ABSTRACT
Hope and despair, that is, participate in the dynamics of self-fulfilling prophecies. The hopeful may realize their hopes because hope gives warrant to their actual striving; the despairing is all too likely to be confirmed in their fears by the passivity that fatalism justifies. In the United States, the assassination of the Kennedy brothers and of Martin Luther King dramatically obliterated the national figures who earlier in the sixties seemed most to embody the hopefulness of youth. Nevertheless, substantial proportions of American youth agree to grim statements about human prospects in their lifetime when the issue is made salient to them. Psychodynamic thinking about hope versus despair, as psychological research has been contributing to it, has dealt with some major interrelated themes. Mental health professionals are trained to intervene at the individual level. Intervention is possible and needed at the social and thus at the historical level as well.
