Imagining One’s Future

A projective approach to Christian maturity

O’Dwyer, Cáit. 2000. Imagining one’s future: a projective approach to Christian maturity. Vatican City: Pontificia università gregoriana.

This work involves a new instrument or test. The subjects of the research were asked to imagine that they had been transported into the future by a "time-machine" to a point beyond the end of their own lives. There each one finds a video-cassette showing the story of the person's own life, from the current date to the end. "as you would desire it to be". They were also requested to allow biographical and psychometric data to be made available in an anonymous way.

It was hypothesised a that a person's maturity in the present living of Christian values would correlate with the story of the imagined future, i.e. with the evangelical quality and inner coherence of the story (external validation); and that this correlation would be stronger than the correlation of the quality of these stories with age, with the length of general or theological education, with clinical maturity or with abstractly proclaimed values (internal validation). Levels of existential maturity (the main independent variable) were based on the level of lived values as assessed from the biographical and psychometric data.

The results of the research show that the stories of the imagined future written by mature subjects differ from those written by the immature in a number of parallel ways, and at very high levels of statistical significance. The stories written by mature subjects are found to be much more complete and realistic than those written by the immature. Psychopathology is accompanied by a more overt passivity in the imagined future. The findings are interpreted with particular reference to an active and realistic way of imagining one's future as corresponding to maturity, while passivity, overt or (more frequently) covert, is the main sign of immaturity.