Judith Herman spoke out about sexual trauma at a time when the dominant culture preferred to pretend it didn’t exist. In 1981, the Harvard professor, researcher, and psychiatrist published her first book, Father-Daughter Incest. She then wrote Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror in 1992, arguing that trauma was not simply a rare affliction affecting war veterans but a condition too commonly experienced by people exposed to abuse and sexual violence in their everyday lives. Trauma and Recovery became the textbook for trauma, read by everyone working with survivors, including myself, a psychiatrist who works with survivors of gender-based violence. Herman remains the authority on the topic, with her three stages of trauma recovery widely adopted as our standard for trauma treatment.
Herman began writing her recently released follow-up, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, in 2001. After decades of treating and researching trauma, she realized she needed to add a fourth stage of recovery, one that involved the wider community around a survivor. “If trauma is truly a social problem, and indeed it is, then recovery cannot simply be a private, individual matter,” she writes in her new book. Healing requires social justice.
