Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless Hardback - 1974

"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.