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“Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker.” [“Whatever does not destroy me makes me stronger.”]
Resilience is something we ask of ourselves everyday—and the rapidity of change and ferociousness of the world demands it of us. In today's world we seem continually to be asked to adjust, and we attempt to do so without losing too much of ourselves. That necessary—even life-or sanity-preserving—resilience is a way of responding to disjunctions in life while attempting to maintain the continuity of who we are even as we are being changed by experience. But we can never be certain where the line lies between, on the one hand, healthy acts of giving up something of who we are in deference to the needs of others, and on the other hand, sacrificing so much of who we are that we cease being and becoming ourselves.
My principal intent in this article is to describe what may be a universal phenomenon relating to the price we pay for being resilient. No clinical experience has so clarified for me the complex linkages among trauma, resilience, and symbolization as my work with the severely traumatized patient described in this case. The destructive effects of trauma on psychical organization have been well documented in the analytic literature; in contrast, little mention has been made of the psychological cost of resilience.
In this article I discuss an analytic experience that involved efforts on the part of both the patient and myself to understand the patient's individual form of resilience and to use that understanding