ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins his discourse with bringing together the scattered psychoanalytic literature on hope and adds some of his own views to it. He surveys the psychoanalytic literature on the experience of hopelessness and provides a fresh perspective from his own side. The author challenges the reflexive tendency to regard hope as healthy and hopelessness as morbid, demonstrating that both hope and hopelessness have adaptive and pathological variants. He delineates the technical implications of the foregoing conceptualizations and concludes with some observations regarding populations that are especially vulnerable to hopelessness and also regarding the existential despair that is the inevitable legacy of our tragically violent world. In cases where pathological hopelessness is on the surface, unrealistic hope lurks underneath.
