This book explores how hope operates as an ambivalent force in relation to issues of sex and gender, power, and identity in both our private and public lives.

The author blends her deep knowledge of psychotherapy and mental health with cultural and philosophical understanding to consider how we have reached our current dilemmas around sex and gender, race, power and identity. Psychoanalysis is put to task in relation to clinical practice, literature, feminism, politics and the understandings of how our personal lives and selves interact with the wider cultural moment we are living through. She explores these issues with compassion and understanding and offers a vision of how we may be able to navigate through widely varying perspectives to a new way of envisioning hope today, as both a false promise and a real and necessary component in our lives and within the clinical encounter.

Drawing on clinical psychoanalytic work as well as literature and memoir, this is essential reading for anyone wanting a psychoanalytically informed understanding of where society is on key issues and where we may be able to get to with hope.

Jan Campbell is a psychoanalyst and writer with over 25 years in practice. She was a Reader in English Literature and Psychoanalysis and Ex member of Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has written extensively on psychoanalysis in relation to theory, practice, motherhood, feminism and cultural studies.