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In a recent issue of The New York Times1 the following article appeared:
Locker Room Talk: It happened the other day over at Manhattan's West Side Y.M.C.A., says Susan Tonkonogy, and here is her account:
“I've had something wrong with my hip joints for a long time and I haven't been able to move right,” reported my locker neighbor, vigorously toweling her 70-year-old body. “When my doctor told me this new operation might help, I said, ‘But I've already had five. Five.’”
“After I said that, my doctor kept quiet. But what he had put in my mind stayed in my mind, and I decided to try the operation.
“At the hospital they discouraged me. ‘Are you sure?’ they kept saying. ‘You're taking a risk. We can't give you any guarantees you know.’
“‘Look,’ I thought, ‘the time I've got left belongs to me. I'm the only one to decide what to do with it.”
“‘I'm going to go through with the operation,’ I told them. I heard something inside me saying, ‘Go ahead, Do it.’
“Now I'm the best I've been in 25 years. You've got to have faith. Right?”
What is this faith she's talking about? Faith can be considered to be belief or trust and derives from fidere,2 to trust or confide in.
This paper will attempt to demonstrate the unconscious elements that sustain or destroy faith; faith can then be succinctly defined as an irrational belief that things will improve or ultimately turn out well. Conversely, faith's obverse, despair, can be thought of as an irrational conviction that things will continue to worsen and deteriorate, and finally turn out badly. It is important to clarify the irrational elements in both faith and despair. In the clinical situation a process is always open-ended, and the participants are operating with limited data. The expected outcome-fortunate or tragic-can contribute a significant variable to the denouement in that it can amplify and augment or stifle and curtail the efforts of the participants. Naranjo3 describes an example of this open-ended outcome in the book The One Quest