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“Hope that is seen is no hope at all:” Theological constructions of hope in psychotherapy Warren Kinghorn, MD, ThD Contemporary psychology and psychiatry have increasingly focused on hope as a human phenomenon relevant to physical and psychological well-being. Contemporary psychological research, however, often considers hope anthropocentrically and cannot speak directly of the particular cultural, religious and theological sustaining contexts of hope that, especially for persons of faith, give hope its shape and meaning. In this paper I focus on three articulations of hope within Jewish and Christian tradition—the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, the lament psalms of the Hebrew Bible, and the post-Holocaust writing of Emil Fackenheim—to argue that attention to these sustaining contexts is essential for understanding what religious traditions mean by hope. Religious traditions display insights and practices related to hope that both complement and challenge contemporary psychological approaches to hope. Close attention to these determinative traditions can therefore enrich and deepen the treatment of hope within contemporary psychotherapeutic practice. (Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 77[4], 369-394)

Hope is noticed in modern mental health practice, and particularly in my own field of psychiatry, most often in its absence. Feeling sad, empty, or hopeless is a key marker of major depression, as outlined in the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013), and hopelessness is listed in nearly every psychiatric textWarren A. Kinghorn is with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center, and Duke Divinity School. This research was supported in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation/ University of Chicago Program on Medicine and Religion. Correspondence may be sent to Warren Kinghorn, MD, ThD, Box 90967, Duke Divinity School, Durham, NC 27708, e-mail: [email protected] (Copyright © 2013 The Menninger Foundation)

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book as a dynamic risk factor for suicide. The absence of hope often brings people into various forms of medical and mental health treatment. All mental health clinicians, as well as chaplains and clergy and many others also, intimately know hopelessness. We know it not only as a theoretical description but as a gnawing, tragic, existential reality in the lives of those with whom we work, and sometimes even in ourselves. For all of their willingness to name the reality of hopelessness, however, the mental health disciplines, at least until recently, have had much less to say constructively about hope. Karl Menninger, speaking to the psychoanalytically oriented American Psychiatric Association in 1959, noted poetically and with reference to St. Paul that: our shelves hold many books now on the place of faith in science and psychiatry, and on the vicissitudes of man’s efforts to love and to be loved. But when it comes to hope, our shelves are bare (Menninger, 1959, p. 481, emphasis in original).

Fortunately this is no longer entirely the case: in part due to Menninger’s own efforts, and in part due to the research and writing of many who came after him, including some whose work appears also in this special issue of the Bulletin, the shelves of psychology (though not, regrettably, psychiatry) are now fairly robustly stocked with literature on hope. Even in Menninger’s time, Erik Erikson foregrounded hope and despair in his influential stage theory, noting that hope emerged as a virtue when basic trust overcame mistrust, and was important throughout life, as the individual sought to ward off despair (Erikson, 2000). Directly influenced by Menninger, psychologist Paul Pruyser (1986) wrote at length about hope both for psychologists and for pastoral counselors, drawing from the phenomenological analysis of Gabriel Marcel in distinguishing between expectation, wish, optimism, and hope. Psychodynamic and psychoanalytic reflection on hope has also been enriched, not surprisingly, by the work of psychologically-informed clergy and pastoral counselors unafraid to use the language of hope in relation to modern clinical phenomena (Lynch, 1974). Since Menninger’s time, hope has also appeared prominently in the scholarship of psychotherapeutic efficacy. Jerome Frank,

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for example, a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist deeply formed in the psychological theories of Kurt Lewin, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Adolph Meyer, argued centrally in his text Persuasion and Healing that the efficacy of psychotherapy is less related to the specific techniques of any particular school than to the therapist-client relationship. Frank came to believe that many patients seeking psychotherapy experienced some form of what he termed demoralization, a broad term that included “various degrees of helplessness, hopelessness, confusion, and subjective incompetence” (Frank & Frank, 1991, p. 14). And the corresponding central task of any successful psychotherapy was the fostering of hope and remoralization. Frank held that all psychotherapies shared in common “an emotionally charged, confiding relationship with a helping person (often with the participation of a group,” “a healing setting,” “a rationale, conceptual scheme, or myth that provides a plausible explanation for the patient’s symptoms and prescribes a ritual or procedure for resolving them,” and “a ritual or procedure that requires the active participation of both patient and therapist and that is believed by both to be the means of restoring the patient’s health” (Frank & Frank, 1991, pp. 40–43). Together, these elements served to combat patients’ demoralization and alienation, to foster hope and the expectation of help, and to enhance the patient’s sense of mastery and self-efficacy. In addition to these strains of scholarship, hope has also found its way into the world of experimental psychology. Attachment theory has provided a rich theoretical and experimental context for psychological reflection on the development of hope, and hope has become a common subject of empirical work in religion, spirituality, and health (Koenig, King, & Carson, 2012). But hope has additionally infiltrated even the traditions of psychology that derive historically from behaviorism as behavioral psychology has become, first, more attentive to cognition and belief and, later, more attentive not only to pathological experience but to the so-called positive psychology of human flourishing and mental health. In the pages that follow I will attend in some detail to this increasing attention to hope within modern cognitive-behavioral psychology, with particular attention to Albert Bandura’s concept

