What Counts as Resilience? Childhood Adversity, Psychiatric Epidemiology, and the Coloniality of the “Invulnerable”

In 1972, psychologist Jerome Kagan boldly proclaimed research he had recently conducted on the Maya of Guatemala would overturn the most cherished assumption in his field of child development. He insisted early deprivation did not doom a child to a lifetime of debility. These children, even without recourse to expert intervention, proved remarkably “resilient” against life’s many hardships. Despite his priority in using the term, Kagan’s Guatemala study rarely appeared in reviews of resilience as the concept entered the psychological mainstream in the twenty-first century. Now ubiquitous in psychological science, community activism, and humanitarian policy, the nature of resilience’s “ordinary magic” has proved elusive. It at once refers to individual psyches and material infrastructures, empowerment and damage, local strengths and geopolitical priorities. The absence of Kagan’s study in these narratives illuminates what does and does not count as psychological resilience. I identify three historical prerequisites for the emergence of contemporary resilience theory. The first is the “discovery” after World War II of how early “deprivation” led to lifelong psychic damage and the mobilization of this knowledge in critiques of the welfare state. The second precursor was the rise of psychiatric epidemiology as a way of knowing where the actuarial risk factor became ontologically real. A final prerequisite was the coloniality of being in an Anglophone field’s fascination with often literal island communities for natural experiments among the poor. This genealogy illuminates the historical expansion of psychological damage from trauma resulting from a discrete, extraordinary event to Adverse Childhood Experiences combining and accreting in the body. It shows how resilience functions as both a critique and an intensification of therapeutic culture.