2024-10-06 04:00:25
Boris Cyrulnik, in Strasbourg, September 16, 2023. VINCENT MULLER / OPALE.PHOTO
Boris Cyrulnik, 87, has established himself in France as a specialist in resilience and early childhood development. His was marked by the Shoah. The current resurgence of anti-Semitism worries him deeply.
I wouldn’t have gotten here if…
…If, before a multitude of encounters that have oriented my life, I had not first met my mother. Really met. And it was decisive. Because during the very short time we spent together – she was deported to Auschwitz when I was 4 years old – she managed to give me an appetite for the world, a desire for exploration, a taste for encounter. I don’t know how she did it, but she instilled in me something that proved crucial to my survival in the heart of war and beyond: self-confidence.
The first thousand days of a child’s life are of capital importance, you always tell yourself…
Essential! It is during this short period of time, even before the appearance of speech, that the brain is sculpted, that the temperament is built, that the propensity for confidence, for daring, for optimism comes into play. And it begins in the mother’s womb, where the baby, in total osmosis, feels well-being or unhappiness, security or stress. Circumstances linked to war, social insecurity, domestic violence or life accidents obviously influence the experience of pregnancy and transmission to the child. An insecure mother will be insecure for her baby, who will remain centered on himself and will have no disposition to meet.
But wasn’t the environment in which your parents lived, before you were born, particularly insecure?
It’s true. I was born in 1937 in Bordeaux into a family of very poor Eastern European immigrants, and at a time when it was not good to be Jewish with war looming. But my mother played her role as a reassuring mother figure wonderfully. She got along very well, it seems, with my father. They were “friends in love”. And if I have few memories from before the war, they are joyful.
I have images in my head of my mother playing with me, talking to me, accompanying me to school, always extremely cheerful. I also have some images of my father, a carpenter, working in the small room adjoining the kitchen, or reading the newspaper saying: “ouch ouch ouch”. He joined the Foreign Legion as soon as war was declared on Germany and my mother found herself alone, without an income. She had to sell items from the house one after the other. She was certainly in a very vulnerable situation, and she could, logically, have transmitted her anxiety to me; yet, she instilled in me an immense sense of protection.
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