The Unbroken Soul

The contributors to this volume are keenly aware that mental health professionals, while well trained to identify and treat psychopathology, are insufficiently informed or cognizant of human resilience, of how, and of what, intrapsychic, interpersonal, and psychosocial factors are operative in adaptive coping with and recovering from trauma. These authors, several of whom themselves were subjected to severe trauma, address the matter of resilience from the vantage point of their own personal and clinical experiences.

How do individuals cope constructively with significant trauma? How do they recover from it? What factors seem most codetermining of coping with and recovering from trauma? Can these be not only identified but also influenced by our interventions? Addressing these questions-questions about human beings' capacity for resilience-is the prime challenge taken up in this book by an assortment of international psychoanalytic, attachment, and biological mental health theorists and clinicians. While mental health professionals are well trained to identify and treat psychopathology, little is taught about how to look for strengths in patients that assist them in their coping and that, on their own and with our nurturance, can foster their recovery. Some of the contributors to this volume, having themselves been subjected to severe trauma, speak of resilience both from within their own experience, from those around them, and from their work with traumatized patients.

Chapter 1 The biopsychosocial miracle of resilience: An overview
Chapter 2 Children in war and their resiliences
Chapter 3 Some thoughts on psychic trauma and its treatment
Chapter 4 Resilience: Accommodation and recovery
Chapter 5 On genocidal persecution and resilience
Chapter 6 A self-study of resilience - Healing from the Holocaust
Chapter 7 Resilience, sublimation, and healing: Reactions to a personal narrative
Chapter 8 Psychological and biological factors associated with resilience to stress and trauma
Chapter 9 From trauma to resilience
Chapter 10 Resilience and Its Correlates