Surviving the Trauma of Life
Interview with Boris Cyrulnik by Sophie Boukhari
UNESCO Courier journalist
in The Unesco Courier
November 2001
please see http://www.unesco.org/courier/

The unclassifiable Cyrulnik

Boris Cyulnik is, beyond a doubt, resilient. Despite a war-wracked
childhood and the deportation of his parents, he still managed to become a
distinguished scholar and well-balanced individual: happy with his family,
respected by his peers and famous for his many books.
Born in Bordeaux, France, in 1937, Cyrulnik only refers to his personal
wounds in "third person," while writing about children. Clearly, this is a
man who has learned to transform weakness into strength. "I was never put
on the 'conveyor belt' of life-I've always made my own path," he says. "I
do only what is absolutely required to be considered 'normal.'"
Instead of distancing himself from people, his personal trauma drove him to
try to understand what it means to be human. After studying medicine, he
followed diverse branches of psychology, such as neuropsychiatry and
psychoanalysis, before breaking the sacrosanct barriers between academic
disciplines. Yet by moving into fields like ethology (which focuses on
animal behaviour), the maverick scholar made considerable enemies in the
scientific community.
This anti-specialist, globetrotter and incurably curious academic has
never hesitated to question some of the dogma of psychoanalysis. While
Freud holds guilt responsible for neurosis and social discontent, Cyrulnik
feels that there is a "good" kind of guilt, through which "we try to avoid
causing harm because we can empathize with others. This is probably the
basis of morality."
Trauma and anxiety are the lot of a growing number of young people, as
violence holds sway and traditional notions of the family disintegrate. But
there are roads to recovery, says French globetrotting psychologist, Boris
Cyrulnik

You must have been quite intrigued by the descriptions of the September 11
terrorists in the media. These young men had fairly balanced childhoods and
were quite educated. Yet they turned into violent fanatics. How do you
explain that?
By their total lack of empathy. Germans became Nazis in exactly the same
way, by not being able to imagine someone else's world. For them, you had
to be blonde, dolichocephalic (having a long head) and not Jewish. All
other people were inferior beings. The terrorists in the U.S. attacks had
good upbringing and education but they never learned to accept forms of
human existence other than their own.

Why not?
In some Muslim countries, fanaticism is manufactured. Just like in France,
where people were taught to hate Germans after the 1870 Franco-German war.
Teachers were actually paid to tell children they would be glorified if one
day they went off to "smash" the Germans. I've seen the same thing in the
Middle East. I've seen books that told little boys that if they died for
religion, they'd go straight to heaven to live with Allah. These schools
that teach there is only one truth, are schools of hatred.

But some of the terrorists were children of immigrants who adjusted well in
Europe...
These individuals never made it through adolescence into adulthood. There
are more and more young people in Europe who fail on that score, about a
third of the total, because we don't know how to help and support them
properly. They drift and become perfect targets for sects and extremist
movements. When you don't know who you are, you love it when a dictatorship
takes charge of you. The moment you submit to a master, to a single
message, you become a fanatic. Many people are also suffering from a
growing sense of anxiety over globalization. They feel depersonalized and
disconnected from their feelings. Disturbed people feel secure obeying
someone who tells them what to do. Submission is a good way for them to get
rid of their anxiety.

So you don't think economic globalization induces a kind of "collective
global sub-conscious" that helps us to come to grips with all the ideas and
information coming at us from all sides?
No. On the contrary, if I want to see the world, I have to accept that I
won't understand everything. Identity is like speech. When a baby is born,
it has the capacity to make several thousand different sounds. But to
speak, it has to whittle them down to between 100 and 300, according to the
language. The same principle applies to forging an identity. I must give up
a thousand elements or dimensions which cannot be integrated into the
person I want to be. Today, with globalization, a lot of people are looking
to their roots to "whittle themselves down" in order to forge an identity.

So people return to their roots because the Western "model" is spreading
too fast?
Some people are fanatically seeking refuge in their roots. But this
approach leads to alienation. Since it's the West that has the weapons, the
money and the technology, there's a very good chance Western attitudes will
become globalized and spread across the world. Either you unhappily submit
to this trend or your hatred of the West increases, which is what is
happening today. Imaginary identities, many hundreds or even thousands of
years old, will continue to resurface. It's as if the only choice is
between "de-identification" and alienation.

