Future

The concept of the future occupies a richly contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, appearing not as a simple temporal horizon but as a psychologically charged, structurally significant dimension of mind and experience. McGilchrist draws the sharpest clinical outlines: in depression, the future contracts to near nullity, frozen by the weight of an unprocessed past, while mania projects an unrealistically luminous futurity — each pathology mapping onto hemispheric asymmetry. Von Franz, following Jung’s structural analysis of dreams, proposes that the final portion of any dream’s arc anticipates future resolution or catastrophe, making the unconscious itself a temporal organ oriented forward. Heidegger’s Dasein, whose being is constituted through temporality, grounds the existential stakes: authentic understanding involves projecting possibility ahead of oneself. The I Ching tradition encoded by Wang Bi formalizes this as a hermeneutic method — to understand the future one must ‘work backward’ from an imagined terminus. Merleau-Ponty and Bergson together insist that past and future are not objectively given but spring forth from an embodied, durational present. What unifies these otherwise disparate positions is the recognition that the future is not a neutral calendar fact but a psychological achievement — one that can be foreclosed by trauma, distorted by pathology, and reclaimed through therapeutic and contemplative work.

In the library 11 passages

In depression it is not that the future doesn’t exist, but that it is hard to imagine one’s own future, because one is still frozen in the painful experience of the past, without any possibility of redemptive change.

McGilchrist argues that depression and mania represent polar distortions of temporal orientation, with the future either frozen by an oppressive past or inflated by unrealistic anticipation, each corresponding to hemispheric imbalance.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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In melancholia, the past becomes more determining, and the future less open; in mania it is the reverse. In depression, time is freighted with minatory meaning, and it is this that stops us moving or becoming.

This passage establishes the future’s openness as the defining psychological index of mental health, contrasting melancholic closure with manic inflation as twin failures of temporal orientation.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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The ego is moving in time from the past to the future. The dream comes up toward it from the unconscious, like a wave containing a cluster of images… first perceiving the past, being hit by the present, and then seeing ahead the solution.

Von Franz proposes that the structural arc of dreams is temporally organized, with the final portion oriented toward future resolution, making the unconscious a prospective as well as retrospective faculty.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

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To understand the future, we must leap ahead in time and then work our way backward through future time to where we are in the present. This process is defined as ‘working backward’ (ni), that is, one has to go against the flow of future time.

Wang Bi’s commentary on the I Ching formalizes the future as a hermeneutic destination requiring retrograde reasoning, positioning divination as a structured method for navigating temporal uncertainty.

Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis

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According to Merleau-Ponty, a past and a future spring forth when I reach out towards them. I am not, for myself, at this very moment, I am also at this morning or at the night which will soon be.

McGilchrist, citing Merleau-Ponty, argues that past and future are not given temporal facts but achievements of embodied intentional reaching, constituted dynamically by a durational present.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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A present which endures. Compare the physicist Erwin Schrödinger: ‘the present is the only thing that has no end.’ Thus, says Bergson, what is in need of explanation is not memory, but its ‘apparent abolition’.

By juxtaposing Bergson and Schrödinger, McGilchrist contends that the durational present subsumes past and future within itself, with the brain’s primary function being to abolish, not preserve, that continuity.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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It shows that somehow the past can be completely present in the deep unconscious. In fact one cannot analyze a person deeply without meeting in him or her dream motifs which come from the remote past of their cultural background.

Von Franz demonstrates that the unconscious is not bound by linear time, holding past and future simultaneously available as psychic content accessible through deep analysis.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

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These worksheets can also be particularly useful with clients who have trouble being present in the here-and-now due to internal ‘chatter’ (e.g., self-critical thoughts, worry about the future, rumination about the past).

Ogden identifies worry about the future as a somatic and cognitive obstacle to present-moment awareness in traumatized clients, situating futurity as a clinical problem to be therapeutically regulated.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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A considerable amount of brainpower has been assigned to the search engines that both automatically and on demand can bring back remembrances of our past mental adventures. This process is critical because so much of what we commit to memory concerns not the past but the

Damasio suggests that memory’s primary orientation is prospective rather than retrospective — what is stored concerns anticipated futures as much as experienced pasts.

Damasio, Antonio R., The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting

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Rotate the cards a final turn clockwise. In this ‘future’ scenario, I interpret the cards as telling me… Permutation #2: Past, Present, Future.

Greer’s workbook treats the future as a structural position within divinatory spreads, operationalizing the tripartite temporal schema of past, present, and future as a tool for self-inquiry.

Greer, Mary K., Tarot for Your Self: A Workbook for the Inward Journey, 1984aside

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More than once my mother predicted to me how the future would be accomplished (krainoito)… It is not fated that Moira should accomplish (krānai) these things in this way.

Benveniste traces the archaic Greek concept of the future as something divinely effected or foreclosed, linking prophetic discourse to the sovereign powers that sanction or deny its accomplishment.

Benveniste, Émile, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside

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