Michael Glock

Film Futuristics is a critical, action-oriented methodology that may be used to unpack the hidden dimensions and prospective suppositions perceived within films and to make the resulting knowledge and insight available to future planning. This presentation will briefly outline the methodology of Film Futuristics followed by a close analysis of a number of films depicting encounters with aliens. The following synthesis, consolidation and extrapolation in the form of three scenarios or future histories will explore the uncanny relationship humankind has with the “Alien” as “Other” as shadow, healer, teacher and lodestar. A close examination of the scenarios will show that the future may well be in plain sight as an external reality for civilization and as the Science Fiction “alien” in some instances exemplifies: a proxy for our own unknown self. Both levels may be unpacked across rich layers of symbolization and metaphoric rebirth in the great dance of creative destruction and renewa...

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 ...

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.

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.

Autobiographical narratives that chart the life story of a person by focusing on defining moments can also be viewed as a form of fiction. These defining moments, both simple and numinous, combined with specific and historic events, become through memory, embellished with fantasy and confabulations. These memories thus become fictions, which are enhanced realities and altered interpretations of past events mitigated by experience. We will call them 'truer illusions.'

Authors, poets and writers are conspiratorially inclined because they form and deform images, which result in stories becoming restructured facts. The resulting fictions thus become more close to reality than what we know as ‘true reality.’ The other idea is that the psyche itself, the poet’s soul, the creative genius, has an independent voice and demands to be heard.

The root of philo, is loving, and sopher is wisdom. Thus when we write pseudologia fantastica, we produce ‘truer illusions’ and these are divine sparks, that make us writers and readers, and true lovers of wisdom.