Idealization is considered to be among the three components of human love : « excitation, idealization, affection ». This contextualization helps us to understand better the complex and contradictory issues of the ideal. Hope is also tied to love. In descriptive terms, hope places in the future the object of love and primary satisfaction lost forever in the past. In this forward, progradient movement it seems possible to find it again in a vanishing point that recedes eternally, always out of reach. According to Freud, hope is « the hope of hallucinatory reunion with the lost object of satisfaction ». Following Freud, the author proposes a phenomenology and a metapsychology of Hope, which entails a theory of the hallucinatory, raising it to the level of a concept. A clinical example links ideal and hope: hope is born from the diminution of an idolatrous idealization. This disappearance of the hope of loving and being loved leads to despair and, in the end, death.

Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 151-164.