Boris Cyrulnik

About the author

Born in Bordeaux on 26 July 1937, Boris Cyrulnik is a French doctor, ethologist, neurologist, and psychiatrist whose life story shaped his life's work. As a Jewish child during World War II, he narrowly escaped Nazi capture in Bordeaux in 1943, survived in hiding under a false identity, and lost both parents to the Holocaust. That experience of survival drove him toward psychiatry, which he studied at the University of Paris.

A professor at the University of the South, Toulon-Var, he is best known in France for popularizing the concept of psychological resilience, and won the 2008 Prix Renaudot de l'essai.