Reasonable Hope

1044 Words3 Pages

As I hope that this paper has made clear, one of the biggest problems for caregivers is how we can define and foster a practical hope in our patients. Kaethe Weingarten addresses this very issue;
Within theology, philosophy, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, nursing, sociology, and anthropology definitions of hope abound. Yet, few theoreticians have been able to move from the abstract to the pragmatic. Few clinicians have taken up the challenge to articulate specific connections between hope as a theoretical construct and hope as a practice.
Weingarten sets out to provide a pragmatic and useful application of hope that she calls reasonable hope. In this section I will overview her concept of reasonable hope and how it might be helpful to …show more content…

Reasonable hope is not a passive state, but is a state of action. Weingarten writes, “Reasonable hope’s objective is the process of making sense of what exists now in the belief that this prepares us to meet what lies ahead. With reasonable hope, the present is filled with working not waiting; we scaffold ourselves to prepare for the future.” With reasonable hope, developing and fostering hope actually becomes a project. Related to this idea is the concept of time. Hope, by almost every definition, is primarily concerned with the future. At the core of every person that hopes is the basic hope that the future will be better than the present. And because hope is future orientated (as it should be), the present is often reduced to a period of waiting and anticipation. Reasonable hope makes the best use of the time spent in waiting to help the individual see their hope realized. Weingarten claims the heart of reasonable hope is, “the activity of making sense of what is happening to us.” In this sense the process is more important than the end goal. Weingarten invokes the old phrase in claiming that the journey is more important than the destination. Weingarten also claims that it is more helpful to think of hope as a verb rather than a noun or object. Doing so communicates the idea that hope is an activity: we do hope. Hope is something that we do, not something that naturally …show more content…

What might her next hope be—just a bit smaller and more attainable than that one?... What if Chloe can’t get out of jail? Suzanne thought for a moment, and generated the idea that she and her co-clinician could make sure that they called Chloe, and maybe they could go visit her in jail—to let her know that they still cared for her, and believed in

Open Document