Interview with Boris Cyrulnik

Boris Cyrulnik is a neuropsychiatrist who is known in France for having developed and popularized the concept of resilience. Born to a Jewish family in Bordeaux in 1937, he lost both his parents during the Second World War and, at the age of 6, escaped deportation himself by hiding during a round-up of Jews organized by the Nazis. His recollections of that event, forty years after the end of the war, provided the foundations for a reflection on post-war traumatic memory. In this interview for the Review, he talks about the relationship between memory, trauma and resilience, both at an individual and a collective level.