Ontological Structure and Complexity of Therapeutic Hope: A Multidimensional Perspective

Abstract

Despite the daunting challenge to hope and hoping currently confronting millions of traumatized populations throughout the world, the psychology literature has largely been silent on the proper meaning of therapeutic hope, and how hope can be resuscitated in people demoralized by extreme hardships or unpredictable life events. This anomaly perhaps arises from the fact that in spite of several and honest acknowledgements found in Western scholarship, about the relevance of hope‐healing in the human conditions of captivity or tragedy, a gap still exists as regards the multidimensional conceptualization of the ontology and epistemology of hope that should enable psychologists to have a firm grip not only on the multidimensional constituents of hope and hoping but also on how it lives and dies, how it heals and how we can enhance its positive component in people (individuals or groups) beleaguered by its over‐determination by the negative component of hopelessness and other devastating conditions of existence. Through a selective review of the scattered literature on hope and hoping, some of them drawn from outside of the mainline psychology field, this paper draws attention to the ontological complexity of the hope construct and to the factors and forces that combine to promote its activation, healing value and endurance. The overall aim is to move towards a more informed multidimensional re‐visioning of the construct.