Session 4A: The Psychology of Hope

Session 4A: The Psychology of Hope
Chair: Felix Christen

Children, Family Violence, and Hope-in-the-Making in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Jennifer Infanti
Department of Social Anthropology, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University, New Zealand

This paper is based on the author’s current doctoral fieldwork with children ages 5 to 12 years who have lived with family violence in Aotearoa/New Zealand.  It begins with the assumption that hope is fundamental to buffering the effects of all types of violence.  Then, using children’s stories gathered over two years of fieldwork, the paper explores how children contend with uncertainty in their lives; cultivate their hopes and dreams; and imagine their futures in the context of family violence.  Finally, the paper problematizes the correlation between ‘having hope’ and ‘being resilient’, in this case to the various effects of witnessing violence in the home.  The author argues that hope is more than an intrinsic personality characteristic (something an individual may have more or less of); rather, in Weingarten’s (2000:402) words, hope is “an emergent quality of relationships”.  By extension, the paper proposes that it is the responsibility of friends, family members, domestic-violence service providers, and communities in general to offer, co-create, and ultimately participate in doing hope with children who have witnessed violence (Weingarten, http://www.witnessingproject.org/teach.html).

Hope is generally perceived amongst scholars as being future oriented.  What I hope for today may (or may not) be realized in times to come. I hope that I won’t have an accident on my way to work just as I hope that my family will be safe and secure in the future. In this paper, I challenge this basic assertion and aim to complicate the notion of temporality which informs accounts of hope.
Marcel (1962), Zournazi (2002) and Steinbock (2004) all begin their studies of hope maintaining that it is a future-oriented act. They argue that hope can only be directed towards what will be and thus cannot be oriented towards either the past or the present. One cannot hope that one had turned right instead of left to avoid an accident nor can one hope that one was born into a different family. However, while logic may preclude backward looking, hope, the lived experience of trauma survivors, challenges this claim.
In the aftermath of trauma, hope becomes redirected. With the suspension of the future, hope is oriented towards the past in an attempt to escape the finality of circumstances. One hopes one took the other direction. One hopes one’s family is other than what it is.  What can we learn about the phenomenon hope from such experiences? What do they elucidate? How do they lead us to configure our understanding of hope and temporality?
These are the questions which I take up in “Hope, Time and Trauma.” Exploring the lived experiences of survivors, I examine how hope is conceived in the wake of trauma and use these accounts to challenge and complicate the accounts of temporality which generally inform understandings of this phenomenon. Incorporating Husserl’s account of internal time consciousness, I argue that rather than being within time, hope helps to create time for those who live in what Chambers describes as the “untimeliness” of survival. In this manner, hope acts both as a response to, and, as a means for structuring, encounters with the impossible.

We often assume others are like us. When we look at the ‘others’ we attribute meaning to their behaviour. We feel ‘sympathy’ but the road to ‘empathy’ is longer and more complex. Indeed, ‘sympathy’ means ‘feeling with’ whereas ‘empathy’ means ‘feeling in(side)’. Empathizing allows us to make the other person’s experience our own, even if for a limited time. It allows us to look at the world from a different perspective. It allows us to understand and feel more available to accepting cultures, attitudes and behaviours which do not follow our patterns.
The experience of ‘feeling’ or ‘being’ like the ‘other’ will certainly influence our use of language, which is a powerful tool whose use may thoroughly shape the interaction among people and their sense of identity. It may begin with the meaning of a ‘name’ to finish with the value given to ‘silence’ or to words like open-mindedness, tolerance and communication.
Neurolinguistics suggests a journey through questions related to the  territory (when and where), the  behaviours (what), the  capabilities, the strategies, the resources (how ), and the level of beliefs and values (why ) whose answers may reset the concept of identity (who), shading new light onto some levels whose changes, trough the years, have not been ‘written’ down in the file of the conscious mind; the system may not have been ‘updated’ and is, therefore, crashing under the conflict of a new situation overwhelming the ‘inner Self’. A re-training in the perception of the world through the five senses may give new life to a dried up ‘identity’. The person may look at himself, from a wider angle, from a position in which he may ‘tip off’ the ‘self’ stuck in a past situation, acting like a film director able to make some changes to an unpleasant movie.

Download Conference Paper –