Ajay Singh Chaudhary in The Baffler:
IN 1971, Aaron Antonovsky, an Israeli medical sociologist, led a small team conducting a survey with over one thousand participants concerning how women cope with the effects of menopause. A question on the survey asked, almost as an afterthought, whether the women were concentration camp survivors. In reviewing the findings, Antonovsky was astonished. “How the hell can this be explained?” he exclaimed to colleagues. What he had discovered would prove foundational not only to Antonovsky’s career but to an entire new field of research. Of the 287 women who reported that they had survived the camps, over two thirds qualified in the category of “breakdown”—still suffering from “the horrors,” as he termed it. Unsurprisingly, this was a vastly higher number than for the women who had not experienced the camps.
“What is, however, of greater fascination and of human and scientific import,” argued Antonovsky, “is the fact that a not-inconsiderable number of concentration camp survivors were found to be well-adapted . . . What, we must ask, has given these women the strength, despite their experience, to maintain what would seem to be the capacity not only to function well, but even to be happy?” The answer was nothing less than a set of psychological dispositions that produce an understanding and acceptance that external stimuli reflect a coherent world; that one has the internal resources to meet any demands from these stimuli; of an optimistic disposition that such demands are “challenges, worthy of investment and engagement.” With these it might be possible for a person to withstand life reduced to the absolute degradation and deprivation of the camps and still remain functional by existing social standards. Antonovsky would eventually call his science “salutogenesis,” but what he had really discovered is what we now call “resilience.”
More here.