On 13 and 14 May last the International Meeting on Resilience took place, organised by the licenciadas Juana Droeven and Élida Romano, with Boris Cyrulnik as guest of honour.

Élida Romano opened the meeting by introducing the guest. She spoke of the influence of a body of work at once vast and complex, which serves as a path and makes it possible to move forward day by day; to enter these ideas, she explained, is to enter a labyrinth in which every corridor leads to another, to a fork, to a new door — and where what matters is not finding the way out, but walking through it. She recalled that a journalist, in the course of an interview, had described Cyrulnik as an optimist, and that he had replied: “I do not know whether I am an optimist, I think I am rather a dreamer.” For her, he is moreover, and fundamentally, a passionate man, who lives and transmits his passion.

Cyrulnik set out the foundations of resilience in Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past (1999); he then analysed the way this process takes hold in early childhood in Les Vilains Petits Canards (2001), and went on to pursue his enquiry on the side of adolescents with The Whispering of Ghosts (2003). Just published in Buenos Aires is El amor que nos cura (Talking of Love on the Edge of a Precipice), which deals with resilience within the couple: how adults whose lives have been “battered” will meet and weave a bond of love that may, or may not, repair them…

Fragment of the presentation of the first module of the meeting, on early interactions…