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of self-efficacy, Martin Seligman’s concept of learned optimism, and, especially, the hope theory of the late C. R. Snyder. I do not wish to suggest that these theorists—or cognitive-behavioral research and theory in general—provide the only intelligible way to speak psychologically of hope. I turn to Bandura, Seligman, and Snyder, rather, because their work provides with helpful clarity both a constructive resource and a cautionary tale for contemporary psychotherapists and counselors who wish to take hope seriously in the lives of their clients. These modern psychologists of hope, particularly Seligman and Snyder, direct the penetrating beam of modern experimental psychological method on hope and its mechanisms. With helpful clarity, they define hope (or something similar), operationalize it, include it in validated measurement scales, and therefore make it a fruitful object of scientific study. They show, masterfully, that hope (or optimism) matters both for primary prevention of psychological illness, for coping, and for resilience. They offer to clinicians helpful insights into the psychological mechanisms of hope, and they at least gesture toward psychotherapeutic interventions for instilling and fostering hope in clients. And for this reason, they deserve attention and respect. In this paper, however, I wish to address more than what these modern psychological researchers and thinkers have to say about hope. I wish also, through the eyes of a theologian, to address what they do not say about hope; indeed, what they cannot say given their methodological commitments and presuppositions. The modern psychologies of hope, I will argue, are masterful in describing hope as a subjective human phenomenon, in describing its psychological contours, and in associating the phenomenon of hope with various empirically-measured outcomes. But there is more to hope than that. Hope, as it has evolved within the cultural, linguistic, philosophical, and religious traditions of human history, entails more than subjective psychological phenomena. It entails, also, a context within which such psychological phenomena are intelligible, a context of meaning within which hope is hope and not just wish or fantasy. If psychotherapists are to understand and engage hope—including hope as it shows up in the lives of our clients—attending to these meaning-contexts of

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hope is absolutely essential. But such contexts can never be fully captured, I suggest, by the modern experimental psychologies— not because the theoretical models of hope research are insufficiently robust, but because these models will always, necessarily, remain trapped in immanence. Modern psychological hope research: Three tributaries

Approaches to hope within modern cognitive-behavioral research and practice are varied, and the field is certainly wider than any one theory or research group. Three theoretical tributaries of this research, however, will provide a glimpse of this modern psychology of hope. I have chosen to highlight Bandura, Seligman, and Snyder because they are among the last four decades’ most influential and widely cited experimental psychologists working on topics related to hope. They certainly do not represent the whole of psychology, and even less do they represent the whole of psychotherapy or other professional disciplines such as pastoral counseling and chaplaincy. But insofar as all mental health disciplines are informed in some way by experimental psychology, both their successes and their failures bear important lessons for any practice of psychotherapy that looks to psychological science for guidance. The first important tributary of modern hope research is Albert Bandura’s concept of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977). Early in his long research career, Bandura found himself uncomfortable with the way that early psychological behaviorists depicted the human as a product of environment, rather than as an agent with the capacity to respond to his or her environment reciprocally and socially (Bandura, 2005). A cornerstone of the social cognitive theory that emerged from this discontent is Bandura’s concept of perceived self-efficacy, “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives” (Bandura, 1994, p. 71). Self-efficacy, for Bandura, is fostered by personal experiences of mastery, by witnessing examples of mastery by others, by verbal persuasion, and by reduced physiological stress. Strong perceived self-efficacy, in turn, predicts willingness to pursue difficult goals,

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to persevere in them, to respond to failure with resilience, and to avoid anxiety and burnout. While Bandura does not generally advert specifically to the language of hope, it is not difficult to see how perceived self-efficacy might positively correlate with selfratings of hope. A second tributary of modern psychological language of hope is Martin Seligman’s work on learned optimism, which has played a prominent role within the emergent field of positive psychology (Seligman, 2006). Seligman’s work, like that of Bandura, emerged in opposition to strict behaviorism; his work on learned helplessness, first in dogs and later in humans, demonstrated that individuals who believe they cannot avoid aversive stimuli become passive and helpless even as the painful stimuli continue. Caged dogs who could not avoid a shock whatever their response, in Seligman’s early experiments, eventually stopped trying and lay helplessly as the shocks continued, with obvious potential correlates to human depression. But the converse of learned helplessness and pessimism is, for Seligman, learned optimism. Seligman has demonstrated that optimistic people tend to view bad events as temporary rather than permanent, and situation-specific rather than generalizable and universal. Optimistic explanatory style is, he writes, the “stuff of hope” (Seligman, 2006, pp. 48–49); and hope is described as a character strength in Peterson’s and Seligman’s 2004 classification Character Strengths and Virtues (Peterson & Seligman, 2004, pp. 569–582). Finally, the third tributary of modern hope psychology, and the only one that has centrally adopted the name of hope in its self-description, is the hope theory of the late C. R. Snyder. Snyder’s work draws on that of Bandura and Seligman, but unlike them, and due in part because of Snyder’s personal interactions with fellow Kansan Karl Menninger at a formative point of his research career (Snyder, 2002), Snyder frames his theory specifically using the language of hope. Hope, for Snyder, is “a positive motivational state that is based on an interactively derived sense of successful (a) agency (goal-directed energy), and (b) pathways” (planning to meet goals; Snyder, 2002, p. 250). The triad of goals, agency, and pathways is critical to Snyder’s characterization of hope. Hope names a state (or disposition) in which a person pur-

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sues goals with an intermediate or uncertain probability of attainment and, in doing so, not only identifies possible routes to the attainment of the goal (pathways thinking) but also believes that he or she is capable of using those pathways to reach the desired goals (agency thinking). As for Bandura, Seligman, and other cognitive theorists, hope for Snyder has more to do with cognitive appraisal than with emotion, though positive emotions both result from and contribute to successful agency and pathways thinking. Snyder distinguishes dispositional (enduring or trait) hope and state hope and has developed validated scales for each, as well as for hope in children (Lopez et al., 2004; Snyder, 2000, 2002). Using these scales in a variety of research settings, Snyder and his colleagues have documented that high-hope people are more likely to engage in health-maintaining behaviors, are more adept at coping with trauma and adversity, are less likely to experience sustained depression and anxiety, are less likely to use avoidance as a coping strategy, and are more likely to endorse close connections with other people (Rand & Cheavens, 2009). Beyond experimental models: Psychotherapy and religious conceptions of hope

