On Hope

When I received the welcome invitation to submit this piece to Psychoanalytic Dialogues’ “Snapshots on Hope,” my first association went to my experience over the past several months of feeling haunted and demoralized by the world around me as never before. It has been difficult to disattend to the enormity of what I register as sheer virulent destructiveness as well as to the many feelings that such destructiveness gives rise to. When discussing my thoughts about this piece with a colleague, she commented that, “hope is something you can’t live without but is hard to find.” She was referring to the current national and global state of things and the great difficulty in finding hope when those in power are engaged in an active and dizzyingly swift process of destroying some of the very structures and contracts that undergird the possibilities for hope, transformation, and what many would consider positive change. This brief discussion with my colleague led me to questions about where one does find hope. Is hope something that one finds “out there” or “in here?” Like most questions posed in such a dichotomous manner, the answer is undoubtedly, “both,” and most likely lives in that vast and necessary Winnicottian land of transitionality. Put another way, to find or to sustain hope “in here,” are there conditions that are also necessary “out there”? What allows for the re-finding or the resuscitation of hope when damaged or newly and fragilely discovered?

These days, while contending with my own difficult to bear experience vis a vis the state of the world and in my efforts to imagine meaningful action moving forward, my attention frequently turns to a certain subset of patients I’ve worked with over the years and to something of their experience that I now feel I know and understand just a bit better. I have devoted my professional life to working with people whose troubles often involve deep and formidable obstacles to imagining and forging a future felt to be worth pu