Most psychological textbooks do not carry the words hope or hoping in their index or chapter headings. Psychological Abstracts, that great indexing journal of the psychological profession, has not had any entries or listings under hope for years. The situation is hardly any better in the psychiatric journals and textbooks, but in that discipline the tide is turning.* (4,14,22) In French's monumental work on the integration of behavior (4) hope is a key term, and Menninger's paper (14) of 1959 has greatly helped to make hope an appropriate topic in psychiatry. Moreover, one can argue that the psychiatrists' long silence about hope was only a verbal and cognitive phenomenon. After all, as a professional healer the psychiatrist is by implication a hopeful, hoping, and hope-instilling person who works with hope, believing practically in its efficacy. Yet it must be said that most psychiatrists, like the psychologists, have thus far remained rather ignorant about hope's conditions and dynamics. One may wonder what subtle reasons lie at the heart of the healer's ignorance and the scientist's neglect of hope. Is it a tacit admission that hope's dynamics are so delicately equilibrated that every attempt to know it will make the phenomenon disappear? Is hope so ethereal that it cannot and should not be discussed? Is hope seen as the exclusive property of philosophers and theologians ? Or as a myth?
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Paul W. Pruyser (1963) studied this question.
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