Word: hoping
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Despite the new riches, no one regarded the world through Utopian spectacles in 1959; desperate poverty was still a condition of life in many lands. Nevertheless, even the humblest of nations could at least look ahead to the 1960s with hope. There were two reasons for this. In their new wealth, the nations of the West were coming to recognize that the task of aiding the underdeveloped lands is not a burden that the U.S. alone should bear; it is a job to be shared. Secondly, most underdeveloped nations have modified or cast aside their once strongly held socialist notions...