Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis

Despite the importance of the concept of hope in human affairs, and especially in all manner of helping relationships, psychoanalysts have long had difficulty accepting responsibility for the manner in which their various interpretive orientations and explanations of therapeutic action express their own hopes for their patients. In point of fact, observes Steven Cooper, analysts have had relatively little to say about the therapeutic role of hope in general. In this study, Cooper remedies this longstanding lacuna in the literature, and, in the process, provides a thorough comparative analysis of contemporary psychoanalytic models with respect to issues of hope and hopefulness.