Trauma and Recovery

TRAUMA AND RECOVERY. By Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. New York: Basic Books, HarperCollins, 1992, xi + 276 pp.

With the publication of Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman has reshaped the nosology of trauma. This work repositions its victims, their pathology, their relationship to each other and to the larger society. Herman's (1981) first book, Father-Daughter Incest, was one of the major works to bring the issue and extent of abuse to public awareness. Her latest book now goes beyond the single issue and brings together all victims of trauma, rather than conceiving of them as separate, relatively powerless, and variously stigmatized groups. She focuses on the commonalities of the many populations we consider when we think of trauma today: war veterans, rape victims, survivors of incest and child abuse, political prisoners, Holocaust survivors, and victims of natural catastrophes. She argues that the features of both trauma and the processes of recovery are more similar than different for these groups, and she forcefully addresses the issue of stigma. Just as victims of "shell shock" were stigmatized for malingering and Holocaust survivors blamed for "willingly" going into the camps, victims of sexual abuse are seen as mistaking fantasy/wish for fact, and as hysterical and vengeful. Even the witness of atrocities who speaks out is burdened: "To speak publicly about one's knowledge of atrocities is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims" (p. 2).

Herman provides us with an incisive sociohistorical analysis of hysteria, shell shock, and domestic violence as the three major paradigms for trauma study in the past hundred years and demonstrates that the historical climate and presence of a forceful political movement were crucial for progress in all three areas. The study of individual pathology is thus set into its larger cultural milieu.

In her chapter "The Heroic Age of Hysteria," Herman addresses the intense concern of Charcot, Janet, and Freud, and states: "For a brief decade men of science listened to women with a devotion and a respect unparalleled before or since" (pp. 11-12). Both Freud and Janet were committed to a sexual etiology of the neuroses and spoke of dissociative states, altered states of consciousness, hypnosis, and trance as we do once again today. Freud went on to claim, in...