The house with a garden of the neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik (Bordeaux, 84 years old) in La Seyne-sur-Mer is a corner of paradise. The Mediterranean is literally four steps away. It is a sunny morning in October. The world seems well done.
Outside, the music is heard on loudspeakers reggae of a gang of boys and girls fishing in the bay. Inside, in a darkened room adorned with old swords and a divan that reproduces that of Sigmund Freud, a man with the appearance of a kindly sage talks about his childhood under Nazism and the concept that he helped popularize: resilience. We talked about the covid-19 pandemic and how it has changed us.
Cyrulnik – son of Jews who died in the Holocaust, scientist and popularizer, prolific author, occasional unofficial adviser to President Emmanuel Macron – has just published Psychoecology. The environment and the seasons of the soul (Gedisa). In France, his latest book, written together with the journalist José Lenzini, is Chérif Mécheri. Préfet courage sous le gouvernement de Vichy (Chérif Mécheri. Prefect Courage under the Vichy Government; pending publication in Spanish), the story of a high-ranking French official who refused to collaborate with the Nazi occupier during World War II.
QUESTION. Will we forget the pandemic? Are we forgetting it already?
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ANSWER. Denial is a psychological protection mechanism: it’s over; let’s think about something else. But the virus has not died down. It’s coming back, and if we relax, there may be another wave. It happens after all catastrophes, after all wars. There is a moment of reckoning and then we move on to the next. With denial we feel better, but it prevents us from facing the problem.
P. After the so-called Spanish flu there was a forgetfulness. The Roaring Twenties …
R. And it killed 30 to 50 million people, more than the 1914-1918 war [la I Guerra Mundial]. I have had patients who have spent their entire lives with Spanish flu encephalitis. They survived, but with badly damaged brains. And no, she was not discussed. They only talked about the war from 1914 to 1918. And in France they only talked about the French dead, very numerous: one and a half million young people died in appalling conditions, and the majority were teenagers.
Q. Don’t we need fun coming out of trauma, a little denial?
R. Yes, definitely. It also happened in France after World War II. I was a child, there was an extraordinary joy. People were in the street, there were dances everywhere, parties, the will to live. And it can be understood, it is legitimate. But if we don’t protect ourselves, in two or three years there will be a new virus, more confinements, more deaths.
Q. In 1945, at the end of the war, there was also a denial of the past, right?
R. It was not possible to speak neither of the prisoners of war, nor of the collaboration [con la Alemania nazi, que ocupó Francia entre 1940 y 1944]. The French were the resistance, not the collaboration! The survivors of the Shoah were not very numerous, 27,000. Not a word, impossible to talk about it. It bothered. When I recounted what had happened to me, people laughed.
Q. What did they tell you?
R. They told me: “What stories you tell.”
Q. What did you tell them?
R. At the age of six and a half I was arrested by the French police, the French Gestapo. I managed to escape. People didn’t believe me and I ended up shutting up. Only 40 years later, when my name appeared in the Maurice Papon trial [el prefecto francés que organizó la deportación de judíos de Burdeos], journalists started asking me about my childhood, and now I can’t stop talking about it.
Q. What happened to your parents?
R. My father entered the Foreign Legion, in which there were only Spanish Republicans and Central European Jews, like my father. He was wounded and in the hospital bed he was detained by the police of the country for which he had fought, France. He died at Auschwitz. I hardly knew him.
Q. And your mother?
R. Like most of my family, she was detained and deported.
Q. I have the impression that you have spent your life trying to answer the question of how it is possible that you survived and overcome the very adverse conditions of your childhood.
R. Above all, I wondered how Nazism was possible. The Germans were the most cultured people in Europe and it was in their home that an immense crime took place against the Jews, against the Poles, against the Russians, against almost the whole of Europe. Later, when he was already working as a doctor and the social worker told the children: “Look where you come from, you will never be able to get ahead, you will never be able to study, you have no family” …, it reminded me of what they said to me when I was a child . That’s why I told myself that I would work to help these kids get ahead.
P. Resilience.
R. Yes, a family, friendly, cultural process that allows them to regain a good development despite the trauma.
Q. The term resilience has been abused a lot.
R. Not at all. It is used well. When a military man talks about military resilience, it is well said: they go to combat, there will be deaths and injuries, and they will need to follow a resilience process. Or when it comes to climate resilience, it is the farmers or climatologists themselves who use it.
Q. The brain is not something isolated and immutable, you argue in Psychoecology.
R. When I was studying medicine, I was told that the brain was in the cranial box, separated from the world, and that we arrived with a warehouse of billions of neurons and that every day we lost some. Now we see, thanks to neuroimaging and neurobiology, that exactly the opposite is happening. The environment sculpts the brain, shapes it.
Q. Is the brain a sculpture?
R. When a child is deprived of otherness, its two prefrontal lobes atrophy, the limbic circuit disappears, and the rhinoencephalic tonsils become hypertrophied. The brain becomes dysfunctional because there is no environment, there is no otherness. This is photographed, it is very easy to see it. Now, when the environment is rearranged, and as long as we have not left the child alone too long, then we see that the prefrontal lobes and the memory circuit develop again and the two tonsils turn off. That is, when we act on the environment, we modify the brain sculpture.
