Something I see often in the consulting room is a particular kind of hope. A relentless hope, as psychoanalyst Martha Stark puts it. It’s the stubborn, almost compulsive belief that someone out there will eventually arrive and make everything okay. Clients don’t describe it in those words, of course. But beneath their stories runs the same current: one day, someone will finally give me the safety, steadiness, and love I never had.
The relentlessness of this hope isn’t a character flaw. It’s the echo of an early deprivation. If a child doesn’t experience a parent who reliably soothes, protects, and makes room for their emerging self, then the psyche improvises. It builds a template organised around longing. The adult who grows from that child often finds themselves waiting for the partner who will understand completely, for the friend who will rescue them from loneliness, for the therapist who will finally make them whole.
Jungian therapist James Hollis calls this figure the Magical Other: the imagined person with the power to dissolve our fear, repair our wounds, and relieve us of the burden of growing up. The fantasy is potent because it speaks directly to the child within us who never got what they needed. And yet, it’s also a trap. No actual human being can carry the weight of a role that large. People break under it, relationships buckle, and disappointment becomes inevitable.
This is the turning point in much therapeutic work: recognising that the hope we’ve been guarding so fiercely is actually the thing keeping us stuck. The task is not to kill the longing, but it’s to mourn its origin. To accept that no one is coming in the way we once imagined. And from that acceptance, to begin cultivating a steadier internal base: the capacity to soothe ourselves, to hold ourselves, to become (slowly and imperfectly) the person we were waiting for.
Giving up relentless hope isn’t despair. It’s the start of adulthood in the deepest psychological sense. It’s the shift from seeking salvation in the Magical Other to discovering the ordinary, hard-won strength of becoming enough for ourselves.
Image credit: Brandon Lopez
