Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, contemporary continental philosophy, axiology (theories and applied research on values), philosophical and cultural anthropology, diversity managment, gender studies, intercultural communication, and translations studies Research Papers (original) (raw)

Futures studies came into existence in the mid-20th century in an effort to imagine how yesterday’s and today’s realities produce the future. Analyzing patterns and causes of change and stability from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, futurists seek to develop maps of alternative futures. They describe these alternative future conditions by writing multiple scenarios that describe possible, probable, and preferable social, ecological, and political environments.
Until now, one of the missing perspective in futures studies has been the critical contribution of depth psychology, particularly how cultural complexes, symbols, myths, and narratives create political and cultural life. This paper presents cultural futuristics, a revisioning of traditional psychoanalysis into a psychological, social-science methodology that informs scenario-based planning.
Cultural futuristics is a cultural psychology that promotes transdisciplinary dialog and enables clinical findings to be implemented in scenario planning. The resulting scenarios, called future histories, reframe and return the voice of the silenced cultural soul to the future, in an attempt to mitigate the potential impact of existing, yet unexamined, volatile, cultural complexes. This effort enlightens researchers and futurists to the promise, the devastating psychological impact, and the teleological dimensions within significant critical events.
Cultural futuristics treats significant cultural events, such as 9/11, global warming, and terrorism, as dream, as place, and as a client that possesses a veiled, imaginal, intersubjective “voice” that is attempting, through action and symptoms, to attract humanity’s attention.
Integrating social-science methods, psychoanalytical techniques, alchemical procedures, indigenous wisdom, and a research attitude akin to the Western Apache concept of smooth mind, cultural futuristics probes collective, cultural complexes in an effort to gain insight and, thus, foresight. Researchers using cultural futuristics reconnect superficial social, political, and cultural facades with unconscious depths, revealing what has been disguised, exiled, marginalized, and hidden from modernism’s surface glance. Informed by the wisdom within the unconscious-constellated opposites, shadows, and archetypal movements of cultural events, cultural futuristics attempts to mitigate and avert future catastrophes by bringing consciousness to cultural complexes and soul to scenario planning.