Symptom as Prospective Function

Jung’s decisive break with Freud on the meaning of the symptom is the addition of a prospective — forward-pointing, teleological — reading alongside the etiological one. In the 1916 paper “General Aspects of Dream Psychology” Jung writes that under regression “the — under normal conditions — merely compensatory function of the unconscious becomes a guiding, prospective function [einer führenden, prospektiven Funktion]” (CW 8 §495).

This is the move that distinguishes analytical from psychoanalytic reading. Where Freud sees the symptom as compromise formation behind which lies a repressed wish — the past returning in distorted form — Jung reads the symptom as also for something, an orienteering of the psyche toward what it has yet to become. “The teleological significance of dreams,” he writes, “is precisely what Freud had neglected in favor of historical determinants.” The symptom carries an aim. The aim is not assigned by the analyst; it is read out of the symptom’s own pattern.

Practically, the prospective reading commits the analyst to the inquiring posture Jung named in CW 4: “In all cases it refrains from judging the value of a symptom, and tries instead to understand what tendencies lie beneath that symptom” (Jung, CW 4 §417). The symptom is taken as message before it is taken as malfunction. Where it points, the individuation process is being summoned forward. The transcendent-function is what arises when the prospective aim and the conscious standpoint are held together long enough to constellate a third.

Relationships

• compensation
• transcendent-function
• individuation
• sigmund-freud

Primary sources

• jung-two-essays-analytical (Jung 1953)
• Jung, CW 8 §495
• Jung, CW 4 §417