Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1997, page 102
Trauma and Recovery. Judith Lewis Herman. Basic Books, New York, 1992, 276
pages.
Judith Herman is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Director of Training at the
Victims of Violence Program at Cambridge Hospital‟s Department of Psychiatry. Although her
groundbreaking Trauma and Recovery was published several years ago, the book remains a
significant one, and in our increasingly violent society, may be even more significant than
when it was first published. My response to this important work is both personal and
professional.
From a personal perspective, as I read Trauma and Recovery the first time, I began to
understand why even today, when I say good-bye to my 22-year-old daughter who lives in
another state, I feel the same heart-wrenching pain I felt more than 15 years ago when I
first had to leave her behind with her controlling, verbally and emotionally abusive father.
Three years ago, she and her boyfriend were violently attacked by strangers in San
Francisco and almost died. In our first phone conversation a few weeks later, she shared
some deeply personal feelings and details about that experience. When I saw her the next
time, she wasn‟t the daughter I knew. I learned from her only then that even during the
months before their California experience, her boyfriend had been emotionally abusing and
controlling her. He is the now the father of their 20-month-old son, and they are still
together.
The accumulated pain and sadness I still feel sometimes overwhelms me. In Trauma and
Recovery, Herman validates these feelings, bringing to bear her professional background,
human sensitivity, and wisdom to address both the psychological bases for the pervasive
effects of primary and secondary traumatic experiences and the critical components in
effective clinical treatment. She offers insights into the impact of “terrible events” on both
victims and witnesses. Although our culture often denies such events and the “crisis of faith”
they often create, their existence resonates with me in light of my daughter‟s experiences
and my own.
Herman draws clear and convincing psychological parallels between victims of war crimes,
political terrorism, and domestic violence, with substantial historical and empirical evidence
to support her views. In her own words, “This is a book about restoring connections --a
book about commonalities, between rape survivors and combat veterans, between battered
women and political prisoners.” Herman summarizes the research into psychological trauma
from the study of hysteria, the “archetypical psychological disorder of women” in the 19th
century, through the long-term effects of combat studied long after the Vietnam War. By
1980, the American Psychiatric Association had included the post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) category in its official manual of mental disorders, legitimizing PTSD for combat
veterans. The culmination of this progression, from Herman‟s self-acknowledged feminist
perspective, is in the professional acknowledgment of the equivalent psychological
syndrome in survivors of rape, incest, and domestic abuse.
Throughout the book, Herman elaborates on the most characteristic feature of post-
traumatic stress: the victim‟s alternation between intrusive symptoms (intense fear and
overwhelming emotion) and constrictive symptoms (emotional numbness, inability to act,
feel, or respond). This fluctuation between emotional states can intensify the victim‟s sense
of helplessness. With trauma, one‟s sense of the fundamental safety of the world is often
destroyed over time, this state can become one of “existential crisis” in which the sense of
self remains shattered. The dialectic of constriction and intrusion becomes habitual, and any
action has potentially dire consequences for the chronically traumatized person. Protracted
depression is the most common finding in virtually all clinical studies of chronically
traumatized people.
Trauma and Recovery. Judith Lewis Herman. Basic Books, New York, 1992, 276
pages.
Judith Herman is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Director of Training at the
Victims of Violence Program at Cambridge Hospital‟s Department of Psychiatry. Although her
groundbreaking Trauma and Recovery was published several years ago, the book remains a
significant one, and in our increasingly violent society, may be even more significant than
when it was first published. My response to this important work is both personal and
professional.
From a personal perspective, as I read Trauma and Recovery the first time, I began to
understand why even today, when I say good-bye to my 22-year-old daughter who lives in
another state, I feel the same heart-wrenching pain I felt more than 15 years ago when I
first had to leave her behind with her controlling, verbally and emotionally abusive father.
Three years ago, she and her boyfriend were violently attacked by strangers in San
Francisco and almost died. In our first phone conversation a few weeks later, she shared
some deeply personal feelings and details about that experience. When I saw her the next
time, she wasn‟t the daughter I knew. I learned from her only then that even during the
months before their California experience, her boyfriend had been emotionally abusing and
controlling her. He is the now the father of their 20-month-old son, and they are still
together.
The accumulated pain and sadness I still feel sometimes overwhelms me. In Trauma and
Recovery, Herman validates these feelings, bringing to bear her professional background,
human sensitivity, and wisdom to address both the psychological bases for the pervasive
effects of primary and secondary traumatic experiences and the critical components in
effective clinical treatment. She offers insights into the impact of “terrible events” on both
victims and witnesses. Although our culture often denies such events and the “crisis of faith”
they often create, their existence resonates with me in light of my daughter‟s experiences
and my own.
Herman draws clear and convincing psychological parallels between victims of war crimes,
political terrorism, and domestic violence, with substantial historical and empirical evidence
to support her views. In her own words, “This is a book about restoring connections --a
book about commonalities, between rape survivors and combat veterans, between battered
women and political prisoners.” Herman summarizes the research into psychological trauma
from the study of hysteria, the “archetypical psychological disorder of women” in the 19th
century, through the long-term effects of combat studied long after the Vietnam War. By
1980, the American Psychiatric Association had included the post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) category in its official manual of mental disorders, legitimizing PTSD for combat
veterans. The culmination of this progression, from Herman‟s self-acknowledged feminist
perspective, is in the professional acknowledgment of the equivalent psychological
syndrome in survivors of rape, incest, and domestic abuse.
Throughout the book, Herman elaborates on the most characteristic feature of post-
traumatic stress: the victim‟s alternation between intrusive symptoms (intense fear and
overwhelming emotion) and constrictive symptoms (emotional numbness, inability to act,
feel, or respond). This fluctuation between emotional states can intensify the victim‟s sense
of helplessness. With trauma, one‟s sense of the fundamental safety of the world is often
destroyed over time, this state can become one of “existential crisis” in which the sense of
self remains shattered. The dialectic of constriction and intrusion becomes habitual, and any
action has potentially dire consequences for the chronically traumatized person. Protracted
depression is the most common finding in virtually all clinical studies of chronically
traumatized people.
