Boris Cyrulnik ::: Talking of Love on the Edge of a Precipe ::: Allen Lane / Penguin

Boris Cyrulnik is beyond doubt resilient. Despite a war racked childhood and the deportation of his parents to a concentration camp during world war II, he became a scholar and famous in France for his writing (get ref’s). He went on to study medicine and followed this into neuropsychiatry and psychoanalysis. He is director of Teaching at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Toulon, France. This is his first book to be published in the UK.

Talking of Love on the Edge of a Precipe is an analysis of the healing power of love and hope. Resilience relies on the same conditions in adults as it does in children: victims must have the capacity to articulate suffering and they must be able to “weave’ their rebirth around another, external, person. “A trauma casts a shadow, but the stories that are told about it bring princesses out of the darkness, as well as toads. That’s why fairy tales are so powerful. That is the difficult hope promised by resilience”. This made me think of the film ‘Pan’s Labrynth’, which perhaps partly articulates this angle, the resilience of the individuals subjective dimension in the face of fierce opposition from external reality. A wound inflicted in the past may become bearable if our representation of it can be modified: this is perhaps one of the foundation ideas that underpins William Gibsons’ ‘Pattern Recognition’, both with the main character Case Pollard and the Russian footage creator.

The book is filled with examples illustrating Cyrulnik’s thoughts, and I wanted to quote one. It concerns a boy who was fostered out to a farm, where he was placed in a barn with another boy and tasked with tending the sheep. After a few months of this he was filthy, and neglected by his foster ‘parents’.

“One Sunday, a….support worker came to treat Bruno to a day inside a real house…..she could not stop herself from showing her disgust. For the first time in his life, Bruno felt that he was filthy. He had a feeling of having a dirty self, and at the same time he was perceived as a model of an other who despised himself. It was as though he thought to himself: ‘The gaze of kind adults is teaching me that I am dirty.’ From that day onwards, the boy felt at ease only when he was in the company of marginal boys who did not make him feel dirty. He began to avoid kind adults, who soiled him by looking at him. By adapting in this way, Bruno was inserting himself into the world of socialisation that blocked his resilience’.

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000071429,00.html

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780713999136,00.html

http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_11/uk/dires.htm

http://www.odilejacob.com/catalogue/index.php?op=par_auteur&auteur=70&cat=0204