HOPE AND HOPELESSNESS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY: THE ROLE OF HOPE IN BUFFERING THE IMPACT OF HOPELESSNESS

Abstract

People react differently to stressors in life, with some individuals deliberately putting an end to their lives in the face of adversity and others endeavoring to proceed. The notion that hope and help may buffer individuals against suicidal ideation is built on empirical findings in the literature suggesting that hope and help buffers individuals against psychopathology and that hope and help contributes to better outcomes in a variety of negative situations. It is not clear whether it is the hope and help construct or hopelessness and helplessness construct that should be targeted in psychotherapy, in reducing suicidal ideation. Underlying this problem is a more fundamental question concerning whether hope and help are simply the inverse of hopelessness/helplessness, which is a controversial topic to a number of researchers, psychologists and psychiatrists in the field. If we see the genesis of helplessness and hopelessness, helplessness reflects a loss of ego autonomy with a feeling of deprivation resulting from the loss of gratification which is desired from an other-than-self object, while hopelessness, on the other hand, is a loss of autonomy with a feeling of despair coming from the individual’s awareness of his own inability to provide himself with gratification. Both hopelessness and helplessness are connected to the loss of ego autonomy and lack of help from another person. Hopelessness/helplessness dyad (and the opposites hope/help) encompasses other concepts used in psychotherapy: conscious, unconscious, deprivation, depression, despair, gratification, self, other, relational patterns, autonomy... This study goes beyond the examination of a direct association between hope, help and suicidal ideation to investigate hope and help as a resilience factor which buffers the strength of the association between hopelessness, helplessness and suicidal ideation.