The man and his path

The person

Born in Bordeaux in 1937 into a Jewish family, Boris Cyrulnik lost his parents in a Nazi concentration camp; he himself managed to escape when he was only six years old. After the war he was shunted from foster home to foster home until he ended up on a farm belonging to public welfare. By good fortune, neighbours passed on to him the love of life and of literature; he was able to educate himself and to grow up by moving beyond his past (1).

It is therefore not gratuitous that D^r Cyrulnik should have explored childhood trauma so deeply: at the age of seven he saw his whole family, Jewish emigrants of Russian origin, deported to camps from which no one returned. He said it in a single sentence: “It is not easy for a child to know that he has been condemned to death.” His was the lost cause par excellence, an “ugly duckling” destined to become, once an adult, an abuser, a delinquent or a person with impairments.

His development

His personal “resilience”, his bond with life, was people, books and rugby. Asked about his choice of career, he explains that he chose medicine out of a desire for security and integration, and that the deportation of his family is obviously not unrelated to his decision to turn to psychiatry: to explore the human mind, to give meaning to the incomprehensible (1).

Giving meaning to one’s life is an aspect inseparable from the resilient process.

Boris Cyrulnik became a neuropsychiatrist, a psychoanalyst and a specialist in ethology; he is one of the founders of human ethology.

Resilience and psychology

Resilience is defined as the capacity of human beings subjected to the effects of adversity to overcome it, and even to come out of the situation strengthened.

One of our author’s major contributions lies in the privileged place he gives to the concept of resilience in the field of psychology. For Cyrulnik, the difference between the North American and the Latin psychological schools (European and, we would add, Latin American) lies precisely in the acceptance of “resilience”. The United States school gives little credit to this notion, which Boris Cyrulnik, on the contrary, holds to be empirically demonstrated by many experiments (2).

In “Some psychological foundations of the concept of resilience” (3), even before coming into contact with Cyrulnik’s thought, we had sought, with Mirta Estamatti and Alicia Cuestas, to justify from a psychological point of view the development of the pillars of resilience as Edith Grotberg described them: we stressed the necessity of the human “other” if each of these pillars is to be built within the subject’s historical trajectory. This makes it easier to understand what the promotion of these pillars means and gives reliable leads for analysing educational, social and health programmes. We also brought the concept of resilience closer to that of mental health, in the sense of a similarity, indeed a coincidence, between the actions that promote resilience and those that seek to develop mental health. From the standpoint of resilience, the most singular and most original aspect is doubtless the insistence on the necessity of the other as a point of support for overcoming adversity.

Among the many experiments that support the concept of resilience, Boris Cyrulnik (4) reports the comparative study carried out by one of his students on what happened, during the Lebanese war, in Beirut and in Tripoli. Beirut was the most cruelly bombed city, the one with the most deaths and the most months of siege; yet field studies showed that children there presented far fewer post-traumatic syndromes than in Tripoli, which had remained quieter. The explanation: the very situation of Beirut increased solidarity and contact within families, whereas in Tripoli the children were quite simply suffering emotional abandonment.

The Romanian orphans with whom work was done after the fall of Ceaușescu moved from an autistic functioning to the possibility of studying or of founding a family, following a foster-family programme. More surprising still was the controversial study of children who had suffered abuse within their families: it found that the trauma did not come from the fact of the abuse in itself, but from the absence of affection in everyday family exchanges.

The keys to resilience: the oxymoron

The key therefore lies in affects, in solidarity, and these rest on human contact.

However serious what a child has undergone may be, the psyche proves so supple that, with the ingredients of human contact, of understanding and of speech, it can come back “to the surface”. Boris Cyrulnik explains that he chose these extreme cases because they make the problem easier to see, but that resilience — like trauma — knows no frontiers of nationality or of condition. To someone who asked him whether there is an age limit, he replied with a laugh: “Up to 120 years old”; in Toulon, he added, work is done with elderly people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, who forget words, but not affects, nor gestures, nor music.

