![]() Herman follows with a description of trauma, stating that it overwhelms the victim, removing control, connection, and meaning. ![]() From there, she enumerates not only the symptoms of traumatic disorders, but argues that only by renaming sexual, domestic, and violence traumas as “complex post-traumatic stress disorders,” and treating victims as suffering from this specific disorder, can victims truly “recover.”īritish soldiers after a German chemical weapon attack in 1917 (via Wikimedia Commons). Herman begins her work by situating it in the feminist movement and the “forgotten history” of traumatic disorders, describing the cultural and political factors that have continually prevented psychological trauma from being recognized effectively by the public. In her own words, Trauma and Recovery is a book about “restoring connections” between individuals and communities and reconstructing history in the face of a public discourse that did not want to address the horrors of sexual and domestic violence. ![]() For Judith Herman, “to study psychological trauma means bearing witness to horrible events.” A professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School and a founding member of the Women’s Mental Health Collective, Herman is best known for her research on complex post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly with victims of sexual and domestic violence.
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