Images of Hope – Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless

The Reverend William F. Lynch (1931–2003) was the author of nine books, including The Integrating Mind: An Exploration into Western Thought and The Image Industries.

“Images of Hope, issued out of a harrowing personal experience of severe mental breakdown, [is] still a classic in the field of psychological healing. [The Reverend William F.] Lynch knew what it meant to rise from the dead.” —Commonweal
 
“For those directly involved with the care of the mentally ill, Father Lynch offers many valid insights, including the fact that honest self-disclosure can be infinitely helpful to the patient who is mesmerized by a perfectionistic or independence ideal carried to its extreme. It is a thoughtful book from which emanates concern.” —Journal of Religion and Health

“While [Lynch] is learned enough about the literature that my field (psychiatry) has accumulated during its brief history, scholarship alone cannot account for his remarkable effectiveness in this volume. So, I must begin with a statement, which because of its simplicity is difficult to make cleanly: Father Lynch is genuinely devoted to our calling. In fact, I suspect he is more devoted than many of its practitioners who tend, understandably, to be more quickly discouraged by its deficiencies. In these days of fashionable get-togethers between religion and psychiatry, I am impelled to add that he has no wish to proselytize or be proselytized. In other words, he is the rarest of human beings—the outsider who can speak as a friend.” —American Journal of Psychiatry

This is a book about hope. Part 1 is a compact but necessarily limited attempt to describe the actual structure and concrete forms of hope and hopelessness; Part 2 is an exploration of a psychology of hope, the beginning of an investigation of what psychic forms and dynamisms move most toward hope and against hopelessness; and Part 3 is an analogous effort to suggest the outlines of a metaphysics of hope.


The Reverend William F. Lynch (1931–2003) was the author of nine books, including The Integrating Mind: An Exploration into Western Thought and The Image Industries.