Boris Cyrulnik (5) has made substantial contributions on the ways in which adversity wounds the subject, provoking the stress that will engender this or that type of illness and suffering. In the favourable case, the subject will produce a resilient reaction that will allow them to overcome adversity. His concept of the “oxymoron”, which describes the splitting of the subject wounded by trauma, makes it possible to advance further in understanding the process of building resilience; he grants it a status that ranks it among the psychic defence mechanisms, but, he specifies, more conscious ones. These would in reality correspond to the psychic mechanisms of disengagement described by Edward Bibring (6) which, unlike defence mechanisms, aim at the realisation of the subject’s possibilities with a view to overcoming the effects of suffering.

In Cyrulnik’s vision, resilience carries a message of hope. Psychology used to teach that the person was formed by the age of five: beyond that age, children who presented difficulties were abandoned to their fate, considered lost — and lost they effectively were. Things have changed: we know today that a maltreated child can survive without trauma if he is not made to feel guilty and if he is supported. History explains the present, but it never closes off the future.

Cyrulnik maintains that every study of resilience should work on three main planes, whose assembly — a personal temperament, a cultural meaning and a social support — explains, in his view, the astonishing diversity of traumas (7):

Hence this scene, which he readily gives as an example: a child has had a problem, he has taken a blow; he tells his parents about it, and a gesture of annoyance, a reproach, escapes them. “At that instant, they turned his suffering into trauma.”

His critical thought

It is important to mention the sharp social critique that the French author develops from the use he makes of the concept of resilience. He recalls, for example, what the cultural context of French psychiatric hospitals in the 1940s was: there was much talk there of the struggle for life, of the selection of the strongest, in other words of the elimination of the weakest. The cramming together of 120,000 mentally ill patients, food restrictions, the absence of care and the declared intention of eliminating those who contaminated the race made insidious decisions possible: mortality in those strange hospitals rose from 6.88% in 1938 to 26.48% in 1941. The some 40,000 patients who disappeared left neither traces nor written accounts. When they were able to testify, the horrors they recounted were taken for horrible delusions; but the mad one was society. These patients died in a silence that was wished for, after the war, when the nation was to be rebuilt without settling accounts with the past (7).

His conclusion: very often, social conduct comes down to this sentence — “You who have suffered so much, tell us what happened. But you have the right to say only what we want to hear.”

There remains, then, the question he addresses to the wounded themselves: what are you going to do with your wounds? Submit and embark on a career as a victim that would give a good conscience to those who rush to your aid? Take revenge by displaying your suffering in order to make the aggressors, or those who refused to help you, feel guilty? Suffer in secret and turn your smiles into masks? Or strengthen the healthy part of yourselves in order to fight against the bruises and to become human in spite of everything? It is in this last path that the essence of resilience lies.

Today, the deepening and the chronicity of the process of social exclusion, in an ever more inequitable society, challenge the capacity of social, educational and health systems to face so much injustice. Within this framework of exacerbated social pain, the promotion of resilience becomes a necessity and an obligation.

Yolanda Gampel (8) studies the problem of social pain, defined as “the suffering that originates in human relations taken as a whole” — Freud said that, of the three causes of human suffering (the disasters of nature, our own body, relations with other human beings), the last was the most frequent and the most important. She posits the existence, in the subject, of a “substratum of security” derived from a balanced emotional base, made possible by a stable family and social framework. It is parents, or those who stand in for them, who, as mediators with the social environment, help to constitute it through an action that neutralises threatening stimuli. This is what Bowlby and Ainsworth call a secure attachment relationship; Cyrulnik too refers to it in order to characterise it as a basis for the construction of resilience, while admitting that an insecure base can be corrected by good later experiences.

Social violence, which fractures existential continuity by making the familiar (heimlich) become unfamiliar (unheimlich, the uncanny), provokes a sensation of threat or of trauma that engenders in the subject another structure, which we call the “substratum of the uncanny”.

