Hope and Capacity

As I started thinking about hope, I realized that there are two kinds. There’s unconditional hope, as in “hope springs eternal,” or “no matter how bad things get, I’m not giving up hope.” And there’s hope based on new conditions that make change more likely, as in: “My new therapist has given me hope that things really can change.” I might call the latter form conditional hope or realistic hope. I’m aware that unconditional hope—hope as a personality trait—has been shown to be associated with a happier, more successful life experience. But being a pragmatist by nature, I tend to orient more toward the conditional or realistic form of hope.

Realistic hope is related to capacity. In this later stage of my career as a psychoanalyst, I feel that my theoretical and clinical capacities have developed to the point where I can confidently bring hope to most of my patients—hope that the complex processes of our radically unique therapeutic relationship will ultimately yield the transformational change they are seeking. And, to the degree that a patient begins to sense that I (or any therapist) has the capacities to help them in the ways they most need, they are likely to feel more hopeful, however tentatively.

Of course, such analytic hope is not a constant: We are subject to the vicissitudes of a patient’s and our own relational trauma histories (our “dreads,” as Mitchell, 1993, put it) and the sense of impossibility that can ensue when we feel trapped in transference-countertransference knots and tensions that we don’t see a way out of. But, given my evolved analytic orientation (which is influenced by Mitchell), I have come to see such tensions as necessary entry points into enactments that we still do not fully understand, or at least do not understand well enough. At such points, I have learned it is most useful and hopeful to stay with the seemingly impossible conditions, not try to force or solve anything, but stay open to what is happening with a sense of faith that so