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.

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1997, page 103
According to Herman, even the resolution of the developmental conflicts the individual has
made during childhood and adolescence may come undone, causing the individual to relive
basic struggles related to intimacy, autonomy, initiative, competence, and identity. By
extension, traumatic events destroy the connection between the individual and the rest of
the world. Trauma seems to exaggerate our common stereotypes about men and women:
men who were abused in childhood are more likely to take out their aggressions on others,
whereas women are more likely to be victimized by others or injure themselves. At the most
extreme, survivors of childhood abuse may attack their own children or fail to protect them.
Paradoxically, the social response to traumatized men and women may be opposite, yet
equally damaging. When PTSD is a result of combat, our society‟s inclination is to tolerate
men who are emotionally detached, yet uncontrollably aggressive. This response can
compound the damages they have experienced in war. Those who care the most about him
may inadvertently exaggerate a traumatized veteran‟s “sense of shame, inadequacy, and
alienation” by accepting his emotional withdrawal and angry outbursts as normal.
Conversely, women who experience PTSD as a result of sexual or domestic abuse may find
their struggles similarly exaggerated by the narrow tolerance of those around them --
society gives women little permission either to withdraw or to express their feelings.
Families and friends may not be generally supportive of their need to express anger, or they
may not support the survivor‟s need to reestablish a sense of autonomy. And because of our
culture‟s deeply embedded standards of male entitlement, many acts that women
experience as terrorizing violations may not be regarded as such, even by close family and
friends.
One of the worst mistakes we can make is to interpret the symptoms of post-traumatic
distress as part of the victim‟s personality, because to do so is to condemn the individual to
a “diminished life, tormented by memory and bounded by helplessness and fear.” Even in
the context of my daughter‟s struggles with her father, at 17 she had a number of friends
and significant teachers and counselors who supported her, and she was generally full of
life, optimism, and emotion. Today, her world rarely extends beyond her baby, her
boyfriend, his family, and his friends her ability to trust is even more limited. She shows
little emotion unless excessively provoked. And unless consciously engaged, she almost
always looks sad. Those who know her now accept her current behaviors as who she is
rather than a result of what’s happened to her.
As a society, we must publicly acknowledge when a person has been traumatized and
assume responsibility to help that individual overcome the effects of the traumatic
experience(s). Our culture‟s tendency to blame the victim is so deep that it has negatively
affected the direction of psychological inquiry, interfering with the understanding and
diagnosis of a post-traumatic syndrome. Herman urges for a new definition of the syndrome
that follows upon prolonged, repeated trauma --complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
And, as with so many traumas, children are the most deeply affected. Herman contrasts the
magnified impact of repeated trauma on children with its effect on adults. Chronic trauma
on children can de-form that personality, causing lifelong effects. Evidence seems to support
the view that chronic trauma and abuse in childhood is a primary factor leading a person to
seek psychiatric treatment as an adult.
In the second part of the book, Herman focuses on the therapist‟s role in helping victims of
trauma recover. She delineates three essential stages of recovery --establishing a safe
environment, supporting the process of remembrance and mourning, and helping the victim
reestablish trust --within herself and the larger community. Recovery must occur in the
context of the victim‟s relationships with others, including the important therapeutic
relationship. And unlike a more traditional medical model of therapy in which the therapist