One may also distinguish contact with a terrible and brutal social aggression from contact with the existential aggression that “works, and works us, within each of us”. In those who have been subjected to brutal violence, the “substratum of the uncanny” cannot be assimilated or integrated into the structure of security existing until then.

But when the violence that “works and works us” existentially is of the order of poverty, of exclusion or of unemployment, for example, with the constant and repeated degrees of humiliation the subject has to endure, it too produces a phenomenon of impossible assimilation and of coexistence of the two substrata.

In these cases, the substratum of the uncanny cohabits with the substratum of security, and the person finds themselves compelled to bear a split world, with an Ego that is split as well, which allows them to deny the uncanny in order to sustain the continuation of their existence, or simply to survive, by keeping the result of the trauma at a distance. It is by this path that we enter the territory of resilience.

If resilience constitutes a process of weaving between what we are at a given moment and the affective resources present in the ecological and social environment, the lack of these resources may cause the subject to succumb; but if there exists even a single point of support, the construction of the resilient process can take place (Cyrulnik).

The psychology of the oxymoron

To understand the phenomenon of resilience, Boris Cyrulnik (9) resorts to the concept of the “oxymoron”, a figure of rhetoric that consists in bringing together two terms of opposite meaning in order to produce a new signification: the “obscure clarity”, a “wonderful misfortune”, the “black sun” of melancholy.

One must, he says, see the problem from both its faces. Seen from outside, the frequency of resilience proves that recovery is possible. Seen from inside the subject, being structured like an oxymoron reveals the division of the wounded person, the cohabitation of Heaven and Hell, “happiness on a razor’s edge”.

It is not a matter of ambivalence, which characterises a drive movement in which opposing feelings of love and hate towards the same person are expressed. The oxymoron designates the contrast of the one who, having taken a great blow, adapts by dividing: the part of the person that took the blow suffers and becomes necrotic, while another part, better protected, still healthy but more secret, gathers with the energy of despair everything that can go on giving a little happiness and meaning to life.

Happiness, he adds, exists only in mental representation; it is therefore always the fruit of an elaboration. It is something to be worked on, and it is built in the encounter with the other.

The splitting of the Ego does not heal over: it remains in the subject, compensated by the Ego resources that are stated as the pillars of resilience — consistent self-esteem, independence, capacity to form relationships, sense of humour, morality, creativity, initiative and capacity for critical thinking. With a little of all this, plus the support of other human beings who provide an indispensable backing, the possibility of resilience is assured and the subject carries on with their life (10).

One could say that the concept of the oxymoron is equivalent to the Freudian concept of the splitting of the Ego in the defensive process: as Freud first described it in cases of fetishism, faced with the psychic trauma of the threat of castration, the subject splits so as to be able, on the one hand, to go on satisfying his drives (a little happiness and meaning in life), while at another level he undergoes the continuous action of the threat received, which he knows to be real and possible. Freud then extended the application of this type of defence to psychoses and neuroses, and as far as “normal” life. Rubén Zuckerfeld (11) goes further and posits splitting as a founding fact of the psychic apparatus, as a condition of the human being, and includes it in his description of a third topography.

In both perspectives, then, it is a matter of the way the subject bears adversity by constructing a vital way out in order to overcome the trauma, at the price of a modification of his Ego — the splitting — with the help of denial.

For Cyrulnik (12), when an external event occurs in the subject’s history and inflicts a wound on him, that wound permeates the body and the memory. The oxymoron becomes characteristic of the wounded but resistant personality, which carries its suffering part and can nevertheless be happy in spite of everything. What he describes there is a pathology of the subject’s bond with the world, which will have to be restored: this is why another human being is indispensable.

Trauma can be the starting point of a neurotic or psychotic structuring, but also a point of arrival in that it generates a strong and useful defensive structure. The construction of the psychic system includes, and not as an accessory, the system of the Ego’s defences.

