Trauma and Recovery
Links private and political violence, and sets out the three stages of recovery.
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.
Judith Herman's book gives clinicians a framework for understanding survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma and for structuring the work of recovery. Herman, a psychiatrist, draws parallels between combat veterans, political prisoners, and survivors of domestic and sexual abuse, arguing that symptoms clinicians tend to meet as isolated pathology follow a shared pattern. She names that pattern and proposes the diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, distinguishing it from single-incident trauma.
For the consulting room, the book sets out a staged model: first establishing safety, then reconstructing the trauma story through remembrance and mourning, then restoring connection with ordinary life. Herman treats the therapeutic relationship as the ground of this work and is precise about its hazards, including the pull of the survivor's helplessness on the clinician and the question of neutrality when a patient has been harmed by another person.
First published in 1992, the text remains a working reference for trauma-informed practice.
About the author
Judith Lewis Herman
Judith L. Herman, born 1942, is an American psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Her clinical research addresses complex trauma, incest, and interpersonal violence. In Trauma and Recovery (1992) she set out a three-stage model of recovery: establishing safety, remembrance and mourning of the trauma, and reconnection with ordinary life. Her earlier book Father-Daughter Incest (1981) shaped clinical understanding of familial abuse. Her account of complex PTSD informs psychodynamic work with survivors of prolonged, repeated harm.
Details
- 1992
- English
- Basic Books
- Basic Books, 1992
- 480
- 9781541602953