Images Of Hope: Imagination As Healer Of The Hopeless

With this analysis of hope as the very center of man, Father Lynch helps us to free ourselves from the entrapment of hopelessness. Review: 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