Biografic turning point in lifetime of individuals living in degraded contexts. The role of resilience.

Abstract

In the course of their lives all people experience events such as the loss of a parent, a child, job or sometimes violence, after which life is no longer the same. In these moments the regular, repetitive and comforting course of life changes because the event is the turning point that changes the direction of the subject's lifetime. The paper is focused on a study of 60 cases in which resilience intervenes in the biographies of individuals, living in conditions of socio-spatial marginality and high social vulnerability, to restore the existential imbalance of a biographical discontinuity represented by a traumatic event. The problem of the research focuses on understanding the role of resilience in facing a turning point and leaving the circuits of social marginality, characterized mainly, but not exclusively, by delinquency, poverty, violence (suffered and played in its biographical path) through the reorganization of the course of one's life. The study was carried out through life stories of individuals living in degraded context on which the turning point had an impact. To analyze life stories, the methodological approach used is the biographical one, according to the "analytical" model scheme of Demazière and Dubar (2000). Like a step-by-step process, resilience is cumulative and progressive of: traumatic event or a succession of them, reflexivity and awareness of a change, identification of ultimate concerns, formulation of a new project. With the categories of active and immovable fatalistic resilients the research shows, on the one hand, the cases in which the context psychologically imprisons the comforting immobility of psycho-social security; and on the other the breakdown of these models, often autopoietic of gender marginality and subordination.