What does Freud oppose to the view that the future is already written? It is in so far as chance does exist in the physical, as opposed to mental world, that Freud distinguishes himself from a superstitious person. Yet the analyst never takes a chance event at face value. Everything mental — that is speakable — is determined. This sense of determination, the famous determinism that Freud is rebuked for, is in truth more of a parody of nineteenth century Laplacean determinism than its extension. From the dream in The interpretation of dreams, we derive the simple formula that dreams foretell the future insofar as the future is a perfect likeness of the past. This model seems to be akin to the Laplacean determinism of the nineteenth century, the view that, given knowledge of initial conditions, of the present state of forces and elements in the universe, the entire history of a system can be predicted, both forward, into the future, and backwards, into the past. This determinism is broken up, we are told, by twentieth-century physics. But this Laplacean future is the future invoked by the dream; the real future, if such a thing can be allowed to escape the clutches of the Augustinian paradoxes, is a very different thing. One simple index of Freud's avoidance of the Laplacean denial of a difference between past and future is the fact that the question of chance and coincidence bulks so large in discussions of foretelling the future. In a sense, the future is the privileged domain of the miraculous for psychoanalysis. And yet, psychoanalysis itself essays to enter into the domain of the future by undoing the Laplacean determinations the patient constructs for him or herself.
Source: wiktionary