This time I shall hardly be spared the reproach of mysticism.
But perhaps the facts should be fuller considered, doubtless the unconscious remnants, for it is one of the essential tasks of analysis to render impotent by dissolution the content of the completes competing with the proper conduct of life.
Psychoanalysis works backwards like the science of history.
Just as the largest part of the past is so far removed that it is not reached by history, so too the greater part of the unconscious determinants is unreachable.
History, however, knows nothing of two kinds of things, that which is hidden in the past and that which is hidden in the future.
Bother perhaps might be attained with a certain probability, the first as a postulate, the second as an historical prognosis.
Insofar as tomorrow is already contained in today, and all the threads of the future are in place, so a more profound knowledge of the past might render possible a more or less far reaching and certain knowledge of the future.
Let us necessarily we must come to the same result.
Just as traces of memory long since fallen below the threshold of consciousness are accessible to the unconscious, so too there are very fine subliminal combinations of the future, which are of the greatest significance for future happenings in so far as the future is conditioned by our own psychology.
But just so little as the science of history concerns itself with the combinations for the future, which is the function of politics, so little, also, are the psychological combinations for the future the object of analysis, they would be much more the object of an infinitely refined psychological synthesis, which attempts to follow the natural current of the libido.
This we cannot do, but possible this might happen in the unconscious, and it appears as if from time to time, in certain cases, significant fragments of this process come to light, at least in dreams.
From this comes the prophetic significance of the dream long claimed by superstition.
The aversion of the scientific man of to-day to this type of thinking, hardly to be called phantastic, is merely an overcompensation to the very ancient and all to great inclination of mankind to believe in prophesies and superstitions. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, Footnote 17.
Image: “Consulting the Oracle” by John Waterhouse