Hope, Despair, and Utopia

The 9/11 terrorist attack punctured America's innocence, inflicting massive trauma on people across the country. Almost without delay, psychoanalysts felt compelled to shed their mantle of neutrality to better assist survivors, first responders, and those who were vicariously affected by the tragedy. The couch was taken onto the streets, and analysts engaged in the arduous task of processing what seemed impossible to do.1

Today, over eighteen years later, while the sequelae of 2001 continuous to claim lives and souls, climate change, gender inequality and discrimination, human rights violations, social injustice, mass killings, and the 2016 presidential election are all adding to the feelings of doom and despair. Under the current state of affairs, hope seems to be eroding, and time seems to stand still with no redemption in sight.

In the consulting room, just as in 2001, analysts become witnesses who are themselves exposed to a “radioactive” effect (Gampel) of sociopolitical destructive forces. Both analyst and patient are rendered impotent to resist recurrent floods of intolerance and injustice. Facing the futility of protest, detachment from external reality may appear as a protective device against deregulated affect states. Detachment impedes the necessary work required to mourn lost ideals and desecrated values. Without mourning, unmovable resentment — and its corrosive outcome on the psyche — may dominate. Are analysts able to stand against despair, fight detachment, and reinforce hope? If so, how do analysts nurture hope when they themselves are as vulnerable to its demise?

The privacy of the consulting room has the potential to offer a unique opportunity to co-construct a safe transitional space where hope could be restored. Waiting might be viewed as a container that embraces disruptive affects and as a means of mobilizing agency. Without waiting, hope gets diluted in despair (Tylim 2007). The Spanish word for hope is esperanza; esperar is to wait. Waiting is