Lhe term has been on everyone’s lips for several years: “resilience”. Boris Cyrulnik, a renowned neuropsychiatrist and author who introduced the concept in the 1980s, could be happy about it. This is not the case. Decidedly trendy, resilience (initially describing an “evolutionary recovery after a trauma”) is today suffering from misuse and, above all, from misinterpretations, the specialist deplores.
Initially a source of hope for patients and practitioners (the trauma is no longer inexorable), the concept has entered common language to become desirable to everyone and – even more problematic – to make those wounded in the soul and body on the road to recovery resistant to all tests.
READ ALSO Boris Cyrulnik, the psychiatrist “a bit of a guru”, a bit of an old sage
More than a diversion, a paradox, that it is used in The Two Faces of Resilience – Against the Reclamation of a Concept*, a collective work signed by experts from various disciplines (psychology, linguistics, neurophysiology, etc.), to be deciphered. Because these misinterpretations, he warns, “pose a philosophical and ethical problem.”
The Point: What prompted you to make this clarification?
Boris Cyrulnik : Forty years ago, I co-organized the first international conference on “intrauterine communication” in Toulon. At the time, the university taught us that until a child speaks, he or she does not understand. However, with international researchers, we […] Read more