Trauma and ordeal, well-being and happiness

Cyrulnik insists on one distinction: trauma must be differentiated from ordeal. To speak of trauma, he says, one has to be dead — and this is not an image, it is real. Traumatised people say that they are not sure they are alive, that they have come back from hell and come back to life. Some go so far as to say that coming out of the death camps is not a return to life, that they are not survivors but revenants, ghosts — which implies this curious thought: “the older I get, the further I move away from death”.

Many people undergo traumas, and everyone has to bear ordeals. But in an ordeal we remain ourselves: we are neither dead nor torn apart. Faced with an ordeal, I think: I have lost my job, what am I going to do? She has left me, I am very hurt, but I tell myself that she must be mad to have let a man like me go — too bad for her. We defend ourselves as best we can, and we remain ourselves (13).

To illustrate this difference, Cyrulnik readily tells the story of the stonecutters. On a road, a first man is breaking stones with a grimace: he is suffering, and explains that his trade is idiotic and that the muscular work hurts him. A little further on, a second seems more peaceful: he strikes the stone calmly and says that it is an open-air trade, which is enough for him to earn his living. Further on still, a third is breaking stones in ecstasy, radiant, smiling: he explains that it makes him very happy because he thinks he is building a cathedral. Those who have a cathedral in their head are happy; those who content themselves with the immediate experience well-being; those who despair at having no other trade are unhappy. The gesture is the same in all three cases: it is its meaning that makes one happy or unhappy (14).

Cyrulnik’s thought is nonetheless not utopian: he does not say that happiness is easy to attain, only that it is possible. The price of it may be high, but those who do not try pay a higher one still. For, as far as the subject is concerned, if the wound is too great, if no one blows on the embers of resilience that remain in him, it will be a slow psychic agony.

Drug addicts, he observes, confuse happiness with the well-being of the moment: the flash of the drug gives them a sensation of well-being that dies out at once and drives them to despair, whereas those who have a project transcend reality (14).

And he refuses all indulgence towards misfortune: a misfortune is never wonderful. It is frozen mud, a scab of pain that forces us to choose: to submit to it or to overcome it. “Resilience defines the spring of those who, after taking the blow, have been able to overcome it.”

Resilience as a weave with the other and with the social surroundings

Resilience is woven: it is to be sought neither in the person’s interiority alone, nor in their environment alone, but between the two, because it constantly ties an intimate process to social surroundings. This does away with the notion of the individual’s strength or weakness; this is why the literature on resilience has stopped speaking of invulnerable children.

This conception meets up with the notion of the anaclisis of the drive. As Freud puts it (15), “the libido follows the paths of narcissistic needs and attaches itself to the objects that ensure their satisfaction”. The mother, first provider of satisfaction for the child’s needs, is the first object of love and also of protection against external dangers; she moderates anxiety, which is the initial reaction to traumatic adversity, even if to a minimal degree.

We have already mentioned the need, for the child, to develop a secure attachment as the basis of his future resilience. Boris Cyrulnik acknowledges here the debt he owes to the man he calls one of his masters, John Bowlby, and to his teaching on attachment theory.

This initial condition of the subject goes on existing throughout life: this is why, all along the course of existence, another human being is fundamental for overcoming adversities through the development of the strengths that constitute resilience. In sum, the process of the anaclisis of the drive leads to the human other and avoids being shut up in narcissistic solipsism, which is deadly.

In resilience, which deals with the effects of the most external crash, the Ego that undergoes it must nonetheless govern the emotional commotion. Stress takes part in the shock when emotion shakes the organism under the effect of the blows coming from social aggressions or from the minds of others. Stress is often chronic, and its insidious effect alters the organism and the psyche, which does not become aware of it.

