My personal interest in the subject

Why is it that some people can endure incredible hardships over a long period of time and yet still retain their spirit and optimism? And why is it that some individuals and groups can ‘bounce back’ from sudden crises whereas others collapse, go into decline or enter a malaise? The answers to these kinds of questions took me to the study of resilience – the ability of individuals, groups and perhaps whole communities to adapt to adversity and, in some ways, continue to flourish. In this chapter, I will draw upon research on resilient individuals and resilient systems to offer some thoughts about the psychological and social factors that appear to contribute to our capacity to withstand poverty, violence, family breakdown and other hardships.

As an academic, I have worked in the area of social policy for many years and have been particularly interested in the relation between class, poverty and community. Resilience was an idea that appealed to me because it drew attention to what poor people have, not to what they lack, so it offered an alternative to all those dominant accounts, supported by all main political parties in the UK, that demonise people who need to draw upon the support of the state for being inadequate, idle, feckless and irresponsible. Besides being an academic, I am also an experienced psychoanalytic psychotherapist working intensively with individuals on a one-to-one basis, sometimes over several years. This gives me enormously privileged insights into the struggles of individuals to move on in their lives and the nature of human strengths, but also some of the ways in which we can be our own worst enemies. This has helped me to appreciate that there are internal factors that can make us vulnerable and undermine our capacity to behave resiliently. Putting these two roles together – academic and psychotherapist – I have been able to use my interest in resilience research in a number of ways. For example, the resilience of workers operating in stressful environments became an important theme in a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on the dilemmas facing front-line public service professionals (Hoggett et al, 2006).