Hope and the Numinous: Psychological Concepts for Promoting Wellness in a Medical Context

Hope is an indispensable component for living a life of meaning, value, and well-being. Hope enables us to manage stressors, threats, failures, and personal doubts while helping us to stay focused on our goals and strivings. The purpose of this paper is to understand the construct of hope within a new dimension of personality termed the Numinous. The Numinous represents those underlying motivations that address our existential engagement with life centering around our needs to find value for our efforts, construct meaning and purpose for our strivings, and to create a sense of personal worthiness for our being. Hope is particularly relevant to the Numinous dimension of meaning. The Numinous model provides a multidimensional approach to understanding the various elements of meaning and how they combine to create various meaning orientations. Hope’s full range of expression is outlined across four different meaning types. The value of the Numinous for healthcare providers and its role in managing patients is overviewed.