It was Nietzsche, in his consummate cynicism, who remarked that "Hope is the worst of all evils, for it prolongs the torment of man." But as any psychiatrist knows well, man's hopefulness is not his torment; it is rather his loss or failure to hope that torments his soul. Man loses hope and becomes hopeless by way of defect; he withdraws from hope by a failure to wish, to desire, to ambition, or to plan. He also becomes hopeless by way of excess, by clinging to excessive expectations beyond the limits of what is realistically possible. It is the burden of man's omnipotent expectations that prolongs his torment. The sense of hopelessness that pervades so many forms of psychopa thology is permeated by a sense of the impossible. The hopeless person feels that he is caught in a prison from which there is no exit. We can recognize the loss of a radical form of hope in the depressed, withdrawn, and apathetic states of seriously disturbed patients and, at less intense levels, of neurotic patients. We can recognize a failure or distortion of the
