Hope as survival: psychoanalysis and poetry

Hope in uncertain times

As an Arab-British woman of Iraqi descent with an Iranian name, whose childhood homes were both Lebanon and the UK, hope is hard to find in these times.

Emily Dickinson created an evocative metaphor for hope, ‘That thing with feathers’, described as perching within the soul, a presence that ‘sings the tune without the words.’ Her ‘Hope’ is not certain or triumphant; rather, it is a quiet, consistent, persistent state of being. Dickinson’s ‘Hope’ asks for nothing but to simply exist, a resilient, wordless presence that has somehow outlasted the vicissitudes of our internal and external conditions.

The quiet persistence of hope

This imagery may also extend to a therapeutic alliance within clinical work, where hope might not reveal itself loudly with grand declarations and confident sureties. Perhaps instead, in the safety of the therapeutic relational harmony and disharmony, it may quietly emerge from the patient’s interior landscape with a shy tenacity, and register itself surely, having survived and navigated the internal and external storms that were held in the alliance.

Emily Brontë’s ‘Hope’ inheres an uncomfortable ambivalence; it is a visitor who flirts fleetingly and swiftly withdraws, heightening awareness of what could be, but yet remains absent. With a psychoanalytic therapeutic gaze, we might view this version as an indication of where hope has sadly become inextricably linked with dread. From such a stance, to permit oneself to hope would be to invite risking further rupture, pain, loss, disappointment, thus transforming the act of desire, of yearning, into a painful and dangerous proposition.

Learning that to want is to risk loss

Navigating this territory using narrative, metaphor and imagery is the work of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Many of us have, to some degree, internalised the early lesson that to want is to invite loss, and that hope is merely a precursor to disappointment. If, as Winnicott suggested, a ‘good enough’ environment can provide the reliability needed for us to manage the anxiety of the unknown, its chronic failure, the breakdown of a holding, coherent environment, would ensure that hope itself would begin to feel persecutory.

And yet there is a third voice worth bringing into this conversation. Caitlin Seida’s poem ‘Hope is not a bird, Emily, it’s a sewer rat’ speaks back to Dickinson with deliberate irreverence, reimagining hope not as something delicate and feathered, but as scrabbling, patchy and foul-tempered, surviving precisely because it is too stubborn and too ugly to give up. It is hope as sheer survival instinct, dragging itself through the worst of conditions and showing up anyway.

Survival, not beauty: the endurance of hope

This image, I think, is the one many of us actually live with. Not Dickinson’s quiet, perching song (though that may evolve later) but Seida’s creature, bloodied and unbeautiful, that has somehow not died. In psychoanalytic terms, we might think of this as what Winnicott called the survival of the self through the breakdown that was feared but not yet experienced: hope that has been forced underground, into the walls of the psyche, living off whatever it can find. The therapeutic task is not to prettify this creature, or shame it for its ugliness, but to recognise it for what it is: something alive, against the odds, still carrying the possibility of more.

In Peter Shaffer’s play, The royal hunt of the sun, Old Martin, lamenting the colonisation of Peru, describes himself as ‘forty years from any time of hope. It put out a good blossom, but was shaken off rough. After that I reckon the fruit always comes up sour, and doesn’t sweeten up much with age.’

The therapeutic task: thinking, linking, surviving

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy is perhaps a resolution to Old Martin’s loss of hope for a ‘bud shaken off rough’. How we learn to tolerate separation, difference, understanding how mirroring and transference can both heal and harm, evolving to keep thinking and linking. As fish, swimming in our collective unconscious within an ocean of time, space, societal structures, culture and its artefacts, we should acknowledge ours and their fluidity, their uncertainties, impermanences and unknowns.

Bridges, waters, and the limits of the therapeutic alliance

Inspired by Elif Shafak’s ‘There are rivers in the sky’, which intricately weaves together ancient and contemporary narratives, exploring themes of civilisation, destruction, and the enduring power of water as a metaphor for the cyclical nature of history and the often-erased feminine, I conceptualise the therapeutic alliance as a bridge connecting across this metaphorical water. Perhaps this alliance can facilitate a deeper awareness of the ‘water’ that constitutes us and in which we swim. However, as Stoppard reminds us in ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ (1966), ‘We cross our bridges when we come to them, then burn them behind us, with nothing to remind us but the smell of smoke and the remembrance that our eyes once watered.’ The therapeutic alliance, while deeply significant, is ultimately finite.

Within the therapeutic relationship, hope is meticulously, and often painstakingly, renegotiated. Both Dickinson and Brontë captured a truth the clinical tradition recognises: that hope is not a cognitive stance or a mere resolution to think positively. It is closer to Bion’s capacity for reverie, an openness to not-yet-knowing, where uncertainty is held without being prematurely collapsed into despair or the refuge of false reassurance.

Brontë’s version of hope mirrors the transferential pull within therapy: the yearning for something transformative that is forever shadowed by a dread of disappointment. Dickinson’s hope, meanwhile, reflects the therapeutic process itself: a quiet, persistent presence, surviving the storms of resistance, rupture, and doubt that constitute our shared labour.

Holding hope in relationship

What all three poets illuminate, with their strikingly different metaphors and imagery, is that hope is not a fixed state but a living, relational one, capable of being witnessed, held and transformed within relationship. Seida’s sewer rat, Brontë’s elusive visitor, and Dickinson’s quietly perching bird are not contradictions; they are different registers of the same interior truth, and many of us will recognise ourselves in all three at different moments of our lives.

Within the analytic frame, the constancy of sessions, the therapist’s sustained attention, and the survival of the link through difficulty are not incidental to the work; they are the work. They constitute the good-enough environment in which even the most battered and feral hope might slowly find it safe enough to stop scrabbling in the walls, to come a little closer, and perhaps, in time, to perch, and begin, tentatively, to sing.