Intervention de Boris Cyrulnik
For more information visit the blog and the website of Consulate General of France in Jerusalem
Around the Resilience of Overlay June 2007
The activities on resilience were financed by the Alembert fund and the Department for Cooperation and Cultural Action of the General Consulate of France. A second series of meetings took place during the visit of Manciaux Michel, Professor emeritus of Social Pediatry and Public Health at the University of Nancy 1.
The introductory lecture “Resilience: Dynamics and Challenges” was held at Birzeit University on 17 and 18 March, 2007. Training workshops focused on the theme of resilience and how resilliance can be incorporated when working with children and families facing the difficult situation prevailing in the Palestinian Territories.
The program involved several steps: -
A workshop that brought together some thirty participants, held in the French Cultural Centre in Nablus. Participants were from Palestinian NGOs, international organisations (MSF, MDM) and UNRWA.
- A field visit and discussion with those involved in psychosocial support in the refugee camps of Balata (Palestinian NGOs present in the camp community centres and psychosocial program UNRWA)
- A similar visit to the refugee camp of Shu’fat which is distinguished by its particularly difficult location in the suburbs of Jerusalem.
- A working meeting organized with the assistance of the NGO “Children, Play and Education ” (EJE), at the French Alliance in Bethlehem attended by forty ‘counselors’ and social workers working in the area of Bethlehem and Hebron.
Topics discussed during these meetings varied depending on the participants and the specific nature of the problems facing them in their daily practice. The starting point for discussion was a summary of the conference in March prepared by Michel Manciaux.
Al Ayyam
March 18, 2007 – page 13
A symposium at Birzeit University on the initiative of the General Consulate of France. Resilience-a behavioral and emotional mechanism to resist the violence of the occupation in Palestine.
Yusuf Shayeb – Work Conference “Around the resilience” organized at the initiative of the Department for Cooperation and Cultural Action of the Consulate General of France in Jerusalem and in collaboration with the Association «Children, Play and Education» at Birzeit University started yesterday at the Law Institute. This two-day symposium is dedicated to resilience. Round tables and seminars will aim to explore the concept of resilience applied to the Palestinian case. According to participants, the symposium has several objectives including to clarify the behavioral and emotional mechanisms that drive us and especially to shed light on cases of resilience at both individual and collective level. They will conduct a comparative study to analyze the factors of resilience and the frameworks within which it operates. [...]
Three conferences were held on the first day of the symposium, the general topic was “Resilience: What are we talking about? The psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, director of studies at the University of Toulon-Var, spoke of resilience as a concept, the mechanisms that predispose it as an assimilation of what is happening around us and the silence that sometimes surrounds our dramas. Boris Cyrulnik said that resilience meant the refusal of resignation to injuries and damage and disobedience against the oppression and hardship. He said that man was in possession of many defense mechanisms against difficulties, but that resilience was in no way a “negative” defense mechanism such as withdrawal, submission or concealment based on an internal rancour. All reduce the shock but are toxic and can poison relations between the man who is full of resentment and those who love him. He has learned to defend himself through the hatred of others. He then reaches a degree of self-flagellation between death and psychic explosion. Other forms of resistance that are also outside the context of resilience are “Complaint” and “denial” or the fact of considering the painful truth as something bearable.
During the second intervention, Roger Heacock, a professor of history at the Institute of International Studies Ibrahim Abu Loughoud, presented a history of resilience. He referred to the concept of “field”, unique to Pierre Bourdieu and his vision of social dynamics, that resonate in all societies, even from a political point of view. He spoke of resilience as a concept combining the physical and psychological resistance, but also one that oscillates between resignation, the will and control. It is an adjective that can be found in the weak against the strong, in a relationship of inequality. He illustrated his point with many examples from the history of France, Korea, Cambodia and other countries. [...]
Ismail Nashef, Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Birzeit, said: “It is no coincidence that the body, individual and collective, has turned into an immediate theater of the conflict in Palestine. In 1948, when the loss of the earthly body became incarnate, with the consequent loss of the collective body, and the individual fled to different countries. This was repeated in 1967. The armed conflict is the base. The method of armed conflict, denying the body, the social alienation and the weakening of links between body, society and the earth, are factors that have strong consequences in the Palestinian society and leading to the martyrdom of Palestinian society, particularly the practice of the liquidation of the collective body which is a fundamental and constitutive caracteristic of the Israeli occupation mentality. [...]
Al Quds
March 15 – page 15
Meeting at Birzeit University about “resilience”
The Institute of International Studies Ibrahim Abu Loughoud organized, in cooperation with the Cultural Services of the Consulate General of France in Jerusalem, the symposium “Around resilience “. The symposium will be held next Saturday in the Conference Room of the Institute of Law of Birzeit.
The conference will discuss several topics of resilience, including mental health, psychology and its various aspects, the different visions of the concept in terms of social science or psychology or cases of individual or collective Palestinian resilience. Researchers and mental health experts, psychiatrists, sociologists and foreign academics and Birzeit University academics will discuss the dynamics of resilience.
The symposium will be inaugurated by Ghassan Khatib, Head of Social Affairs and by François-Xavier Leger, the General Consul of France. Six conferences were held during the two-day symposium. A roundtable will bring together Palestinian and foreign professors and close the session, entitled «From concept to applications.»
