Anticipation, Hope, and Despair*

Expectations, anticipations, and hopes quicken the imagination, enliven the curiosity, increase the appetite and desires and energize the action of all of us. However, unrealistic and exaggerated expectations and anticipations lead to false hopes that pave the way for bitter disappointment, desperate frustrations and tragic despair. We see this today in the anti-scientific, anti-intellectual attitudes of many bright talented people who reject the scientific enterprise for superstitious dogmas of various cults and for magical counter-culture rituals. Psychiatry, and especially psychoanalysis, is dismissed because it did not deliver on its exaggerated promise of better lives, more efficient learning, and a saner society. Parents are bitterly disappointed that their children are of a different sex than they had hoped for, different intelligence than they expected, and have different friends and values than they anticipated. Children are disappointed in their parents for being less than they expected themselves to be, for being frightened, less courageous, less assertive, more confused than they hoped they would be in taking action in this troubled world. Schools disappoint parents and children and are in turn disappointed themselves by diminishing moral and financial support, less than they anticipated when they had planned for the future. All the institutions of our society - schools, hospitals, courts, prisons and even the