And yet self-esteem can always, with the help and the gaze of others, be reorganised and reworked by means of new representations, actions, commitments or narratives. It can be debated whether the concept of resilience belongs to the family of the Ego’s defence mechanisms. Perhaps one must resort to the little-used concept of the Ego’s mechanisms of disengagement introduced by E. Bibring (16), which “have as their purpose neither to bring about discharge (abreaction), nor to make tension cease to be dangerous (defence mechanism); without denying that phenomena of abreaction in small doses occur during the process”. These are operations of the Ego that aim at dispersing painful tensions into other complexes of thoughts and emotions, with compensatory effects; or else, as in the work of mourning, at detaching the libido from the lost object in order to transfer it onto others. A third mode is familiarisation with danger in order to overcome it in a counterphobic way. Daniel Lagache (17), following Bibring, points out the passage from repetition to thought and spoken recollection: for him, the Ego’s operations of disengagement make it possible to neutralise the (unconscious) defensive operation. For psychoanalysis, these would be mechanisms belonging more to the cure than to the illness; from the standpoint of resilience, they constitute the possibility of a continuity of life in acceptable conditions of mental health.

The construction of resilience

The way our French author conceives the construction of resilience cannot be abstracted from his ethological conception of the human being. When he writes that, in this construction, “genetics will have something to say, but early interactions will speak much more, while family and social institutions will contain the essential part of the discourse” (18), one can translate this by other of his formulations: for there to be speech, the development of the human brain must first be correctly programmed, the child’s eyes must meet an attachment figure that arouses in him the wish to speak, and he must be steeped in the social linguistic bath of the adults around him. Speech no longer belongs to heaven: it takes its origin in the body, in the affective and in the social (19).

Cyrulnik thus brings out the social character of every human being, whose individuality is built in a field of affective tensions structured by words. But, in terms of resilience, the possibilities of restructuring never cease. This is why he takes on the possibility of working with patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and insists on this point: the mind of a child, of a person, is like a submarine that withstands tons and tons of pressure without breaking and that always — as long as there is life — can come back to the surface. For him, there is no wound that cannot be recovered from. By the end of their life, one adult in two will have lived through a trauma, a violence that will have pushed them to the edge of death; but, even abandoned, martyred, disabled or the victim of a genocide, the human being is capable of weaving, from the first days of life, their resilience, which will help them to overcome inhuman shocks.

The whisper of the past in the intimacy of the adolescent

Le Murmure des fantômes is a book by Boris Cyrulnik devoted to adolescence, that complex and critical stage of life in which sexuality surfaces forcefully in a body that is transforming and becoming adult, in which identity is constituted as a fundamental quest in which peers play an important part, in which the desire for self-affirmation brings authority in general — and not only paternal authority — into conflict, and in which it becomes imperative to find new meanings for a life that is filling up with uncertainties.

In this circumstance, the past of the subject’s childhood comes back like a ghostly whisper that obliges him to put the facts and the emotions into the form of a narrative to which he himself gives a meaning. For there to be trauma, the traumatic experience must occur twice: the first time in reality, the second in representation. It is in relation to this second one that the work of resilience can set in. The adolescent looks for it: first in his family and, if he does not find it there, with his peers, a teacher or any significant adult who can play the part of tutor of his resilient development. With affectively adequate surroundings that support his socialisation, the adolescent can recall his traumatic experiences and place them within a positive narrative of his life. The ghosts are then laid to rest.

The tutors of resilience

A tutor of resilience, Cyrulnik explains, is someone — a person, a place, an event, a work of art — that brings about a resumption of psychological development after the trauma. It is almost always an adult who meets the child and takes on for him the value of a model of identity, the turning point of his existence. It is not necessarily a professional: a significant encounter may suffice. Many children start learning a subject at school because they like the teacher; but when, twenty years later, that teacher is asked to explain the success of his pupil, the educator underestimates himself and does not suspect how much he counted (20).

When he begins to tell the story of his life, Tim Guénard (21) makes this remark: when people speak of beautiful houses or of old cars, they always tell the story of their restoration beautifully; but when they see a child who is cracking, an adult who is collapsing, people ask themselves so many questions that they no longer even dare to do the simplest things: to look kindly, to touch, to keep company.

