The standard knock against old-school approaches to psychology – Freud, Jung et al – is they’re obsessed with the past. Visit some crusty psychoanalyst and you’re sure to waste years picking through your childhood, concluding – surprise! – that your parents messed you up. (A Freudian slip is where you say one thing but mean your mother.) Modern, self-helpy psychology starts from the tempting premise that you can skip all that: just change your present-day thoughts and happiness will follow! But now Martin Seligman, the father of “positive psychology”, has gone further. The past and present are both distractions, he argues in a book and New York Times essay; the key to happiness lies in humans’ unique ability to contemplate the future. “For the past century, most researchers have assumed we’re prisoners of the past and the present,” he writes. But we’re not. For example, depression results not mainly from “past traumas and present stresses, but because of skewed visions of what lies ahead”. Indeed, “the main purpose of emotions is to guide future behaviour”. He even proposes a new discipline, “prospective psychology”, to tackle this paradigm-shifting truth.

I suspect other psychologists might be surprised to learn they’ve been neglecting the future. After all, there’d be no point getting therapy, reading a self-help book or taking an antidepressant if it couldn’t change your future. Even Freud saw himself as freeing patients from neurosis so they could live future lives of “ordinary unhappiness”, in his splendidly bleak phrase. (Jung was even more future-focused: “I am not what has happened to me,” he wrote, “I am what I choose to become.”) But the problem, for Seligman, is that all these versions of psychology see humans at the mercy of “inner drives”, which determine our trajectories, unless we can somehow silence them. In reality, he argues, we don’t spend our lives acting out childhood patterns. Instead, our actions stem from how we conceive of the future. The title of a paper he co-authored expresses the distinction: “Navigating into the future or driven by the past?”

Yet the metaphor highlights the strangeness of his idea: a journey by car involves both navigating and being driven. (Try going on a road trip using a satnav but no fuel, or with nobody at the wheel.) The insight of most earlier psychologists wasn’t that we’re prisoners of the past, but that the past affects how we approach the future. If you get the message from your earliest relationships that the world is a scary place, you’ll approach the future anxiously – and understanding this may help interrupt the anxiety spiral next time it occurs. The past constrains our futures in countless down-to-earth ways, too: thanks to my genes and/or parenting, I doubt I’ll ever be a weightlifter or a chess grandmaster. Seligman cites a study in which people were interrupted through the day to record their thoughts. They were thinking of the future much more than the past. But that hardly shows the past didn’t matter to them; it shaped how they faced the future. To quote some other outdated ignoramus, the past isn’t even past.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com