Il tempo della speranza

The article proposes a reflection on the existential concept of Hope, considered a precious experience within current relationships, inserted in a sociocultural field in which the future appears increasingly fragile, precarious and "sick" (Galimberti, 2007). In fact, today we are witnessing a general weakening of relationships, a change in the ways of beingwitheach other that we have always used to reach each other (just think of the behavioral innovations introduced following the Covid19 pandemic) and the shared fears related to the environmental and climatic future of our planet. Initially, the article investigates how the Gestalt therapy can take care of the future temporal dimension through support for the nowfornext, which already includes particular attention to the movement of Hope. Then we will try to explain what it means to feel Hope and feel it with the other.

The "time of Hope" in therapy represents a relational space that can only be reached by crossing, with caution and delicacy, the "time of pain" (ours and our patients) and capable of providing new and nourishing meanings to the past, present and future (Borgna, 2005). The time of Hope is also a profoundly human and very precious experience for the therapist, continuously in contact with pain and despair: "training" this "attitude to life" supports him or her in being a supporter of others' pain, often (and rightly) perceived as too heavy, unfair and inhumane to bear. Finally, a reflection will be proposed on how the Gestalt therapist can now support this experience in therapy, through phenomenological tools and refining innate empathic skills (Spagnuolo Lobb, 2017).

In particular, the article focuses on the importance of respecting the "right time", necessary in therapy to provide the patient and therapist with the opportunity to feel pain together without running away from it: an essential ingredient to achieve a reworking of all "times of life", through the magnifying glass of Hope. [Publisher's text].