There is at best an indirect relationship between the theoretical models of Bandura, Seligman, Snyder, and others, which I have collectively referred to as the modern psychology of hope, and the practice of modern psychotherapy. To be sure, some of these researchers envision and intend very direct psychotherapeutic applications of their work: Seligman provides concrete behavioral recommendations for fostering optimism (Seligman, 2006), and colleagues of Snyder have articulated strategies for hope finding, hope bonding, hope reminding, and hope-enhancing (replete with acronyms such as G-POWER) for individuals and for groups (Lopez et al., 2004). But psychotherapy in practice, as a practical art, is generally too complex and too improvisational to be enveloped by any single research paradigm. To be sure, some therapists will resonate more with these theorists than will others. Therapists formed within traditions historically removed from behaviorism and cognitive theory, such as pastoral counsel-

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ing or psychoanalysis, might find Bandura, Seligman, and Snyder rather alien. But even therapists trained in modern cognitive-behavioral theory are likely to find their practices only tangentially determined by modern hope research. This is in part because any practice is only imperfectly formed by its research theories, but also because practicing therapists usually draw on a wide array of sources and intuitions when approaching any particular patient; this space for creative integration of multiple sources is part of what distinguishes psychotherapy as an art rather than as simply an implement of technology. It is likely, then, that clinicians reading this paper will greet these modern hope theories with mixed reactions. On one hand, these paradigms provide clear theoretical and psychological models for hope’s development and sustenance and, as such, offer novel and useful ways to engage clients prone to despair. In this way, the psychological models of hope prove very attractive. But on the other hand, many clinicians are likely to resist the encapsulation of hope by these theories. Self-efficacy, optimism, and goal/agency/pathways thinking might be useful ways to dissect hope, they might agree—but surely hope is something more than any of these constructs. There is a resonance to hope in the lives of clients and therapists that exceeds, or transcends, any of these cognitive models. For a client to say “I hope,” or “I am hopeful,” or conversely, “I have lost hope,” is something more than to say, “I can achieve my goals,” or “I expect things to work out well.” This something more of hope is a powerful and possibly sustaining reality in the lives of many humans—clients and therapists alike—and yet eludes the grasp of empirical scales and operational definitions that have been developed to date. A strict empiricist might suggest that this is due simply to the inadequate progress of science and to the failure of empirical imagination; the work of scientific psychology should be to develop and refine constructs that would capture this something more in an operational model. Modern psychology and psychiatry, in this view, depend on the willingness of researchers to subject the deepest intricacies of human life to the empirical gaze. And indeed there is no empirical way to refute this point, in part because it is not itself an empirical assertion. Perhaps psychological science will

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someday encapsulate the deepest meanings of hope in human language and culture. But there are structural and conceptual reasons why this is highly unlikely. The inability of modern psychological models to encapsulate hope, I suggest, is not due to a failure of empirical imagination, but rather due to the ultimate failure of any imagination that would limit itself to modern empirical methods. Hope, as writers both within (Yahne & Miller, 1999) and certainly outside of the psychological literature have recognized, is not a phenomenon that can be comprehended only by reference to the subjective experience, cognition, and behavior of an individual. For many clinicians, and certainly for many of our clients, hope is only possible within a context—a cultural and existential context, and often a religious context—that renders hope possible. For many, the context of hope includes not only a particular set of beliefs and emotions—for instance, beliefs that one has the power to achieve certain goals and to overcome obstacles to those goals—but also, crucially, a sustaining context that makes hope intelligible. Such a sustaining context need not necessarily include a god. It might be a relationship, or a community, or a culture, or even a principle; 12-step models like Alcoholics Anonymous provide an example of how hope might be sustained in a context that is not necessarily theistic (Yahne & Miller, 1999). But empirical psychology cannot speak directly of hope’s sustaining contexts. Psychology can, to be sure, speak of these contexts as they are reflected in experience, belief, and behavior. But the proper context of hope, I suggest, can never be reduced to this reflection. To believe that things will turn out well is similar, but not quite the same, as to live in hope. What kind of languages, then, can speak of hope’s context? If therapists and clients really want to engage the richly subtle contours of hope, it would be wise to look beyond the language of modern psychology to the languages of cultural and religious traditions that have been shaping the context of hope for thousands of years. Attention to religious formulations of hope can not only deepen our collective appreciation for hope’s complexity and power, but can bear practical fruit for the practice of psychotherapy. Let us therefore attend to examples of the way that hope is constructed within the particular voices of particular religious

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traditions. I am not able, in the context of this paper, to consider in detail how hope appears in all of the world’s major religious traditions, or even in the three Abrahamic traditions, or even, for that matter, within my own debate-filled tradition of Christianity. But I will describe three pertinent examples, chosen for the ways that they can helpfully illumine understandings of hope in psychotherapeutic practice. First, I will consider the treatment of hope in the work of the 13th-century Christian theologian/philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Second, I will consider how hope emerges in the laments of the book of Psalms of the Hebrew scriptures, which have influenced both Christian and Jewish practice. And finally, I will consider the work of the contemporary Jewish rabbi and philosopher Emil Fackenheim, for whom hope was an essential Jewish response to the un-understandable, diabolical evil of Auschwitz. Thomas Aquinas: Hope and the wayfarer Hope has always been a central theme of Christian language and practice, just as it is a central motif of the Jewish tradition out of which Christianity emerged. Themes of hope permeate the Christian New Testament, particularly in the letter to the Hebrews and in the writings of Paul. Paul in particular writes repeatedly of the hope of a new creation that is already present but not yet fully revealed (Rom. 8:18–25), and his privileging and linking of faith, hope, and love (1 Cor. 13:13; 1 Thess. 5:8) has given rise to a long tradition of Christian reflection regarding faith, hope, and love as the Christian “theological virtues.” Thomas Aquinas (~1225–1274) was a 13th-century philosopher, theologian, and Dominican friar who taught in Paris, Rome, and Naples, and whose work is characterized by the synthesis of Christian theology with close attention to the natural world and to human psychology and biology, which he interpreted primarily through the work of Aristotle. Aquinas inherited the long tradition of Christian reflection on hope, and in his most mature work, the Summa theologiae, Aquinas writes of hope two distinct ways, considering it first as a passion or emotion and then, later, as a theological virtue. Attention to each of these, and to the dif-

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Hatred (odium)

Love (amor)

Note. For more detail see Miner (2009) and Lombardo (2011).

