For Lisa Mack , who knew what it meant to hope and to despair - 1954-1998

What reinforcement we may gain from hope, If not, what resolution from despair. Paradise Lost, John Milton

Hope and its polar opposite, despair, are the subject of this issue of Social Research. When this theme first occurred to me, I worried that it was driven too closely by the circumstances in my own life at the time. On reflection and after discussions with others, it became clear that hope and despair are not just aspects of our psychic life that affect only our individual behaviors and sense of well being. They also have determining effects on the histories of nations and on political and economic activities which, on the face of it, seem patently nonpsychological. For example, the rise and fall of the stock market is hardly a function of market factors alone. So, there seemed no doubt that this was an appropriate subject for Social Research, a journal that prides itself on being, in the best sense of that unpleasant word, "interdisciplinary."

Those who know even a little history know that there have been periods we think of as times without hope, as dark times, and others that seem, in retrospect perhaps foolishly, to have been filled with hope and optimism. Both hope and despair have been written about by philosophers and theologians and studied by psychologists. In Catholic doctrine, hope is one of the three theological virtues (along with faith and charity). Its absence, namely, the denial of hope, or despair, while not a mortal sin is a sin, nevertheless, conceived of as the denial of a virtue or as moral sloth--an uncomfortable idea when increasingly large numbers of Americans suffer from depression.

When I was in graduate school training to become a cognitive psychologist, I learned of an experiment, the outcome of which was so compelling that I never forgot it, and which bears directly on the subject of this issue. In the experiment, two groups of rats were individually placed in containers filled with water. One group had previous experience of having been left in the water for a period of time during which they were able to swim about, and after which they were "rescued"--that is, they were removed from the water. The others had no such prior experience. Subsequently, the experimenters simply clocked the amount of time each animal swam before drowning when placed in a water-filled container. (This experiment clearly predates the raising of our consciousness about animal rights.) They found that those animals with the experience of rescue swam for a significantly longer time than those without the "hope-inducing" experience (see the paper in this issue by Shlomo Breznitz). So, even in rats hope is important and can prolong life.

This issue, then, reflects on hope and despair from many different perspectives and, while there are a few notable absences, I hope you will agree that together these papers make for an interesting set of readings on a subject not generally found in journals like this one.

COPYRIGHT 1999 New School for Social Research
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group