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Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
By Judith Herman

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Product Description

When Trauma and Recovery was first published in 1992, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work. In the intervening years, Herman’s volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large.Trauma and Recovery brings a new level of understanding to a set of problems usually considered individually. Herman draws on her own cutting-edge research in domestic violence as well as on the vast literature of combat veterans and victims of political terror, to show the parallels between private terrors such as rape and public traumas such as terrorism. The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context. Meticulously documented and frequently using the victims’ own words as well as those from classic literary works and prison diaries, Trauma and Recovery is a powerful work that will continue to profoundly impact our thinking.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #2456 in Books
  • Published on: 1997-05-29
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 304 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Herman links the public traumas of society to those of domestic life in this provocative work of psychiatric theory.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Judith Herman, M.D., one of this country’s leading experts on trauma and abuse, is associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, and director of training at the Victims of Violence Program at Cambridge Hospital. She is also a founding member of the Women’s Mental Health Collective in Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Invaluable for those in helping professions....clear, compassionate5
The subject matter is hard to read about in large doses but the
information is very very helpful and clear. It helped me see the issue
from the victims point of view.

Much of the info is distressing...our society is shown as self protective
and without compassion.

Not for idle reading but very helpful if one is suddenly put in a place
to help and understand the effects and recovery process.

Move Over Freud: Future Definitive Psychology Classic5
This book is a must read for anyone, male or female, who has suffered tragedy/abuse due to someone else's actions and who is struggling to make sense of their lives in the aftermath. It's not fair to label this book as a post-traumatic stress book: it is soooo much more than that. The author explains how trauma affects the psyche: particularly the developing psyche, explains the cycle of abuse, explains crime and the criminal mind, and pedophile behavior in a way that no one has before. The author is bar none brilliant. I predict that this book will become a definitive psychology classic: as far as this book defines things that no one has before, makes obvious connections that no one has stated before. It is the ultimate connect the dot book for trauma. This book and should be reading required reading in all psychology courses and especially criminal psychology courses.

A classic, read it if you haven't before5
Written from the heart as well as the head, Trauma and Recovery is the best introduction to what is more technically known as post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. But don't let that scare you off! It is about what happens to people--may have happened to you or people you know--under conditions of fear, helplessness, torment, abuse, that many people discount as "not having been so bad really."

What Judith Herman shows very elegantly and simply is how the body and mind change, are altered at the physical level, even without our knowing it or sensing it. This book is, in her words, about "human vulnerability in the natural world" and about "the capacity for evil in human nature."

She even explains without rancor why at different times people have a backlash against the whole idea of abuse and trauma. This is an elegant and very compassionate book for understanding a particular kind of fracture of the human heart.

I love books that lift us up even as they delve into the broken places, and Judith Herman's book on Trauma is an enduring classic.