Passions directed toward evil

Passions directed toward the good

. . . as apprehended by the intellect

The evil is present: sorrow (tristitia) or pain (dolor)

The evil is absent: aversion (fuga) or repulsion (abominatio).

The good is present, and the will rests/reposes in it: Pleasure (delectatio) or Joy (gaudium)

The good is absent: desire (concupiscentia)

. . . as pursued or avoided by the will

Concupiscible passions,directed toward good or evil as such . . .

Table 1. Basic structure of Aquinas on the passions

The present evil seems possible to overcome or overthrow: anger (ira)

The absent evil seems possible to overcome: daring (audacia)

The absent evil seems impossible to overcome: fear (timor)

The absent good seems impossible to obtain: despair (desperatio)

The absent good seems possible to obtain: hope (spes)

Irascible passions, directed toward good or evil apprehended as difficult to obtain or to avoid

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ference between them, bears interesting implication for the ways that hope is considered in psychotherapy. First, Aquinas considers hope as a passion or emotion. Understanding Aquinas’s treatment of hope as an emotion, however, requires some background in Aquinas’s understanding of the emotions as a whole (see Table 1). The section of the Summa theologiae commonly known as the Treatise on the Passions (STh I–II.28–47) was, in the 13th century, the most detailed treatment of emotion ever written, and it continues to be an interesting and fruitful source of reflection on emotion (Miner, 2009; Lombardo, 2011). For Aquinas, the emotions are not simply freefloating psychological or bodily phenomena; when rightly functioning and not distorted by bodily disease or infirmity, they serve as orienting signs of who and what we love. Love (amor) and its converse, hatred (odium), are the orienting themes of human emotional life. When we love someone (or something), Aquinas states, we judge him or her (or it) to be good and we unite ourselves in love to him/her/it (Aquinas writes that love “implies a certain connaturalness or complacency of the lover for the thing beloved,” STh I–II.27.1, English Dominican Fathers translation). But love itself is not enough: love awakens desire or longing (concupiscentia) to be united to the beloved, to attain the beloved not only in love but in act. Humans, that is, don’t simply love; we additionally pursue what/whom we love, and this pursuit is fed by desire. And when the beloved is attained—when the person or thing we love is united to us in act and not just in desire—we feel delight (delectatio) or joy (gaudium). There is therefore a clear order to the emotions for Aquinas: love gives rise to desire for the beloved; when the beloved is attained, desire gives way to the rest and repose of joy and delight. Aquinas understands, as psychotherapists know all too well, that human life is not always full of joy and delight; more often than not, love’s pursuit is met with obstacles and dangers. Indeed, much of human emotional life has to do not with pursuing good but with avoiding harm—but this too follows a particular order. If love specifies an object of desire, a good to pursue, hatred or aversion specifies the opposite of this: an evil or harm to avoid. Hatred for Aquinas is therefore simply love’s converse: humans

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hate that which stands in the way of the good. And just as love engenders desire, hatred engenders particular emotions also: aversion (fuga), if the evil is not present, or sorrow (tristitia) and pain (dolor), if the evil is present already. To provide but one example of how Aquinas might be useful for modern psychotherapeutic thinking: the unremitting sorrow of depression, for Aquinas, can have many causes, including bodily illness, but often it reflects the sustained presence of evils (or perceived evils), which thwarts the pursuit of beloved goods. To be depressed is to perceive that one cannot avoid the sustained presence of an obstacle to the good. All of the emotions described so far are what Aquinas describes as concupiscible passions, passions that have to do with the immediate presence (or absence) of a good or evil. But he also describes a second order of emotions, collectively referred to as the irascible passions, which have to do with the pursuit or avoidance of goods or evils when the pursuit or avoidance is marked by difficulty. The irascible passions, for Aquinas, include fear, daring, anger and—most relevant for this discussion—hope (spes) and despair (desperatio). Hope, like desire, motivates the pursuit of a beloved person or object. Hope, however, is a more refined emotion than desire; it encourages the pursuit of the beloved, but recognizes at the same time that the journey to the beloved person or thing, though possible, will be difficult. Aquinas specifically defines the emotion of hope as “the movement of the appetitive power ensuing from the apprehension of a [difficult-to-obtain] future good” (STh I–II.40.2). Hope, that is, names the emotion that results when a good is loved and desired and possible to attain, yet difficult to attain. Despair, conversely, is the emotion that results when a good is loved and desired and yet impossible to attain. The parallels of Aquinas’s 13th-century treatment of hope to Snyder’s 21st-century hope theory are striking. For both Aquinas and modern hope theory, hope is not just an emotional state; it is rather, in Snyder’s words, a positive motivational state that entails particular beliefs about the desirability and attainability of a good. More specifically, hope entails (1) identification of particular goods worth pursuing, which Aquinas describes as love and which Snyder describes as goal specification; (2) belief that

