Resilient children self-generate their own constancy after trauma annihilates prior form

Evidence

The concept of ”resilience,” taken up and reworked by Boris Cyrulnik, confirms this proposition. Resilience is indeed a logic of self-formation starting from the annihilation of form. It appears as a psychical process of construction, or rather of reconstruction and self-reconfiguration, developed simultaneously against and with the threat of destruction. In studying the cases of certain ”problem children”—children held back, mistreated, sick—Cyrulnik reports that some of them developed processes of resilience, possibilities for a becoming on the basis of the effacement of every future, for a transformation of the trace or mark, and for a historical transdifferentiation. It is as if, in order to return to themselves after the destructive trials they had suffered, these children had to create their own constancy, to self-generate their homeostasis. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 251

Categorization

• XREF: Cyrulnik’s resilience-as-self-formation is the concrete psychiatric case grounding the plasticity/flexibility distinction against management-buzzword usage of ‘resilience’. — connects to: Showing young children horror films can cause lasting trauma they later reframe into forgiveness — Dolores DeLuce, Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making It in Show…, 61