognition of that becoming. The prospective symptom — the pathology that is, at depth, pressing the person toward the next developmental step — is the clinical form in which the function is most recognizable. The prospective function is the psychological mechanism of individuation: the psyche knows where it is going before the ego does. See compensation and transcendent-function.

Relationships

• compensation
• symptom-as-prospective-function
• individuation