Is there a compromise solution?
Yes. To avoid feeling alienated, people must recognize that an identity is
like a patchwork of different elements. All identities are the product of a
father's and mother's past and of a religion everyone interprets according
to their cultural surroundings. In France, for example, Bretons are very
proud of the painted crockery made in Quimper but not many know that the
style was invented by an Italian who emigrated to Brittany a century ago.

You've talked about the serious problems of today's teenagers, who are
"drifting" more and more. Yet children have never been better understood by
society than today, so why are so many youngsters becoming neurotic,
committing suicide and taking to crime?
That isn't a contradiction. Progress always has a price. The price of
freedom is anxiety. Today children get help to develop their personalities
and become aware of all kinds of things. They're more intelligent and more
lively, but also more worried. We look after them very well when they're
young and then we abandon them as soon as they're teenagers. Society
doesn't take over where parents leave off. So a third of all teenagers fall
apart, usually after leaving high school. To avoid that, we need more
social and cultural structures that will help them give meaning to their
lives by encouraging them to be creative, to speak openly, to reach out to
each other. But we don't do that.
A teenager's problem lies in the question: "What am I going to do about
what I've been made into?" To answer that, they must be surrounded by the
warmth of feeling that comes from a group, from friends, from the
confidence of being able to find a job. But the technological revolution
has been so massive that schools now have a monopoly on social
selection-they determine the possibilities open to an individual. If a boy
or girl blossoms, they do well in school and learn a skill. They'll be
among the two-thirds of teenagers who benefit from the improved facilities
and support available in early childhood. But the other third don't like
school, feel humiliated and don't get a chance to shine elsewhere. They
find themselves at a loose end on the street, without a job and often
without any family. How do kids like this recover their self-esteem? They
indulge in "tough" activities, testing themselves and proving their
existence by adopting primitive social rituals such as violence, fighting
and drugs.

You say, "there is no family." But isn't it just that the family is
changing?
There's no family and it's changing, as it always has. When kids get home,
there's no one there. No father, no mother. Why should they shut themselves
up in an empty house when there are pals out in the street? I've worked in
some Latin American countries where kids say they had a row with their
mother or stepfather and just left. Life is physically very hard in the
street but there's always something going on-a celebration, a theft,
something to share. You talk and you live. These children get used to not
having a family by turning to petty crime. A street boy in Colombia who
isn't a delinquent has a life expectancy of about 10 days. He's eliminated
if he doesn't join a gang. Delinquency is a way of adapting to a crazy
society.

But what should be done? Make women stay at home?
No, but there has to be someone there, man or woman. In some cultures that
still have extended families, there's always a grown-up at home. Elsewhere,
we have to innovate. In Brazil, for example, people construct families that
have nothing to do with blood or biology. An old man says to an old lady:
"I'm sick of going down the steep slopes in the slums, I'm going to take
care of the house." And the old lady says: "Well, I'm going to look after
the kids in the neighbourhood." And then another, a bit younger, says:
"I'll chip in with some money because I've got an odd job." These are
verbal families, people who've made understandings to protect each other,
to be friends, to celebrate and fight together, like all families.
Delinquency vanishes immediately in these households as soon as this kind
of family develops.

In the West, the family has changed dramatically, yet laws and attitudes
haven't.
That is because we often make the mistake of talking about the
"traditional family." Yet this structure only emerged in the West in the
19th century, at the same time as the factories. It was a way of adapting
to industrial society. A man was an appendage of a machine and a woman an
appendage of a man. There was order in every facet of life.
Individuals-just about all women and most men-were psychologically crushed.
Only a minority, about two percent of the population, was able to develop
healthily. And so they married to pass on their property and other goods.
But this version of a traditional family wasn't very common at the time
because most workers didn't get married, since they had no property to pass
on.
That society has disappeared and there are fewer and fewer traditional
families, but the model is still in people's minds. And the laws are only
just starting to change. When there's just one concept around, it takes a
long while for people to change their attitudes. You have to wage "a war of
words," writing and debating, to drive things forward. You can invent a
thousand different variations of the family as long as children still have
a place where they're protected, where there's love and growth and where
some things, like incest are absolutely forbidden, while other rules can be
negotiated.