Q. What exactly is the environment?
R. There are three environments. The first is the baby’s immediate environment: amniotic fluid, chemistry. The second is the affective: the mother, the father, the family, the neighborhood, the school. And the third is the verbal environment: the stories, the myths. And this environment also participates in the sculpture of the brain.
P. A too comfortable environment, can not be a cause of unhappiness? Do we need a little unhappiness?
R. We don’t need unhappiness: we need to defeat unhappiness in order to have self-esteem. Overprotected children are unhappy, they live drowned. They are hostile to their parents and seek adventures — it may be in an NGO or in jihadism — to defeat unhappiness and love themselves. There is a happiness in regression. You and I do it: from time to time: I’m fed up with everything, I stay in my pajamas and I watch the TF1 television network. And it’s okay to do it. You need a rhythm of regression and exploration, regression and exploration, both. A baby only has the courage and pleasure to explore if they have been made to feel safe before. If not, don’t explore. If there is only regression, we die of boredom, we become suicidal, life has no meaning. If there is only unhappiness, it is exhausting.
Q. The stories you referred to earlier — the verbal environment — can be lies too.
R. Of course. The stories and the totalitarian language stop thinking, you no longer need to reflect. This is what the Nazis and all dictatorships did. The political, religious, scientific leader tells us where the truth is and we no longer need to think, which stops brain development.
Q. Is there a totalitarian brain?
R. No. There are totalitarian stories. They do not sculpt the brain, but their effect is calming, it gives security. When a believer prays, all electrical signs of distress in the brain disappear. It is a natural tranquilizer. Religious or political believers — Communists were believers — feel better. There is a solidarity effect too: if we all recite the same thing at the same time, we feel safe. But we stop thinking. I call it lazy thinking. Totalitarian language is euphoric and lazy thought.
Q. What leads someone, in a situation like the Nazi occupation during the war, to collaborate or enter the resistance? It is the subject of his book on Chérif Mécheri.
R. The prefect Mécheri, an Arab and Muslim, did not comply with the orders of the Vichy regime. At the same time, Maurice Papon, also a prefect, at Vichy’s orders had the Jewish children arrested and closed the Bordeaux station district so that no Jews could escape.
Q. What determines that someone ends up being Mécheri or Papon?
R. My answer is Hannah Arendt’s. Some of us have a self-esteem, an inner freedom that allows them, at an order, to choose. Instead, Papon submitted to all orders and executed them to climb the hierarchy.
Q. Let’s go back to the present. Has the pandemic changed you?
R. I dare not say it, but for me the first confinement, in the spring of 2020, was a moment of happiness. I have a house and a garden by the sea. He didn’t have to travel or respond to invitations. I was able to work at my own pace. At dusk I bathed in the sea and walked. I have never had such a healthy life. And now I spend the day on the plane and the train. It is an unhealthy life. Everything is going too fast.
P. For others it was not so placid.
R. I am ashamed that I was happy when many were unhappy. In a peaceful country, 12% of adolescents become depressed. In a country after the covid, according to an evaluation, they are 39%. Those who have paid the highest price for covid are adolescents. Some will not recover what they lost, others will find it difficult.
Q. Why are adolescents the most affected?
R. In adolescence there is a pruning of neurons. The brain works better with fewer neurons, with less energy. Adolescents have two or three years to learn to learn, to orient themselves in one direction. If, due to a family conflict or because the boys prefer to play soccer, they miss these two years, then it is difficult for them to get back on track. In school or college, you laugh, agree or disagree with a teacher, your brain is activated. Before a screen, the brain goes numb.
Q. What consequences will this situation have for these adolescents as adults?
R. They will be in chronic depression. They will have small trades that will not interest them. They will learn to be in charge of society. They have missed a sensitive period of their development. To reconnect they will have to work 10 times more.
Q. There is a social factor.
R. The children of the rich endured confinement better than the children of the poor. They lived in apartments with excessive density and exasperated by the presence of others. They calmed down in front of the screens. The screens numb the psyche and increase the weight. During confinement, the daughters of the rich did not gain weight; the daughters of the poor got fat.
Q. Didn’t we “come out stronger”, as a Spanish government campaign said?
R. I do not believe it. Nietzsche used to say that what doesn’t hurt you makes you stronger. It’s false. When you have been injured you have acquired a factor of vulnerability. Young people who have lost the hook or people who have suffered depression during the virus will have sequelae.
P. I see you pessimistic.
R. Yes and no. This has not been a crisis. In a seizure of epilepsy: one speaks, falls, has convulsions, gets up and finishes the sentence. Things go back to the way they were before. And now things will return, but not as before. The right word now is not crisis: it is catastrophe. After wars and epidemics there have been cultural revolutions. Vocational training, university, the relationship between men and women, old age are already being rethought. We are going to rethink our way of living together.
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