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