He was abandoned by his mother. The only image he has left of her is that of a woman walking away, seen from behind, wearing white boots; she used to leave him tied to an electricity pole at the side of a road. Beaten by his alcoholic father, despised by his stepmother and by her children, who relegated him to the dog’s kennel, outside. The father’s last thrashing, with a stick, followed by a fall into a cellar, left him with multiple fractures, one eye put out and an ear burst open. He wakes up from a three-day coma in a hospital where he will spend three years, healing and learning to walk again. From an orphanage where his physical appearance gives him no chance of being adopted, he is entrusted, along with other children, to a “foster mother” who also mistreats him — after a stay in a hospice for the mentally ill to which a doctor had sent him on the basis of his history alone; another doctor noticed, several months later, that he was not mad. He ends up in a harsh reformatory where he is labelled and stigmatised as a “wayward” child. He had become a person at risk, “done for”, and therefore “beyond recovery”. These words addressed to the child renewed the violence he had lived through. His only hope was to manage to kill his father: that was what kept him alive.

He was a thief, ran away from the institutions where he was confined and made his way to Paris. There he met two young men who took him in in a friendly way and helped him, but who also drew him a little further into delinquency: he lived by stealing from prostitutes, then as a gigolo in Montparnasse, where wealthy women picked them out in a fashionable café.

He ended up meeting a woman judge — thus fulfilling his old wish to have a mother — who brought him into her office, began to talk with him, paid attention to him and finally found him work in a sculpture workshop. Nobody was betting on his perseverance; and indeed, furious that one of his pieces of work had been rejected, he tore up the whole year’s drawings belonging to his main teacher, who taught technical drawing. The teacher let it pass and taught him geometry, technology and technical drawing for two and a half years. Tim says: “I dreamed of having a father like him.” The diploma he finally obtained he offered to the “judge-mother” who had given him the chance to earn it.

He then met a priest who worked with people with disabilities. Surprised to find himself loved by these young people, he devoted himself to caring for them. And, surprised once more to get to know those “extraterrestrials” that the believers gravitating around the priest were in his eyes, he ended up becoming a Christian.

The summary he gives of it takes few words: he grew up wanting to kill his father, and today he loves his father; if he is a happy man, with a wife, four children and friends, he cannot be what he is without all of his past. To the prisoners he visits in jail who tell him they feel “crooked”, he replies that it does not matter: if everything crooked had to be torn out of the whole Earth, there would be no more wine, no more olive oil, no more fruit — crooked things are given a stake so that they can bear fruit. To those who say they are “rotten”, he replies that a rotten apple is thrown away, and the pips are left; and that after the pips comes a new tree, and from the new tree, new fruit. With a background that promised his life a dire fate, Tim Guénard found the tutors of resilience needed to become, among other things, Boris Cyrulnik’s co-author in El realismo de la esperanza.

The moment of resilience

When resilience is spoken of, one immediately thinks of its application, on the social, health or educational level, to the populations most disadvantaged by a society that produces poverty, inequality, exclusion, delinquency and illnesses of every kind. But suspicion then arises. Is promoting resilience in damaged populations not functional to the prevailing system of social injustice? Is it not a sticking plaster that makes people forget the need to transform the social structures that generate injustice? Are we not indefinitely putting off their transformation? Is it only a matter of modifying the Ego of the one who suffers, leaving intact the discourses that legitimise power structures which go on producing injustice, mistreatment and unhappiness?

Nothing could be further from the thinking of the many of us who work with the concept of resilience. Boris Cyrulnik has precisely situated, with a great deal of precision, the place of resilience among the various tasks of a society (22). When a child is expelled from his home following a family disturbance, when he is placed in a totalitarian institution, when state violence spreads across the entire planet, when those in charge of assisting him mistreat him, when each suffering proceeds from another suffering like a cascade, it is fitting to act on each of the phases of the catastrophe:

What is at stake here holds far beyond the great collective catastrophes. Resilience can become the object of a full-fledged therapeutic work, be declined into brief solution-focused interventions, or be sought in the most difficult clinical contexts. But it never replaces the other three moments; it follows them.