Cultural Futuristics
Developed by Michael Glock Ph.D.

Cultural Futuristics is a method of imagining the future using a psychoanalytic method that interrogates the depths within significant cultural events. This new form of analysis informs future studies and produces future histories—scenarios with soul in mind. Cultural Futuristics is a social science methodology developed by Michael Glock.

Summary

CULTURAL FUTURISTICS:

Freud and Jung understood that unconscious forces exist not only in the individual, but also in events and in the culture. Although the unconscious is, by definition, hidden, humanity can gain access to this seemingly mysterious aspect of the cultural psyche by studying its manifestations, including symbols, images, complexes, symptoms, dreams, and events. Cultural Futuristics is a critical action-oriented methodology. It has been developed to examine, analyze and forecast the future based upon the psychic interiority of numinous cultural events and significant business events. The resulting three scenarios are termed future history, these scenarios delivers the depth of depth psychology into futures studies and specifically scenario based planning.

Depth Psychology:

J. H. van den Berg (1983) asserted that humanity’s unconscious psychological life is visible in specific historical manifestations and cultural events. Engaging with event as symptom (Freud); with cultural event as image, symbol, and dream (Jung); and with culture as symptom and dream (Romanyshyn)—and through a polytheistic psychology (Hillman)--depth psychologists bring forth the unheard cry of the world’s cultural soul—anima cultura mundi.
By listening to event as though culture is undergoing psychoanalysis, this study reveals what has been exiled within events. Informed by the unconscious opposites, shadows, and projections within events, this approach can bring consciousness to culture and soul to scenario planning. Revealing how the cultural unconscious is forming the future, this methodology allows futurists to write scenarios with soul in mind, so that higher quality decisions can be made, possibly averting future tragedies.

The Wounded Researcher:

Cultural futuristics is dedicated to situating “psychotherapy in the history and culture of its time and place” (p. 3).
Futures studies uses a variety of methodologies to examine the future, but the most commonly used method, which is included in all other futures studies methodologies, is scenario planning.
Cultural futuristics rests on the tenets of postmodernism, critical theory, and depth psychology, it is a set of precise techniques and unmasking practices that analyze significant cultural events as symptoms and dreams of society. Cultural futuristicsis therefore intended to be an antidote to the failure of imagination and the poverty of expectations in the contemporary cultural, political, and social landscape. Cultural futuristics re-animates futures studies by infusing its practices and methodologies with depth psychology’s knowledge of the unconscious. The cultural futuristics methodology rests within the context of a postmodern worldview. Cultural materialism is an outgrowth of postmodernism. Cultural materialism’s key axiom is, “Culture is political. . . there is no cultural practice without political significance” (Sim, 2004, p. 188).

Conclusions:

Cultural futuristics is a phronetic social science method that allows the researcher to keenly identify reified material and observe shadow components, projections, cultural complexes and opposing forces that are in action in the psycho-cultural world. I have demonstrated how the researcher conducts an analysis and resulting unification via synthesis and articulated how van den Berg’s historical psychology can be used to identify the psychic interiority that exists within significant and numinous cultural events.

This essay has attempted to fulfill its obligation by delivering a phronetically based social science methodology that explicitly informs and delivers the analytic depth of depth psychology into futures studies. This is the question with which this essay began with, however I wish to reemphasize the substantial limits and delimitations, vis-à-vis, the lack of gender balanced research foundation and my own clinical limitations. In addition a multi-disciplinary team would be most effective in conducting cultural futuristics research projects as well as a focus on many interrelated significant events is called for.

Cultural futuristics delivers a liberating methodology that mitigates the modern era’s age of reason and failure of imagination inherent within existing methods that forecast and imagine future possibilities. A significant cultural event can now be understood as a symptom because it is a representation of cultural dysfunction.

Cultural futuristics I sincerely hope will impact the future because now, soul’s voice can be included in the imaginative visions of tomorrow. Cultural futuristics hopefully re-injects urgent values based perspectives and debates about the role and impact of myths, symbols and the specific narratives that are induced by the affecting intensity of numinious cultural events. Moreover, cultural futuristics is, I hope, a psychologically appropriate analytical tool that addresses essential issues, such as, national identity, global cultural changes, geo politics, global climate change and political systems.

In summary this dissertation brings forth several key contributions to futures studies. Namely, the fundamental idea of how cultural complexes may be revealed using a method like cultural futuristics on events as place and how this conscious knowledge may be used in scenario based planning to mitigate future explosions of cultural complexes. Secondly, the benefit of sharing these ideas with existing think tank’s of like-minded researchers who share methodologies and scenarios together may deepen scenario based planning because cultural futuristics delivers a psychological richness and teleological thrust that exposes these same unexploded cultural complexes. Thirdly this dissertation is suggesting that future planners have an opportunity to become aware of personal, cultural, and collective projections, agendas, and complexes. Importantly these complexes may be revealed while engaged in working the transferential forces that are at work between the researchers and the events under study—“the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 2003, p. 355).

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