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Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation is a brief, complex, erudite, fascinating work, ultimately an attempt to explore the idea of a “moral psychology.” In Radical Hope, Lear weaves together a tapestry of ideas, crisscrossing with grace boundaries of academic and professional disciplines, engaging and sometimes dazzling his readers.
It seems almost shameful to dissect his artwork, but taking it apart is necessary in order to see clearly the value and limitations of this work for psychoanalysts. Lear presents us with a number of challenging ideas that might affect our behavior, especially outside of the consulting room. Living one's life in the world, even in the community of psychoanalytic organizations, requires different skills of thinking and acting from those employed in the practice of clinical psychoanalysis. Living in the world involves moral values and their expression in action. Analysts tend to avoid those problems. Lear certainly does not.
The book employs the history of the destruction of the Absaroke Indian tribe (also known as the Crow) as a prototype for cultural devastation, and looks to the ensuing behavior of the Crow to show the possibility of survivors building a new way of life. The author then proceeds by imagining hypothetical states of mind that might make this kind of adaptation possible. An assumption is that, in order to achieve the resiliency needed for such transformation, one must continue to see oneself as the person one has always been and still is as a part of the culture that used to be one's own, while adapting courageously and wisely to a transformed, unfamiliar world.
Obviously, the idea of resilience in the face of cultural devastation, of going beyond merely surviving calamity, applies much more broadly than to the reaction of American Indians to genocidal onslaught. That is the inspirational direction of the