Versión Completa. Resiliencia: el dolor es inevitable, el sufrimiento es opcional. Boris Cyrulnik

children to express themselves. And then we talk about the morality of the story. Why do they steal the cheese from the crow? Because he lets himself be fooled by the fox. We can work on morals with children's stories. We tell them a beautiful story and invite them to become little philosophers. These little philosophers are very intelligent from very early on. The other day I was talking to a little philosopher of five or six years old. We were talking about death, because when children discover death, it is a metaphysical problem, it is important for them. I ask the little philosopher what death is for her.

And she tells me: "very easy. You fall, you get cold, they take you to the hospital, they warm you up and you come back." This allowed us to talk about the representation of time on a philosophical level with a little five-year-old philosopher who understood everything. So, I think that art, introduced very early in school, music, sport... Because sport is a form of art. Art, sports, drawing, cinema, theater are part of the educational condition, they develop empathy and allow us to learn to live together better. There is a phrase that says: "pain is

inevitable

, suffering is optional." What do you think of that phrase?

It is magnificent. Because pain... All mammals feel pain the same. For example, we burn our skin, a path connects it to the spinal cord, reaches the base of the brain and reaches the cortex. All mammals feel pain the same. But not all mammals feel suffering the same. If a mammal, or a human baby, has received security during development, from its mother, its father, the family, the school, the neighborhood, the words, the theater... All of this, when it receives once, it hurts. . This is pain. Suffering is something else. If he has had a safe childhood, he will suffer much less than someone who did not have one as a child and who perceives the sensation of pain in an exacerbated, amplified way.

Senseless pain hurts even more. Human beings live in a world of meaning. We need to have dreams and memories to give direction to our lives. If our direction comes from a pain that has not been overcome, without resilience, when we receive a blow, we suffer greatly and without the possibility of modifying that suffering. If we have grown stronger and secure, we receive the same time, a tragedy, but we have learned to be stronger than the suffering, than the pain, and then we suffer less. We suffer only once, like animals. And, furthermore, if we do something with that pain, that suffering, we will have transformed suffering into a work of art.

Among artists, among film people, there is an unusually high number of children deprived of affection who take refuge in the cinema, who make very beautiful and emotional films because, having been wounded, they have found a means to transform that wound and turn it into in artistic production. Most works of art are autobiographical confessions. I would like us to talk about a current issue. Right now, in our current society, there are wars, there are political conflicts, different migrations... There are people who suffer. And there are pregnant women who also suffer. Can this affect the development of the unborn child, as well as the people who have suffered?

This is a very scientific question that has been investigated for 10 or 15 years. It is the subject of Israeli studies with pregnant women traumatized by the attacks. Israeli and Palestinian women who went to the doctor for symptoms of post-traumatic stress. These women, 170 pregnant women, brought 170 babies into the world and all of them already had a brain disorder. They all had brain malfunction. If we had left these women alone, the babies would have started life with a serious neurological deficiency. This did not happen. The women were protected, the babies too, and this activated a more or less simple process of resilience.

Some of the women and babies quickly began the resilience process, for others it was more difficult, and others could not. This was the first work that was done in Tel Aviv. Then biology researchers came and showed that when stress... Stress is part of life. We all experience moments of stress: when you have exams, you suffer stress. It is part of your life. But you overcome that stress and become proud. It is part of life and we should not deprive children of stress. But if the stress is too strong, intense, prolonged, and if we leave the child alone, the excess of cortisol and catecholamines, that is, the stress substances, ends up damaging the brain cells and the brain is altered by having left the child alone. woman and child alone.

That is, we have allowed stress substances to become toxic to the brain. Today we know that the ends of chromosomes receive fragments called methyl radicals. They are fragments that obstruct the expression of the chromosome. That is to say, the chromosome does not change but the obstructions caused by this excess of toxic substances act like the plugs that we have photographed; black spots are seen. A healthy gene strip with obstructions does not express the same at all. That is why we cannot point out that the problem is innate or acquisitional. Because the chromosome ribbon has not been modified.

It's not a mutation, it's the same tape. The expression does change completely depending on the structure of the medium. It began to be done on animals, and the same rat genetic tape was seen. If we let the rat develop in a peaceful environment, it will become a fat, fatty, tame rat with a long life expectancy. With the same type of rat, if we put it in an environment of stress, alertness, constant aggression, it becomes a small, surly and negative rat, hyperkinetic, that is, very active, and with a very reduced life expectancy. . It is the same genetic ribbon that, experimentally, we have made express itself in a totally different way morphologically, at the level of behavior and life expectancy.

So the problem of whether it is innate or acquired is absurd. This also means that we, human beings, politicians, philosophers, parents are responsible, because now we know that we can and must intervene in the environment that affects us. We are not passive beings. We have the possibility of intervening in the middle. Currently, the action of human beings on the environment is one of degradation. What suggestion can we make in society to foresee this problem? We must do like the countries of northern Europe: slow down, develop sports and artistic activities to strengthen the links that develop familiarity.

And you have to face real ad

versi

ties: you have to work, stress about an exam... These are real problems. But you need to be prepared to face these ad

versi

ties. If we have been abandoned, we are afraid of everything. And if we have been too protected, we also have, because we do not have self-confidence. We need to invent a culture that is like the sea, with its ebb and flow, like day and night, like heartbeats, a culture with rhythms. Young people are already starting to do it, there are more and more young people who work and, from time to time, breathe.

Young people may invent a new culture to combat the effects of anxiety caused by technological culture. Technological culture combated the fear of the Middle Ages and the fear that we knew until the 50s, this has been thanks to technology. But it has had the side effect of developing anxiety. Perhaps the culture that young people will invent will also allow anxiety to be controlled. It is very interesting what you have shared with us. We very much appreciate your presence and this interview. No, it was a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.