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Boris Cyrulnik: Surviving the trauma of life
Interview by Sophie Boukhari, UNESCO Courier journalist
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 Cyrulnik1
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, Ren? 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.
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.”
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).
---------- Post added later and automatically merged ----------
Thank you Dr. Baxter for making this article look good , It was a mess before and I didn't know how to improve it .
Interview by Sophie Boukhari, UNESCO Courier journalist
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 Cyrulnik1
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, Ren? 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.
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.”
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).
---------- Post added later and automatically merged ----------
Thank you Dr. Baxter for making this article look good , It was a mess before and I didn't know how to improve it .
Last edited by a moderator:
