Hope is a desire for something better. Hopefulness is objectless. It is a life impulse. Hope can be disappointed, but not hopefulness since it expects nothing. Immortal in its tenacity, it does not die with failure. Mad trust or perseverance abolishes time and never gives up. Violent and tragic, it replaces the human dimension in expectation, against a background of finiteness. In its space a reparative reverie can be deployed. It may be thought of as a force at work outlining the contours of an encounter with an object to be cathected, the high point of the need to remain present without being elusive, to be there to hear the helplessness, to agree to share it, to identify with anger and rage. Through situations arising from critical care and disability, the author proposes to explore the hypothesis of an impulse of hopefulness in the face of somatic emergency, defining an extreme space, the theatre of “a painful communion, entirely human and fragile”.