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the good is attainable by certain means, which encompasses Snyder’s agency and pathways thinking; and yet (3) belief that the probability of attaining the good is at best intermediate. Here, as in other examples, positive psychology can be understood as facilitating rediscovery of older approaches to psychology that had been lost in the reductive and increasingly medicalized psychology of the 20th century. When we turn from Aquinas’s treatment of hope as a passion to his treatment of hope as a theological virtue, however, the parallels with Snyder’s hope theory fade and an approach to hope emerges that has no analogue in the modern psychological hope theories detailed earlier. And just as Aquinas’s treatment of hope as an emotion makes sense only in the broader context of his treatment of emotion in general, so also Aquinas’s treatment of hope as a theological virtue demands a brief introduction to Aquinas’s understanding of virtue. Virtue can mean a lot of things in modern language and in modern psychology; commonly, virtue is used to denote socially desirable or favored traits or patterns of behavior (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). For Aquinas, however—as for Aristotle before him—virtues are particular types of habits, and habits are embodied dispositions to action. Habits are not themselves actions or behaviors, but they name the disposition of an individual to act in particular ways in particular situations: to use Anthony Kenny’s example, behind the act of speaking French is a habit of being able to speak French when one encounters a fellow Frenchspeaker (Davies, 2002). As such, habits are a product both of one’s contingent bodily makeup as well as of formative learning history. Virtues are those habits that dispose a person to act well, in a way that leads to flourishing, and are distinguished from vices, which are habits that dispose a person to act in ways that are not consistent with flourishing. Virtues for Aquinas, therefore, are embodied dispositions to respond to particular situations in ways that lead to health and flourishing. Following Aristotle, Aquinas distinguishes between intellectual virtues—virtues that lead to the reliable determination of truth— and moral virtues, which are virtues that lead to the reliable pursuit of good things. Examples of intellectual virtues, for Aquinas,

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are deductive reasoning, which Aquinas refers to as science (scientia), and prudence (prudentia), which is the ability to know the right course of action when there are multiple options and the path is not clear. (Prudence, in Aquinas’s sense, is absolutely essential for any skillful psychotherapeutic practice.) Examples of moral virtues, for Aquinas, are the cardinal virtues of justice, courage, and temperance or self-control, which allow a person to overcome barriers and to withstand challenges, both internal and external, to the pursuit of that which is good. Hope, however, is not for Aquinas either an intellectual or a moral virtue. It is, rather, a theological virtue, which is a virtuecategory that Aquinas derives not from Aristotle but from Christian language and practice. Faith, hope, and love are, like other virtues, embodied dispositions to action; but Aquinas refers to them as theological virtues because they connect a person to God and, in God, to the things God loves. They are also called theological because, unlike the moral and intellectual virtues, they cannot be attained through human effort alone; they can only be infused by God, in God’s grace. The theological virtue of love (caritas), as Aquinas describes it, is best understood as God’s love, given to humans, by which one loves God in return, and by which one also loves everything and everyone else that God loves. God’s love does not overmaster the human, as if the human were a robot; the human, rather, participates in God and in God’s love, and that participation enables God’s love, which is also fully the person’s love, to flow freely to God, to oneself, and to others. Apart from the prior action of God, however, the grace-born(e) virtue of caritas would be unattainable, as would the participation in God’s life that caritas enables. The theological virtue of faith operates in much the same way. Faith, for Aquinas, is the intellectual disposition to assent to truths that have been revealed by God and that are necessary for union with God, but which have not been demonstrated by natural reason. Faith for Aquinas is not believing against natural reason, as if faith and reason were in conflict, but rather believing beyond natural reason, as God both reveals particular truths and enables the believer, by grace, to assent to them. Like love, faith is a human disposition, but it is made possible only by the prior action of God.

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The theological virtue of hope, in Aquinas’s system, is intelligible only within this virtue-ecology of love and faith. It shares a certain basic structure with the passion of hope, but goes far beyond it. Theological hope, for Aquinas, applies to those who long for God and for God’s goodness and God’s life, but who have not yet attained God; they are wayfarers on a journey to God who have not yet arrived. They know, and they suffer, this not-yetness, the parched aridity of desire, the empirical awareness that God and God’s good things are not yet fully present. They do not have any proof, either through empirical observation or through natural reason, that their longing for God and for God’s salvation will ever be satisfied. There is nothing that any therapist or spiritual director can do to convince them that they will ever emerge from this incompleteness and suffering into the fullness of God’s life. But even amidst this empirical uncertainty, they are able to rest their will in God and God’s goodness—not because they possess the natural ability to do so, but because God, through a special infusion of grace, has made it possible. Theological hope, for Aquinas, is the disposition of the will to fix itself on God and God’s goodness even when that goodness is not immediately apparent, and when God seems absent. It does not come naturally; hope in this sense is possible only because God, in God’s grace, makes it so. Hope is a grace-given disposition to rest in God’s good future, even when that good future is not yet (Verhey, 2003). As such, it pertains not to those who have already attained God in full, but to pilgrims on a journey; in Dominic Doyle’s apt formulation, hope “is that virtue whereby the believer becomes a pilgrim” (Doyle, 2011, p. 40). But hope, for Aquinas, is not only an expectation regarding the future: because God’s goodness is not ultimately separable from God’s nature, to fix one’s will on God’s goodness is, in a very real sense, to be drawn into God’s life, not only in the future but in the present also (Pieper, 1986). The virtue of hope, for Aquinas, can be contrasted with two opposing vices—vices to which Menninger (1959) calls attention as well. On one side of hope, predictably, is despair (STh II– II.20). Despair for Aquinas is the disposition either not to deem God’s goodness worth seeking, or to think it impossible to attain, even through God’s help. It arises sometimes because the will is

