Hope & Psychiatry

When Pandora opened the box and loosed upon mankind all the evil gifts of the malevolent Greek pantheon, by Hesiod's account "Hope was the only spirit that stayed there . . . and could not fly forth." According to Kansas' famed Psychiatrist Karl Menninger, hope has stayed there, cowering and crouching, too much of the time from Hesiod's day until now. To this fact, as much as to the evils of "selfishness, vengefulness, hate, greed, cruelty, destructiveness and even self-destructiveness," which Pandora released, Dr. Menninger lays many of mankind's troubles.

"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," Dr. Menninger writes in the American Journal of Psychiatry. "But when it comes to hope, our shelves are bare. The Encyclopaedia Britannica devotes many columns to the topic of love, and many more to faith. But . . . poor little hope*... is not even listed." Often the downgrading of hope was not by accident but by design. Most of the great Greeks held that fate was unchangeable, so hope was an illusion and therefore evil. To Aeschylus it was "the food of exiles," and to Euripides, "man's curse." And 2,500 years later Nietzsche echoed: "Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man."

"It was intrepid indeed of St. Paul . . . to declare that hope should stand along with love," says Dr. Menninger, and lays it largely to Paul's Jewish background of hope in a Messiah. Then Martin Luther: "Everything that is done in the world is done by hope."

Dr. Menninger notes that he has had some patients who agreed with the Greeks, adds, "Partly that is why they were patients." There is evidence that even in such lowly animals as rats, the loss of hope is the fatal factor in stress experiments. And in man Dr. Menninger notes what he calls the "Queequeg phenomenon" of "voodoo death" in Moby Dick. Most physicians, he believes, have seen cases where the loss of hope has hastened death.

But doctors and their scientific training are partly to blame, Dr. Menninger suggests: "We doctors are so schooled against permitting ourselves to believe the intangible or impalpable or indefinite that we tend to discount the element of hope, its reviving effect as well as its survival function." In psychiatry especially, he argues, there used to be an "impression that 'our patients never get well.' " In fact, says Dr. Menninger, the best thing that psychiatrists can do for their patients is to "light for them a candle of hope to show them possibilities that may become sound expectations."

* Dr. Menninger could have found more on the topic in Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon--four listings (v. 15 for faith, 22 for love).

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