One of the essential features of the child-motif is its futurity. The child is potential future. Hence the occurrence of the child-motif in the psychology of the individual signifies as a rule an anticipation of future developments, even though at first sight it may seem to be a retrospective configuration. Life is a flux, a flowing into the future, and not a stoppage or a backwash. It is therefore not surprising that so many of the mythological saviours are child-gods. This corresponds exactly to our experience in the psychology of the individual, which shows that the "child" paves the way for a future change of personality. In the individuation process, it anticipates the figure that comes from the synthesis of conscious and unconscious elements in the personality. It is therefore a unifying symbol which unites the opposites;21 a mediator, bringer of healing, that is, one who makes Whole.
— C. G. and Kerényi, C. Jung
Jung reaches for futurity here, and the instinct is right — the child-image in a dream or fantasy is rarely about childhood. It arrives as an announcement. But notice what slips in at the close: "bringer of healing," "one who makes Whole." The capital letter is not ornamental. It ties the child-motif back to the Self, which ties it back to a telos, which is the move that deserves a second look.
The child as anticipation makes psychological sense. When this image surfaces in someone's interior life, something not-yet is pressing toward form. That much holds. What is harder to grant without friction is the confidence that the something pressing forward is integration — that the child heralds synthesis, completion, the marriage of the opposites. That is a very specific claim dressed as observation. It carries the full weight of a salvific grammar: the process tends somewhere, the somewhere is wholeness, and the child is its herald.
What the image actually delivers is more austere. It delivers urgency without a map. The child insists on being received; it does not promise what it is growing into. Hearing it as pure anticipation — without assuming the destination — keeps the image alive to what it is actually saying, rather than enrolling it in a story whose ending was written before the dream began.
C. G. and Kerényi, C. Jung·Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis·1949