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so distracted by other things that it no longer seeks God, and sometimes because the torpid sadness of acedia, or sloth, suffocates the will’s aspiration for God. But on the other side of hope is the contrary vice of presumption (praesumptione; STh II–II.21). Unlike despair, which names the disposition of the will to regard God as unattainable, presumption disposes the will to take the journey to God too lightly and to forget that one is a pilgrim on a journey. One might, for instance, think God’s goodness could be attained by human effort alone, or might think that one had already attained God’s goodness—forgetting that such attainment is not easy, and that God alone makes it possible. But such certainty—we might call it a projected fantasy—is incommensurate with human life in the present. Human life is indeed hard, and God’s goodness is not fully attained, and so the proper approach for pilgrims is not presumption but, rather, hope. Aquinas’s complex treatment of hope provides a useful example of a religious thinker who would understand and in many ways applaud modern psychological hope research—his account of hope as a passion bears marked resemblance to Snyder’s hope theory—but who at the same time offers an account of hope’s sustaining context far beyond the reach of any psychological theory. Hope is indeed a human phenomenon for Aquinas, but in its most full sense, as a theological virtue, it is a phenomenon intelligible and sustainable only because of the providence of a faithful and loving God. The Psalms of lament: Hope and the context of covenant Aquinas’s account of hope is, of course, not the only account of hope within the Christian tradition, nor does Aquinas speak for any tradition other than Christianity. For a different perspective on hope that has informed both Christian and Jewish tradition, we may turn to the “psalms of lament” within the book of Psalms in the Hebrew Scriptures. Readers uninitiated in the psalms, particularly American Christians who expect only saccharine promises from scripture, are sometimes startled at the raw, brutal descriptions of experience contained within them. This is particularly true in psalms such as Psalm 88:

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Such is the experience of many clients in therapy in our day, the hopeless in the presence of whom therapists struggle to respond. And the most notable thing about Psalm 88, the darkest of the lament psalms, is that there is no response, no promise of salvation, no explicit affirmation of hope. There is only a raw, soul-wrenching prayer to a god who seems absent. But the lament psalms taken as a whole, including Psalm 88, are not nihilistic. They do indeed frequently call God to question; they question why God has not protected God’s people, why God allows evil to prosper, why God is absent when God’s people call to him (e.g., Psalms 74, 79). Frequently, they demand that God listen and act. These questions and demands are sometimes accompanied by assurances of God’s faithfulness (e.g., Psalm 60), and sometimes not (e.g., Psalm 44). But even when there is no answer, even when God seems absent, the psalms of lament are shaped and enabled by the context of God’s covenant with Israel. All of the lament psalms, including Psalm 88, presuppose that God has linked Godself to Israel in a way that makes these questions and demands intelligible, just as securely attached children may question and make demands of their parents with the reasonable expectation of being met, eventually, by a benevolent response. God may not seem present, but God has claimed Israel, God has linked Godself to Israel, and God may therefore be called to account and to action. And because this covenanting God is faithful to the covenant, even the cry of lament is, in a sense, a display of hope (Verhey, 2003).

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If the lament psalms display hope, however, it is not the sort of hope described in any of the modern psychological hope theories detailed above. The psalmists of lament would not score highly either on agency thinking or on pathways thinking (Snyder, 2002); indeed, the lament psalms are nearly universally occasioned when the psalmist either does not know how to achieve the desired goal of liberation from suffering and oppression, or does not believe himself/herself capable of achieving liberation, or both. But this inability to press through to a better future, which might ordinarily be the occasion for despair, is for the psalmists an occasion to press harder into God’s faithfulness to God’s covenant. For the psalmist, it is God who needs to make a way, precisely because God’s people are suffering and unable to do so themselves. This divine covenant-faithfulness is often a matter only of individual or communal memory, but this memory is sometimes sustaining: Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. (Psalm 42:5, New Revised Standard Version)

Emil Fackenheim: Hope as command Unlike Christian theologies of hope, which have often placed heavy emphasis on the promise of life after death, Jewish tradition has generally avoided focusing on the afterlife. Hope in Jewish tradition, therefore, has traditionally focused on life in this world. Jewish reflection on hope has been shaped and made complex, however, by historical events that have threatened not only Jewish practice but the very existence of the Jewish people. Three such events, among many others, stand out: the Babylonian destruction of the first Jerusalem temple and exile of the southern kingdom in 586 BCE; the Roman destruction of the second Jerusalem temple in 70 CE; and, of course, the Shoah or Holocaust of the 20th century. Each of these events triggered major changes in Jewish life and thought, and forced creative and sometimes painful reformulation of the locus and role of Jewish hope. And of course, Jewish reflection on hope is not monolithic. For one example, however, of the way that hope arises in Jewish tradition, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Fall 2013)

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we can turn to the post-Holocaust writing of the 20th-century rabbi and philosopher Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003), who was himself interned in a Nazi concentration camp before escaping Germany for Canada and who wrote piercingly of the deep evil of that time. Speaking to an interfaith audience in 1968, Fackenheim asks, “How come Jews are still around after thousands of years, mostly exiled?” and then immediately responds, “There is only one answer, and that answer is hope” (Fackenheim, 1970, p. 69, emphasis in original). Fackenheim then argues that the greatest threat to the Jewish people after Auschwitz is the loss of this sustaining hope, or at least the de-coupling of hope from God’s covenant with the Jewish people and the transferring of messianic hope to modern secular political structures. And indeed the haunting specter of Auschwitz, in its very un-understandability, in its failure to advance any cause other than Jewish extermination, severely challenges hope: in the Nazi death camps, unlike any previous Jewish persecution or pogrom, a million Jewish children were murdered simply because their Jewish parents and grandparents had obeyed the mitzvah of bringing up children in the Jewish faith. In the face of this monumental evil, Fackenheim counsels hope. Indeed, he presents hope as a command: I think merely to survive, to exist as a Jew after Auschwitz, is to be committed to hope: to hope because you are commanded to hope, because to despair would be a sin. It is to be commanded to hope that a second Auschwitz will not happen, not for Jews, not for anyone. It will not happen because it must not happen. You might say there isn’t much empirical evidence. The next Auschwitz might catch us all in a nuclear holocaust. But, I think, to give in to the demons of Auschwitz by despair is to do belatedly the work of Hitler. (Fackenheim, 1970, p. 91)

