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Psychoanalytically oriented clinicians and researchers do not often profit from, attend to, or even understand each other's work. Clinicians tend to dismiss research as reductionistic, not clinically relevant, or downright destructive to
their work, whereas researchers tend to view clinical approaches as unsystematic, unfalsifiable, or entirely idiosyncratic. Hauser, Allen and Golden show the value and richness of a complementary interchange between the two modes of thinking. The study of resilience presented in this book is based on systematically collected empirical data drawn from controlled research on teenagers, some initially patients in a psychiatric hospital, over approximately 10 years. The study also focuses on psychic reality and quite explicitly searches for subjective meaning. There are new findings and hypotheses on the development of resilience in adolescence and young adulthood that will interest both clinicians and researchers.
The book addresses the mystery of resilience: how do “children break out of vicious cycles of violence, abandonment, or abuse and grow up to be productive adults and gifted parents?” (p. 1). Many, perhaps most, clinicians have had the experience of treating adult patients who as children and adolescents suffered psychic hardships and traumas, faced developmental and psychological low points, perhaps requiring psychiatric hospitalization, yet as adults functioned surprisingly well. These patients' eventual success is indeed a profound puzzle – a puzzle which this book attempts to tackle in a new way.
Hauser et al. define resilience as “successful adaptation in the face of danger” (p. 2). They are careful to point out that resilience is not a permanent endowment, or a protective shield. The subjects they studied became resilient after they suffered severe psychological wounds. The authors are interested in this process of ‘self-healing’.
Past studies of childhood adversity and recovery look at genetic endowment, parenting, oppor