Psychoanalytic Perspectives
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org,
please feel free to visit the school website)
Freud did not emphasize the process of hope in his system of psychology. The human condition was seen in deterministic terms, driven by instincts and even a powerful destructive tendency. Such a perspective did not leave much room for hope, and as Horney in Nuestros Conflictos Internos (1973) stated, “...the philosophy which underlies it is essentially pessimistic.”
Witness Freud's discussion in The Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud (1915) on narcissism. In it he addressed the formation of an ego ideal, a self¬concept “...possessed of every perfection that is of value.” Freud did not recognize the ego ideal to be a potentially-beneficial goal in life. Quite to the contrary, the ego ideal was seen to be a narcissistic act of repression, replacing infantile narcissism with a socially-acceptable form: “What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal...The formation of an ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favoring repression...”
He even argued that this mechanism could be at the root of paranoid symptoms such as “being watched.” That could be the case if one's conscience became overly critical in its comparison of the true ego and the ego ideal. While the ego ideal is not synonymous with hope, this negative evaluation of it appears to similarly indict any concept of hope which includes a positively distorted image of potential reality.
On the other hand, in The Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud (1905) Freud seemed to endorse the role of hope as essential to the practice of good medicine: “There are many ways and means of practicing psychotherapy. All that lead to recovery are good. Our usual word of comfort, which we dispense so liberally to our patients, ‘You'll soon be all right again,’ corresponds to one of these psychotherapeutic methods.”
He declared: “[The] state of mind, in which expectation is colored by hope and faith, is an effective force with which we have to reckon, strictly speaking, in all our attempts at treatment and cure. We could not otherwise account for the peculiar results which we find produced by medicaments and therapeutic procedures.”
After several pages of persuasive testimony about the transcendent role of expectation in “miracle cures,” and advice on ways to enhance the process through hypnosis, Freud concluded that, “Then, as now, the physician's personality was one of the chief instruments for bringing the patient into a state of mind favorable for his recovery… It is from this attempt that modern mental treatment has taken its start.”
While the founding father of psychoanalysis apparently abandoned his early enthusiasm for hope as an element in treatment, others have integrated it into a neo-Freudian structure. Within a standard psychodynamic model of the unconscious, Burton, in the article “Hope And Schizophrenia,” which appeared in Psychoanalytic Review (1973), argued that in the tension between eros and thanatos, hope is the force in favor of life, it is “a bridge between reality and magic…” This implies that “the prototype of all hoping… is immunity to death.” With hope highlighted as a significant function of the ego, it emerges as an important and useful clinical issue. Burton's hope is seen as a heightened expectancy which transcends the objective probability of an event.
This implies that hopeful expectancy is not completely based on reality. Nonetheless, such a distortion is vital because it “energizes life projects which would never ordinarily be undertaken to begin with” and there¬fore, favorably changes the probability of an event occur¬ring. As a distortion of reality, hope is seen as an adaptive mechanism to offset realistic consciousness of human hardships, so as not to fall into constant pessimism.