For Fackenheim, as for other notable contemporary Jewish thinkers such as Elie Wiesel, hope after Auschwitz has little to do with any positive emotion and even less to do with any immediate expectation of deliverance or victory. It is, rather, the moral stance of a people not to allow Hitler to complete in successive generations what he failed to complete in the dark years of the Shoah, namely,

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the annihilation of the Jewish people. Hitler must not be allowed to achieve, by means of Jewish despair, such “posthumous victories” (Fackenheim, 1994, p. 10). Implications of religious conceptions of hope for psychotherapeutic practice

In the pages above, I presented three examples of the way that hope has been narrated and practiced at concrete points in Jewish and Christian tradition. I stress that they are only examples: none of these three instances establishes a Christian view or Jewish view of hope. Clients in therapy who self-identify as Christian or Jewish may well have conceptions of hope that are very much related to these traditions but differ considerably from the examples presented here. And, of course, these examples emerge only from Christianity and Judaism. We have not here considered the way that hope emerges within the fellow Abrahamic tradition of Islam, in which two of the traditional 99 names for the one God are As-Salām, the “Source of Peace (and Perfection),” and Al-Muhaymin, the “Preserver of Safety” (Qur’an 59:23, Yusuf Ali translation). Nor, obviously, have we considered the quite different ways in which hope might be narrated and modeled within Dharmic traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and other world religious traditions (Selvam & Poulsom, 2012). The point of the examples above, therefore, is not to set forth some generic religious formulation of hope. In describing the examples of Aquinas, the lament psalms, and Fackenheim, rather, I have sought to gesture toward the diversity of such religious formulations; to argue that the sustaining contexts of hope, which are often mediated within religious traditions, matter in contemporary psychotherapeutic practice, and to argue that religious and theological constructions of hope might challenge and expand modern psychological work on hope in creative and life-giving ways. In order to illustrate these last two points, I close with some reflections on how the treatments of hope by Aquinas, by the psalms, and by Fackenheim might bear practical fruit for the way that contemporary therapists understand and speak of hope in psychotherapy. If we limit ourselves to these three examples,

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without presuming that they speak for all religious traditions, or even for the whole of their own religious traditions, how might contemporary psychological reflection on hope be challenged and expanded? First, these theological constructions of hope agree with modern psychological approaches that hope is a deeply human phenomenon with certain manifestations in behavior, in cognition, and even in emotion. Thomas Aquinas, as detailed above, even goes so far as to propose what might be understood anachronistically as a cognitive theory of emotion in which hope is classified as a passion that motivates the pursuit of a desirable good that is difficult but possible to attain. But these theological accounts would never want to stop with an outline of the phenomenology or cognitive mechanism of hope, as if hope were only a human psychological phenomenon. Rather, when considered theologically, certain forms of hope exceed the possibilities of humanness, precisely because the conditions necessary for hope’s intelligibility cannot be attained or guaranteed by human effort or capacity alone. Theological hope, at least in these Christian and Jewish examples, takes shape only in the context of the past and future activity of a covenanting God, even when that God is nowhere to be found in present experience. Standard psychological research cannot speak directly of this sustaining context of hope; at best, it can speak of clients’ meaning-systems or ultimate concerns, and look at their behavioral and emotional correlates (Emmons, 1999). But this sustaining context matters because—at least for some—it makes hope what it is. I might even suggest, contra Pruyser (1986), that hoping differs from wishing not in the breadth of its object but in the presence of such a sustaining context. Wishing becomes hoping, in these religious examples, because God is faithful. Second, and closely related to this, in these theological accounts this sustaining context matters not just for the phenomenology of hope but also for the activity of hope. Hope does involve, as in Snyder’s (2002) theory, some degree of both agency and pathways thinking, some confidence that a desirable goal can be attained by certain means. And none of these theological approaches would object to psychotherapeutic efforts to foster hope by seeking to

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bolster clients’ capacities for agency. But these theological accounts make clear that hope as a human activity is not solely an endogenous process, as if any individual could conjure hope by enough discipline, willpower, and effort. At least in some cases, in these examples, hope comes ad extra, from the outside. Hope can be exogenous as well as endogenous—or, as at least Thomas Aquinas would have it, both at the same time. One of the central points of Aquinas’s classification of hope as a theological virtue is that it cannot be performed or achieved through human effort alone; theological hope is from God, but not for that reason any less human. This has very practical implications for the everyday work of psychotherapy: from this theological perspective, neither therapists, nor clients, nor any therapeutic techniques or instruments, nor even conceptual models are the ultimate creators or guarantors of hope. To believe this would be idolatry, the ascription of divinity to what is not properly divine—an ascription that can easily lead, at least in the context of psychotherapy, to disappointment and to despair. Third, and very important for the interpretation of these first two points, is that hope in these theological examples is not just an individual but a communal and interpersonal reality. Hope is not isolated to an individual, nor is it isolated to an individual’s dyadic relationship with the divine. It is a communal practice. Many of the psalms of lament are written in the language of we, the first-person-plural of a people, but even those that use the language of I were written and practiced communally and played an important role in Israel’s liturgy and collective remembering. Similarly, for Fackenheim, modern Jewish hope is not only the isolated experience of an individual but, more importantly, the collective stance of a people. These communal understandings of hope harmonize nicely with intersubjective accounts of agency and of hope arising from attachment theory, and they also have very practical implications for the work of therapy. What does it mean, we might ask, to hope for someone? Commonly, hoping for is interpreted as little more than hoping that, such that I hope for you is to mean little more than “I hope that you achieve your goals, or that you feel better soon.” But there is a deeper meaning of “hoping for” that is closer to these religious interpretations of

