The term resilience is appearing increasingly in articles in specialised journals, covering anything from psychology to management and strategy. The very word resilience is worthy of a moment’s consideration because of the issues it raises, and also to examine why it has become so fashionable. It comes into the language, probably via French, from the Latin verb resaltare, which means to rebound or bounce back, to get moving again or to result from, or possibly from the verb resilire, with the literal meaning to jump backwards. In modern language, however, the word is used in a number of contexts with nuances of meaning, most of which boil down to the notion of adapting to circumstances in the face of some shocking event.

Resilience in Context

Science has long used the word resilience, one application being in metallurgy, in which it defines one of the properties of a metal—steel, for example.⁽¹⁾ Put simply, it is a measure of the resistance of a metallic bar to shock. The word is also used in biology to explain the ability to live in an environment in spite of changes to the latter and attacks by predators. Ecologists refer to resilience when defining the ability of an ecosystem to maintain its function when faced with a disturbance, and resilience time as that needed for an ecosystem to return to its original state after such a disturbance.

In France, however, it is in the field of psychology that the concept of resilience has been promoted over the past few decades. The term was introduced by Boris Cyrulnik as the capacity to carry on regardless in environments that ought to lead to breakdown. Resilience is therefore considered as the capacity to face up to trauma without later being affected by it, or to find the means to reconstruct after it. In a broader sense, resilience is the capability to continue one’s life post-suffering or post-shock, in a way defining a kind of immediate or rediscovered stability. Hence resilience would seem to be a psychological quality that affords those who possess it a conscious or unconscious return to normality without lasting injury. That said, the psychiatrist Michel Hanus, in his latest book La résilience, à quel prix ? (What Price Resilience?), warns against over-generalisation of the resilience process, since it risks sidelining those who are not resilient and labelling them negatively as incapable.