“Disvulnerable” Others: Toward a Prehistory of “Resilience” in European Human Sciences

The relatively shallow history of the term “resilience,” and its transformation from a property of things to a quality of individuals and later communities, remind us that psychological and sociological categories emerge in response to particular kinds of problems.  This essay explores earlier ways of making sense of the recuperative capacities of bodies and minds, focusing on late-nineteenth-century European human sciences, and in particular on the concept of “disvulnerability.”  First articulated by Hungarian-Austrian neurologist Moritz Benedikt, the term was taken up by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, the British sexologist Havelock Ellis, and other researchers in fields as diverse as anthropology and childhood psychology.  Scholars sought to describe and evaluate the ability of some people (women, children, epileptics, and “savages”) to both resist injury and to recover quickly from physical and emotional wounds.  Claims about disvulnerability were situated in broader debates about sensitivity and the capacity to feel pain.  Arguing against what they characterized as a “common sense” understanding, Benedikt and others suggested that sensitivity was a mark of a civilized state, while insensitivity and disvulnerability were indices either of a failure to evolve or of degeneration.   The discourse of disvulnerability was, at the same time, in tension with other work in European psychology focused on psychological trauma, memory, and recovery.  Attending to the problem of recuperation in the nineteenth century may, I suggest, help us to make sense of the emergence of resilience as a particular way of understanding, managing, and seeking to prevent injuries to individuals and communities.