“My Computer Has Never Smiled At Me!”

Boris Cyrulnik is a neurologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is known worldwide for his theory of resilience, the ability of people to rebuild after difficult moments of life. He has published numerous books including The Ugly Ducklings, Under the Sign of the Bond and The Wounded Souls (Gedisa).

Why as a child did you already want to be a psychiatrist?

During World War II a part of my family died in a concentration camp. I was arrested by the Nazis and did not understand why they wanted to kill me. I thought it was all crazy, and to prevent Nazism from coming back again, with my childhood mentality at the time, I decided that when I grew up I had to be a psychiatrist.

You often use the word madness …

The history of Psychiatry is in a way a history of madness. In the old days, insanity was a medical thing: syphilis, for example, was believed to infect the brain. Or it was also associated with meningitis or a lack of iodine. Today, with the development of psychiatry, it is no longer something medical, but has to do with psychosocial development.

And there was the “madness surgery.”

The doctor who discovered the lobotomy was given nothing more and nothing less than the Nobel Prize. He discovered that by cutting the frontal lobe of the brain, the anguish disappeared. And we are talking about anguish about exams, or marital problems … The frontal lobe is the neurological nucleus of anticipation and once it is cut we lose the ability to anticipate in time. Isn’t it funny?

Do you think that great visionaries and mystics in history today would be considered mentally ill?

The great mystics are always innovative and very transgressive. And today, they would either be confined to mental hospitals … or idolized by the mass. Without going that far, currently there are politicians who are very paranoid. And on top of that we vote for them.

What do you think are “the crimes” of our society?

Not educating children well. Leave them in an environment without culture.

But they are given knowledge …

They are not being taught what is most important: they are not being taught to live. Their link with nature has been severed. They no longer see their parents working in the fields or in the workshop.

What kind of culture are you talking about?

When I speak of culture, I mean the sensitive nature. To what we perceive. Also to ecology.

Has society and motherhood really changed so much?

In France, today, mothers have children on average at 31 years of age and maintain a very different bond with motherhood than their mothers and grandmothers had … Grandmothers went to the factory when they were very young. They worked six days a week and only aspired to marry young to quit. And then they were with the children and they educated them and they knew almost everything about motherhood.

And now?

Today’s mothers hardly know how to hold their babies in their arms. If they have a problem, they call the pediatrician or consult a book.

We bond less and less …

We send phone messages with emoticons, but without feeling any emotion. Communication on the Internet is not relationship. My computer has never smiled at me! My computer is not expressing itself.

However, it can favor the creation of links …

The world of technology is like the world of the word. It is wonderful and terrifying at the same time. It is true that with the Internet we can communicate better, but it disconnects us from the other.

Is the word overrated?

The human being lives in a world of symbolic representation, but that at the same time prevents us from having a deeper link with direct reality. The word implicitly leads us to delirium due to that disconnection from reality we were talking about.

Jiddu Krishnamurti said that it is not healthy to be adapted to a deeply sick society.

Yes, I also believe that our society is sick. All societies are sick. Because they are based on a world of symbols, and that leads us to delirium. The solution would be to return to the link with nature. In any case, I would like to make it clear that culture must be preserved, because without it it is impossible to develop as human beings