The neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik (Bordeaux, France) is on his way to turning 86 with an eye on the changes that are marking the current era. The French thinker, an expert psychoanalyst and raised during Nazism, has passed through Valladolid for the celebration of II Forum of Culture in the city, which has relied on various protagonists to reflect on the state of societies. Cyrulnik spoke to EL PAÍS at the Calderón theater shortly after his presentation, in which he expressed his surprise at living through a new war in Europe despite believing that this horror would never be repeated and warned about hatred and totalitarianism. The intellectual expresses himself calmly, with hints of humor and pessimism regarding a future that he considers complicated and with unprecedented challenges.
Ask. Do you think that the interviews serve to explain something as complex as neuroscience, the brain or societies?
Answer. You journalists are the intermediaries, if we only talked to each other the message would remain in a closed circle. As the Italians say, “translation equals treason”, journalists often improve interviews, they transform and greatly improve the discourse. I felt betrayed when in New Orleans Hurricane Katrina (which occurred in the United States and caused hundreds of deaths in 2005) many more blacks died than whites were not reported because blacks were poor and lived much closer to the river Mississippi, which raised the waters a lot. They did not say that the whites were richer and lived high up in the city.
Q. Should we feel guilty for sometimes not understanding ourselves? When was the first time you didn’t understand?
R. We understand each other very, very little. Many decisions surprise us because we don’t know why we have made them. The most neurotic decision of the human being is that of the trade, the job, and that of the spouse. The rest of life we wonder why. Many years ago I had a patient, a young military man who had his nose broken by his classmates (he gestures and points to it as he explains the story). I fixed it right away and he went back to the Army, to military service, if he hadn’t fixed it I would have gained a year of his life and I wondered if he had done well.
Q. Two years ago I would be doing this interview with a mask; three years ago, by phone. We hardly even remember the pandemic. How much is our ability to adapt?
R. We adapt surprisingly easily, older people adapt to imminent death. Adaptation does not have to be a sign of health but rather a form of pathology. A prisoner who is in jail, isolated, goes round and round in the cell, speaks only because he hears voices or has hallucinations. In his head they hear voices, they have adapted to the space and have auditory hallucinations because they feel less alone, it is the pathology that allows them to adapt.
Q. To what extent can people run away from pain?
R. Pain has a neurological and an encephalic part, this depends on the relationship in which it is found. If we are in a safe environment, the pain will be less strong, but if it is unsafe, it will become more intense and reach our brain. When the encephalic stimulation is very strong, you manage to decrease the physical stimulation. When a woman gives birth, if you ask her to rate her pain right after delivery from zero to 10, she would say seven. If you ask her when she is already with her family, surrounded by her environment, being in a safe environment, she will answer three or four. That ability can be trained. In my area there are soldiers and they are trained with pain. They are overstimulated and all this affects their physical pain and prepares them to feel less pain.
When I saw that Putin invaded Ukraine I was stupefied, when I see the corpses I remember my war days
Q. Do you know of anything more complex than the human brain?
R. Another brain (laughs). Two brains are more complex than one brain. It is a very interesting question, a brain is one and needs another brain to stimulate itself, otherwise it is useless. Leeches have 20,000 neurons, which is nothing, we have thousands and thousands of neurons. A bird does not have much of a cortex, a mouse a little more, in a dog or cat there is a prefrontal lobe, in a monkey 25% of the prefrontal lobe, and in a person 30% more speech. 100% would be several brains, therein lies the power of the word.
Q. How does it feel to see a war in Europe again?
R. A great sadness. He was convinced that it would never happen. I lived through World War II and the Algerian War and I thought we had understood. The social and communication efforts have been useless, it is an enormous sadness. When I saw that Putin invaded the Ukraine, I was stupefied, when I see the corpses, I remember my time of the war, with bales of straw on the roads that reminded me of when we tried to cross the borders in France. It was a return to anguish.
Q. Is it hypocritical to be scandalized by the war in Ukraine and not so much by those in Yemen or Syria?
R. You are right, it is a cynical but real question. It is empathy. If something happens to those close to me, it moves me because it touches me. If they tell us now that 10,000 Chinese have died during this interview, it doesn’t cause us anything. It is not hypocrisy, but the rule of empathy.
Young people have never developed as well as now in the intellectual
Q. How would you explain to the new European generations that less than 100 years ago millions of people were persecuted for their religion or ideology?
R. It is the problem of totalitarianism. To make war you have to tell a single truth. If we try to understand the adversary, the war is lost. War is an excellent means to democratically elect a dictator and then it takes us a generation or two to get rid of them.
Q. Do you understand young people?
R. I’m afraid to understand them! There is a phenomenon that young people drop out more and more. As there is a technical and social improvement, the work does not bring the improvement that it meant before. For youth, work is the way to flourish, for their personality to expand and come to light. Before, for us, work was survival and we accepted any type of work. There is a social and affective abandonment, the social abandonment comes because if the work is not liked, they abandon it, and if the affective does not work, they separate and that’s it.
Currently, a young man thinks that he will have three or four types of work and three or four partners. Children may feel good like this, but not parents, who end up electing a dictator. Young people have never developed as well as they do now intellectually, they are brighter in exploring the world, traveling, that makes them develop their personality much better and society is increasingly fragile. Before, social work was done through sacrifice, women sacrificed themselves to take care of their husbands and children, men sacrificed themselves for the war or work in the mines for 15 hours, for example. Young people, being better prepared, reject it.
Q. Can it be frustrating for young people to have prepared hard, but that the labor market does not fit them?
R. The work is robotic. In a few years, artificial intelligence will do the robotized work, we are seeing that there are young people with many diplomas who return to agriculture, to be peasants because the work is robotized.
Q. Can artificial intelligence and robotization be dangerous?
R. Simple answer: more than we think. When the Internet appeared, I remember that I spoke to supporters, who said that there would be no side effects and today we see that there are many, for adults and especially for children. In artificial intelligence, side effects such as plagiarism are beginning to be seen, surely one of them is the disqualification of exams. Another system will have to be found to select young people. Also for writing anonymous letters, threats… (laughs).
In two months I will be 86 (years old), I still have many more to retire to reflect
Q. Has Isaac Asimov’s science fiction been surpassed?
R. We are much further. We are capable of mixing human and animal genes, the Internet is much more than Asimov thought, it is far exceeded.
Q. Do you see it feasible, with this context, for large social mobilizations to be repeated like those that brought about changes in the past?
R. Unions played a very important role in the 19th and 20th centuries because many men and women would have been sacrificed. Today we see that they represent fewer people and start social movements. There are deputies in France who ridicule democracy, this weapon was very useful in previous centuries, but I don’t know if it will be so now. Politicians make decisions without taking these movements into account.
Q. He is 85 years old. At what age does one retire from reflecting?
R. At 120 years, then it is more complicated. In two months I will be 86, I still have many more to retire to reflect.
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