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Resilience, according to the dictionary, means recoiling or springing back to the original shape after bending, stretching, or compression. Psychosocial resilience implies a similar springing back after having been subject to severe stressors.
As against vulnerability, which we may say is its opposite, resilience is a new concept. It arose from observations that some children seemed to come out relatively unscathed even from most adverse social conditions. This gave rise to the initially rather optimistic concept of invulnerability (Anthony, 1974). However, as all children could succumb to large-enough stressors, the term gave way to the relative concept of resilience.
Perhaps there is an internal dialectic in the term. On the one side, as Wolff (1995) warned, emphasis on resilience may be a self-comforting device which concentrates on the indomitable and triumphant human spirit and hides the devastating nature and pessimism of major childhood adversity. This includes the “St. Matthew effect,” where those who have will receive, and those have not will have taken away (Matthew 13:12). On the other hand, resilience may be an objectively useful concept which while it does indicate the strength of the human spirit, may also point to factors which could be facilitated to mitigate long-term effects of severe stressors.
The nature of resilience has been elusive. Factors ranging from chance innate childhood qualities to character traits, and