- published: 06 Feb 2008
- views: 660307
Hope is an optimistic attitude of mind based on an expectation of positive outcomes related to events and circumstances in one's life or the world at large. As a verb, its definitions include: "expect with confidence" and "to cherish a desire with anticipation".
Among its opposites are dejection, hopelessness and despair.
Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson argues that hope comes into its own when crisis looms, opening us to new creative possibilities. Frederickson argues that with great need comes an unusually wide range of ideas, as well as such positive emotions as happiness and joy, courage, and empowerment, drawn from four different areas of one’s self: from a cognitive, psychological, social, or physical perspective. Hopeful people are "like the little engine that could, [because] they keep telling themselves "I think I can, I think I can". Such positive thinking bears fruit when based on a realistic sense of optimism, not on a naive "false hope".
The psychologist C.R. Snyder linked hope to the existence of a goal, combined with a determined plan for reaching that goal:Alfred Adler had similarly argued for the centrality of goal-seeking in human psychology, as too had philosophical anthropologists like Ernst Bloch. Snyder also stressed the link between hope and mental willpower, as well as the need for realistic perception of goals, arguing that the difference between hope and optimism was that the former included practical pathways to an improved future.D. W. Winnicott saw a child's antisocial behaviour as expressing an unconscious hope for management by the wider society, when containment within the immediate family had failed.Object relations theory similarly sees the analytic transference as motivated in part by an unconscious hope that past conflicts and traumas can be dealt with anew.
Every time I try to make it happen
I just fake it
I think it's over
And I blink, it's over
Every time I screw up
I never let up
And I keep forgetting to think it over
'cause I blink, it's over
Every time I close my eyes
I sit there hoping
You go on holding my hand in Yours
So stay, yeah stay forever
Every day it's getting colder
And I find I'm getting older
Need warmer climes now
Need a land with warming sun
And a heart whose every beat is one
That keeps Your time
Keeps Your time somehow
Every time I close my eyes
I sit there hoping
You go on holding my hand in Yours