The idea of resilience you discuss in your recent books1 is becoming very
popular. Why?
Epidemiological research by the World Health Organization shows that one
out of two people has been or will be seriously traumatized at some time
during their life (by war, violence, rape, cruelty, incest, etc.). One in
four will experience at least two serious traumas. The rest are also bound
to fall on some hard times. Yet the notion of resilience, which is a
person's ability to grow in the face of terrible problems, had not been
scientifically studied until recently. Today, it's all the rage in many
countries. In Latin America, they have resilience institutes, in Holland
and Germany they have resilience universities. In the United States, you
hear the word all the time. The World Trade Center towers have even been
nicknamed "the twin resilient towers" by those who want to rebuild them.

So why wasn't this idea investigated earlier?
Because for a long time people have despised victims. In most cultures,
they're regarded as guilty of something. A woman who's been raped, for
example, is often condemned as much as her attacker because "she must have
provoked him," it is said. Sometimes a victim is punished even more than an
aggressor is. Not so long ago in Europe, an unmarried woman who had a baby
was thrown out on the street while the father risked virtually nothing.
This disdain or hatred has also been directed against the survivors of
war. The families and villages of these victims are suspicious and say:
"He's coming home. That means he must have hidden somewhere or collaborated with the enemy." After the Second World War, the most deadly in human history, things swung to the other extreme. The victims became heroes. By pushing these individuals into making careers as victims, societies found a
convenient way of downplaying the crimes of the Nazis. The fact that these
victims survived was used to downplay the savagery.
At the time, René Spitz and Anna Freud2 described children whose parents
had been killed in the wartime bombing of London. They were all profoundly
impaired and shut-off people, suicidal and unable to relax their bodies.
When Spitz and Freud saw them again a few years later, they were amazed at
how well they'd recovered and wrote that these abandoned children had gone
through four stages: protest, despair, indifference-all students learned
about those three-and then recovery, which nobody was interested in
studying.

How did resilience become accepted among psychologists?
The word, which comes from the Latin "resalire" (to jump up again),
appeared in the English language and passed into psychological parlance in
the 1960s thanks to an American psychologist, Emmy Werner. She had gone to
Hawaii to assess the development of children who had no family, didn't go
to school, lived in great poverty and were exposed to disease and violence.
She followed them for 30 years and found that in the end, a third had
learned how to read and write, acquired a skill and started a family.
Two-thirds of them were still in a bad way. But if people were just
machines, all of them would have failed.

What's a typical resilient child like, socially and culturally?
There is no typical profile. But a traumatized child can still be resilient
if she or he has acquired a gut or primitive confidence in the first year
of life. Such children take the attitude that "I've been loved therefore
I'm worth loving, so I live in hope of meeting someone who'll help me
resume my development." These children feel a lot of grief but still relate
to other people, give them gifts of food and look for an adult they can
turn into one of their parents. Then they give themselves a narrative
identity - "I'm the one who was... sent to the camps, raped, forced to
become a child soldier" and so on.
If you give them a chance to make up for lost time and to express
themselves, nearly all-90 to 95 per cent-become resilient. They have to be
given a chance to be creative, to test and prove themselves as kids,
through things like joining the scouts, studying for an exam, organizing a
trip and learning to be useful. Problem youngsters feel humiliated when
they're given something, especially if there's a lecture along with it. But
they regain their balance when asked to give something themselves.
When they grow up, such children are drawn to selfless professions. They
want others to learn from what they've gone through. They often become
teachers, social workers, psychiatrists or psychologists. Having been
problem children themselves helps them to identify with and respect those
who have been psychologically hurt.

1. Boris Cyrulnik is the author of over a dozen works. The Dawn of Meaning
was published by McGraw-Hill in 1992.
2. Both are psychoanalysts, one American (1887-1974) and the other the
daughter of Sigmund Freud (1895-1982).