You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper posits that our unconscious hopes and dreams, our goals and ends, pull us toward our destiny, and highlights how we unconsciously anticipate and rehearse for that future. From objects of fate, we become agentic subjects, creators of our destiny, of our futures. Indeed, we suggest that this goal represents an additional layer of meaning to Benjamin’s call, “where objects were, subjects must be.” The prospective function, an idea first introduced by Jung, does not mean prophetic, but rather it means that we unconsciously “look forward” to, anticipate, envision, and construct future possibilities. This paper develops our understanding of the prospective function by exploring the concept of enactment, a central means by which patients and analysts enter into each other’s inner worlds and discover themselves as participants within each other’s psychic lives. The authors suggest that enactments are not only restrictive and repetitive, with therapeutic benefit resulting from their resolution. Rather, enactments themselves may also be generative and growth enhancing. Enactments can repeat and work through the past and can at times also anticipate, rehearse, and work toward the future, toward our transformation from fatedness to destiny. This thesis is illustrated by two vibrant and pertinent clinical case illustrations, one highlighting dreams and the other enactment.