La résilience : un concept inutile en psychotraumatologie

Abstract

Resilience is a term originally used in physical sciences to describe the shock-resistance of a material. Recently, it has been used in psychopathology to describe the ability to withstand stress or to bounce back into life, in the face of adversity. In relation to the issue of psychological trauma, it is assumed by the authors to be innate or to be the result of early good quality mother-infant bonding. In this article, we propose an alternative hypothesis that eliminates the concept of resilience. Faced with a potentially traumatogenic event, the subject is likely to develop a traumatic neurosis. This consists of registering the traumatic image by unknowingly adding it into the interior psychic system. It would be able to, if there is already present a recorded trace at the conscious and unconscious representations, in their original aspect of enjoyment (the “Paradise Lost”, Freud). The traumatic image comes to this place as “an object lost and found” which is a source of unconscious enjoyment, but which also carries an anguish of annihilation. The whole question is to know whether this object could be accommodated in the psychic system and if the links of attachment which it forms with the psyche, will be sustainable or not. The reception and also the maintenance of the intensity of the traumatic image and its effects depend therefore on the connection which the subject preserves, prior to the critical event, with the trace of a “paradise lost”. If he is waiting for a place for full enjoyment, the object lost/found, which constitutes the traumatic image, naturally will find its place by the trace left by the “Paradise Lost”. If he is not waiting, or only slightly waiting for a place for full enjoyment, the traumatic object will leave him almost indifferent, and it will either not be received within the psychic system, or it will disappear comfortably and easily. Thus, the traumatic neurosis requires prior neurotic functioning characterized (Here, neurotic is to differentiate from “normal neurotic”), which will nourish the psychodynamic psychotherapy of these patients. This will serve to resolve neurotic embarrassment, which requires the existence to a point of completion. The concept of resilience says nothing about the nature of the phenomenon that would designate.