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hope. To hope for someone is not simply to hope that a desired outcome occurs; it is, additionally, to induct hope into this intersubjective and communal context, to do the work of hoping for someone who is temporarily unable to hope for themselves. To a depressed person, a community might say, “You are unable to hope right now, and that’s OK. You don’t have to. We will carry you for a time in the work of hoping.” Finally, as above, these theological examples of hope can rescue present-day therapists from the twin dangers of therapeutic nihilism and therapeutic messianism, the Scylla and Charybdis of modern therapy that each reflect a failure of hope. Therapeutic nihilism and messianism are in fact modern displays of despair and presumption, the twin vices of hopelessness described by Aquinas. The relationship of hopelessness to therapeutic nihilism is clear, as the work of therapy becomes meaningless when therapists no longer believe that the good of a patient’s recovery— or the good of therapy in general—is attainable. But as Aquinas points out, therapeutic presumption also entails a sort of hopelessness, as therapists believe that the difficult-to-attain good of a patient’s recovery is in fact easy to attain, and that therapists are the instruments and guarantors of its attainment. Such presumption might work for a time—it might even advance one’s career! —but it can easily lead also to despair, the defensive denial of which only reinforces therapeutic presumption. But hope is an antidote both for despair and for presumption, both for therapeutic nihilism and therapeutic messianism. Hope, as Aquinas pointed out, is the virtue appropriate to pilgrimage, including the pilgrimage of psychotherapy. It is the virtue that allows wayfarers to continue journeying in a way that is deeply realistic, that enables lament and mourning when lament and mourning are due, that fully embraces the finitude of therapy and therapists, and yet that enables the journey to go on. In the Christian New Testament, in the midst of a complex meditation on human hope and redemption, St. Paul states that “hope that is seen is no hope at all” (Rom. 8:24, New International Version). If taken seriously, this religious view poses certain challenges for approaches to hope within modern psychology, which can focus its gaze only on what is seen—or, even better,

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measured. But no such view, surely, would counsel psychology to abandon hope entirely; hope is too important, too vital a human phenomenon to be forgotten again by the mental health disciplines. Menninger’s (1959) entreaty for the mental health disciplines to attend to hope is still good and incisive counsel. Theological accounts of hope do, however, encourage psychology and psychotherapy to look beyond itself. Hope is indeed a deeply human phenomenon that manifests itself in experience, behavior, and belief. But what if hope is more than this? What if the psychological phenomenon of hope is understood not as the substance of hope but, rather, as a reflected vision, an echo, a beckoning sign of something that stands beyond psychology’s horizon? Such a sustaining context might be empirically unattainable and yet, at the same time, capable of sustaining the tough, healing, repairing journey of psychotherapy.

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Kinghorn Fackenheim, E. L. (1994). To mend the world: Foundations of post-Holocaust Jewish thought. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Frank, J. D., & Frank, J. B. (1991). Persuasion and healing: A comparative study of psychotherapy (3rd ed.). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Koenig, H. K., King, D. E., & Carson, V. B. (2012). Handbook of religion and health (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Lombardo, N. E. (2011). The logic of desire: Aquinas on emotion. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Lopez, S. J., Snyder, C. R., Magyar-Moe, J. L., Edwards, L. M., Pedrotti, J. T., Janowski, K., Turner, J. L., & Pressgrove, C. (2004). Strategies for accentuating hope. In P. A. Linley & S. Joseph (Eds.), Positive psychology in practice (pp. 388–404). New York; John Wiley & Sons. Lynch, W. F. (1974). Images of hope: Imagination as healer of the hopeless. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Menninger, K. (1959). The academic lecture: Hope. American Journal of Psychiatry, 116, 481–491. Miner, R. (2009). Thomas Aquinas on the passions: A study of Summa theologiae 1a2ae 22–48. New York: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, C., & Seligman, M.E.P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. New York: Oxford University Press. Pieper, J. (1986). On hope. In J. Pieper, Faith, hope, love (pp. 87–138). San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Pruyser, P. W. (1986). Maintaining hope in adversity. Pastoral Psychology, 35, 120–131. Rand, K. L., & Cheavens, J. S. (2009). Hope theory. In C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Oxford handbook of positive psychology (2nd ed., pp. 323–333). New York: Oxford University Press. Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Learned optimism: How to change your mind and your life. New York: Vintage. Selvam, S. G., & Poulsom, M. (2012). Now and hereafter: The psychology of hope from the perspective of religion. Journal of Dharma, 37, 393–410. Snyder, C. R. (Ed). (2000). Handbook of hope: Theory, measures, and applications. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Snyder, C. R. (2002). Hope theory: Rainbows in the mind. Psychological Inquiry, 13, 249–275. Thomas Aquinas. (1981). Summa theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics. Verhey, A. (2003). Compassion and suffering: Looking heavenward. In A. Verhey, Reading the Bible in the strange world of medicine (pp. 99–144). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Yahne, C. E., & Miller, W. R. (1999). Evoking hope. In W. R. Miller (Ed.), Integrating spirituality into treatment: Resources for practitioners (pp. 217–233). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

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"Hope that is seen is no hope at all:" theological constructions of hope in psychotherapy.

Contemporary psychology and psychiatry have increasingly focused on hope as a human phenomenon relevant to physical and psychological well-being. Cont...
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