ABSTRACT
This chapter discovers that resilience is typically studied from the perspective of general psychology and aside from a few miscellaneous papers has hardly received attention from the psychoanalytic community, let alone those interested in relational psychoanalysis. A psychoanalytic approach can indeed add to an understanding of the unconscious motivations, unique experiences and psychodynamic genesis of resilience. Resilience might indeed come about as a compensation for a lack of parental attunement, as D. W. Winnicott describes. Briefly, he holds that a parent, typically a narcissistically wounded parent, is emotionally unattuned to a child’s needs and serves as a poor mirror to a child’s experience. Another issue that arises in regard to time and resilience is that the meaning of the future for both the analyst and the patient takes on markedly different meanings.
