Introduction

Over autumn 2005 and spring 2006 the Maya Centre put on a series of eight lectures on the subject of resilience. We were invited to publish a selection from this series in the BJP.

The Maya Centre, founded in 1984 in Islington, North London, provides free psychodynamic counselling for women who are on poverty-level incomes (below £8000 for those with no dependants, £11000 with dependants), who have not completed higher education, and who have received no previous long-term psychotherapy or counselling. The current work of the Centre focuses on the mothers of young children and teenagers, older women, women in situations of violence, Black, Irish, Turkish and Somali women. For the last two, counselling is given in their mother tongue. The Centre employs seven part-time counsellors and psychotherapists and is a charity entirely dependent on the public and private funding it is able to raise.

The clients seen at the Maya Centre find themselves, with few exceptions, in situations of multiple hardship. These stem both from severe stresses in early life, and from additional social disadvantage over time and in the present. Their inner strength, their resilience, has been strongly tested. The ability to survive and prosper is a mysterious and multifaceted issue. It was from a wish to look at these mysteries with a psychoanalytic eye that these lectures grew, bearing in mind that many other discourses can be brought to bear on the subject - social, economic, biological.

How is it that some people who have been through traumatic experiences recover and flourish, while others are unable to make use of what life has