Abstract
This article is a follow-up to my recent article on Erving Goffman’s Asylums (1961), an analysis of the mental hospital environment. I focus here on William F. Lynch’s book Images of Hope (1965) which was written when Lynch was a scholar in residence at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. in 1962. I take particular note of the fact that Lynch perceived the book to be a venture into the psychology of hope, and that he based this psychology on the complementary relationship of hope and imagination. I also consider the relationship that he draws between hope and help; the dynamic of hope and hopelessness; the roles of wishing and waiting in the development of a mature sense of hope; and the imagination as an instrument of coping. I conclude that among the selves that comprise our composite Self, the hopeful self is essential to life itself.
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Notes
William F. Lynch was born in New York City in 1908 and died there in 1987. He graduated from Fordham University with a bachelor’s degree in classics in 1930. He worked as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune from 1930 to 1934. He studied for nine years to become a Jesuit priest and was ordained in 1945. From 1945–1950 he taught at Fordham and was the editor of Thought, the University’s philosophical journal. In 1956 he became director of the honors program at Georgetown University. From 1962 to 1975 he was writer-in-residence at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. His books include The Image Industries (1959), a study of the moral and ethical aspects of motion pictures and television broadcasting; Christ and Apollo (1960); The Integrating Mind (1962); Images of Hope (1965); and Images of Faith (1973; see also Bednar 1996).
I am using the republished version (Menninger 1987). It does not include the first three paragraphs of the original address in which Menninger comments on the fact that he, along with his father and his teacher Ernest Southard, attended the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association 40 years earlier (Menninger 1959, p. 481). Otherwise, the republished version is identical to the original version.
Menninger is using the King James Version translation here. The New Revised Standard Version translates this verse: “”For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?”
Discussion of the writings on hope by Paul W. Pruyser, who was a colleague of Karl Menninger’s, is beyond the scope of this article (Pruyser 1964, 1986). But his observation that Menninger’s 1959 article on hope “has greatly helped to make hope an appropriate topic in psychiatry” is especially noteworthy (1964, p. 86). See also my discussion of Pruyser’s writings on hope in Agents of Hope (Capps 1995, pp. 33–47, 155–157).
See, in this regard, Pruyser’s The Play of the Imagination (1983).
Lynch also cites clinical explorations into the role of maternal deprivation that show that even babies can become mentally ill from hopelessness when they can no longer depend on their mothers or maternal substitutes (p. 20).
Lynch does not cite chapter and verse and I have been unable to find any reference to an angel saying this to Daniel, but it recalls the proverb that Menninger alluded to in his article on hope: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life” (Prov. 13:12).
Images of Hope was written before gender-inclusive language became the norm. It is clear that Lynch’s use of the word “man” is intended to include women as well as men.
I identify apathy as one of three major threats to hope (the others being despair and shame) in Agents of Hope (Capps 1995, pp. 58–60, 107–122). I suggest that despair is the closing of the personal future, apathy is the state of desirelessness, and shame is the humiliation of dashed hopes. I identify the three corresponding allies of hope as trust, patience, and modesty.
Lynch indicates in a footnote that he will not speak directly about the hope that one’s present good circumstances will continue. One reason for this is that he wants to discuss hope in a way that applies usefully to the troubled and the mentally ill, who lack this form of hope. Another is that the hope that the present good will not be lost may be included within the hope that there is a way out of a difficulty (p. 259).
In Agents of Hope (Capps 1995), I suggested that the process of hoping “is the perception that what one wants to happen will happen, a perception that is fueled by desire and in response to felt deprivation” (p. 53).
Lynch concludes this chapter with a few comments on fixated wishes, that is, wishes that may appear to reflect the conviction that something will come of it, but that, in fact, reflect the feeling of being mired or trapped in some past situation. Thus, they inhibit movement into the future with new wishes. The result is an accumulating feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. He suggests that such fixated wishes are often found among the mentally ill (pp. 121–122).
In Agents of Hope (Capps 1995) I suggest that apathy, one of the threats to hope, is the state of desirelessness, whereas patience, the corresponding ally of hope, is concerned with keeping hopes alive, especially when they are not immediately attainable (p. 148). Patience is the ability to wait for an expected outcome, but it is not passive. Rather, it is proactively involved in the realization of the desired outcome, and manifests itself in steadiness, endurance, and perseverance (p. 148).
Lynch illustrates this type of waiting with an excerpt from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (Beckett 1954).
In the supplemental readings at the end of the book, Lynch includes Erikson’s discussion of the choice of the negative identity (pp. 237–243: see Erikson 1959, pp. 129–132).
In his theoretical interlude in Identity: Youth and Crisis, Erikson (1968) suggests that we have a “composite Self” comprised of various selves, and he notes that each of one’s selves reflects one’s experience of various and distinctive psychosocial conditions. He adds, “It takes, indeed, a healthy personality for the ‘I’ to be able to speak out of all these conditions in such a way that at any given moment it can testify to a reasonably coherent Self” (p. 217; see also my chapter on the hopeful self in Capps 2008, chapter 1, and on the promise of hope in Capps 2014, chapter 7).
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Capps, D. Imagining Hope: William F. Lynch’s Psychology of Hope. Pastoral Psychol 65, 143–165 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-015-0653-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-015-0653-5