Introduction

In “Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis” , Stephen Mitchell explored the interconnection of hope and dread in psychic life, arguing that we cannot fully experience hope without also confronting dread. Hope and dread, rather than opposites, are intimately related aspects of human experience. Hope is an essential part of being human, a driving force for change, connection, and transformation. Dread, meanwhile, is the fear that change, vulnerability, or new experience will bring loss, pain, or chaos.

Holding onto hope isn’t naive; it’s a radical and courageous act of ethical insistence, one that engages conscious and unconscious processes that can sustain life under material conditions of oppression and dehumanization. Community, solidarity, and collective engagement may offer potential avenues to mobilize hope in the face of dread and in the service of change.

In the clinical space, the oscillation of hope and dread saturates the very space we must find and re-find in ourselves and with our patients as we listen not only to what has been, but also to what is emerging. Hope, in this sense, is part of the analytic process itself: a shared prospective function that keeps transformation possible.

We created the Snapshots series five years ago to invite a broad international and interdisciplinary group of analytic scholars to contribute brief pieces on a specific topic germane to the current analytic discourse and social/political zeitgeist.

In the current moment of climate catastrophe, rising authoritarianism, deepening inequality, racial injustice, gender violence, and threats to democracy, it can be difficult to generate a sense of hope in the midst of destruction and despair. We are so grateful to all of our authors for the creative, compelling and profound ways in which they took up the topic of HOPE from multiple perspectives, theoretically, clinically, politically, and personally.

Lauren Levine, Ph.D. and Stephen Hartman, Ph.D.

Joint Editors in Chief, New York University Pos