Judith Lewis Herman's Trauma and Recovery
Rosen, Ruth
TRAUMA AND RECOVERY, by Judith Lewis Herman. Basic Books, 1992. 288 pp. $14, paper. We live in a therapeutic society that trivializes trauma. Every day, ordinary people confess their secrets to...
...They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experience...
...This is a provocative book and I can't help but wish that Herman had extended her analysis to more examples of trauma, especially those nightmares that have afflicted whole populations...
...American resistance to what Europeans used to call the tragedy of the human condition creates a schizophrenic culture in which we either blame our victims or, when we discover a new social evil, see everyone as victims...
...What he first identified as the sexual abuse of young women, he eventually saw as women's sexual fantasies...
...By 1980, they had won their fight to have the disorder accepted by the psychiatric profession...
...Every day, ordinary people confess their secrets to Oprah, Phil, and Geraldo...
...Another symptom, hyperarousal, reflects the persistent expectation of danger...
...Who will help this community, which was clearly traumatized, move toward recovery...
...It was difficult to recognize that a well-established democracy in the public sphere could coexist with conditions of primitive autocracy or advanced dictatorship in the home...
...They shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others...
...When polled, most Americans believe they have the right to pursue happiness...
...An expert at excavating the tragedy of trauma, she is the author of Father-Daughter Incest, which helped certify the prevalence of incestual trauma...
...It takes a political movement to make a particular trauma visible, Herman argues...
...Are the symptoms of trauma experienced by incest victims, tortured prisoners, and combat veterans the same as those experienced by people whose society has disintegrated into ceaseless war...
...Against this blame-the-victim syndrome, many feminists joined the victimologists and proclaimed all women the innocent victims of men's uncontrollable lust...
...Rather, she provides a thoughtful analysis of the trajectory individuals traverse as they move from trauma toward recovery...
...Most military doctors regarded them with disdain and sent them quickly back to battle...
...Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning...
...As their movement grew, Vietnam veterans gradually gave post-traumatic stress disorder a dignity and manliness that it was formerly denied...
...Although Herman does not discuss such shared trauma, the symptoms she describes may in fact be applied to entire cultures or communities...
...If you have the poor taste to grow old, you can still find absolution through self-improvement programs...
...At the moment of trauma," she writes, "the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force...
...The second half of Herman's book explores how people recover from trauma...
...If I didn't know about half my own life, what other knowledge can I trust...
...But as we all know, terrible things do happen to good people...
...Even when natural disaster strikes—a fire or a flood consumes an entire community—a chorus of voices blames sufferers for building on hillsides or too close to the river's edge...
...Yet, despite all the unspeakable traumas experienced in the twentieth century, we have yet to understand how the trauma experienced by an incest survivor is similar to—or differs from— that experienced by tortured political prisoners or combat veterans...
...They breach the attachments of family, friendship, love, and community...
...During World War I, up to 40 percent of British soldiers broke down in shell shock, weeping and sobbing in the midst of trench warfare...
...Determined to politicize trauma, Herman argues that those who recover best are people who discover some meaning that transcends the limits of personal tragedy, often through political or social activism...
...Those who have been traumatized will undoubtedly recognize many of their feelings in this elegantly written book...
...Take the Vietnam War, which certainly was experienced as a national trauma...
...After denial, hyperarousal, and flashbacks, came two contrasting resolutions to the trauma...
...The modern feminist movement, for example, was necessary for society to believe that the hidden injuries of sex—incest, rape, or domestic violence—really exist...
...The result of environmental racism, North Richmond sits surrounded by a strip of chemical plants and oil refineries that constitute one of the nation's worst toxic hot spots...
...Some people may heal best through spiritual or other means...
...American feminism, deeply rooted in this political culture, has shown all the signs of these extremist tendencies...
...Victorian Vienna was not yet ready for his revelation...
...A political movement, however, was able to "name" traumas that had not yet entered public consciousness...
...148 • DISSENT Books With considerable detail, Herman describes the three major symptoms that traumatized people tend to experience...
...The intrusion of flashbacks, though painful, helps people integrate the trauma into their memory...
...Men who don't love enough...
...Decent folk are stricken with lifethreatening disease...
...Even more, Herman reminds us that one must also have the political clout to force public attention...
...For a traumatic experience to receive any public attention, as Herman argues, it must be politicized...
...Freud, as we now know, backed off from pursuing the sexual origins of hysteria...
...Finding some middle ground between these extremes is rare in American writing...
...When and under what conditions is a trauma recognized for what it is in a particular culture...
...Women did not have a name for the tyranny of private life," writes Herman...
...WINTER • 1994 • 147 Books Like many feminists, Herman believes that private and public tyranny are probably linked and traumatize people in similar ways...
...the torture of political prisoners...
...Many subjects became unspeakable, including the bravery of combat veterans and especially the courage of antiwar resisters...
...Her newest work, a wise and intelligent book titled Trauma and Recovery, is a cultural, political, and psychological meditation on the personal experience of trauma...
...The individual and group therapy sessions Herman advocates for victims of trauma won't be made available to this ravaged community...
...This is a controversial assertion that can be overstated...
...She quotes one incest survivor, for example, who took the fact that she had absolutely no recollection of early painful memories as an occasion to rethink simplistic ideas about knowledge: "My pride of intellect has been battered...
...As feminists in the 1970s redefined the personal as political and excavated all sorts of hidden injuries, they had to fight against a culture in which women who had been raped, battered, or sexually abused were either blamed or disbelieved...
...After the publication of his brilliant, early study The Aetiology of Hysteria, which he hoped would bring him glory, Freud confessed to one of his colleagues, "I am as isolated as you could wish me to be...
...Judith Lewis Herman is a major feminist therapist and writer who still searches for that vanishing middle ground...
...They violate the victim's faith in a natural or divine order and cast the victim into a state of existential crisis...
...Combat veterans, according to Herman, also required a political movement to turn their trauma into a legitimate disorder...
...Now, in the 1990s, everyone is said to be addicted to something, but an endless array of twelve-step programs promises deliverance of the self...
...The idea of a self that can transcend fate runs deep in Western culture, but nowhere has it become as firmly entrenched as in American society...
...Over twenty thousand people sought treatment and reassurance at nearby hospitals...
...The human potential movement of the 1970s made the cultivation and improvement of the self both the means and end of life's journey...
...the destruction of a village by an earthquake...
...Still, Herman convincingly argues that what is required is a new interpretation of the trauma...
...When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters...
...War, fast engulfing a good part of the globe, destroys families and communities, sending refugees fleeing in all directions...
...Herman is most interested in the psychological trauma that results from violence...
...the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me...
...First, the nation became fidgety even at the thought of war and the "Vietnam syndrome" prevented a number of possible military interventions...
...By the Gulf War, George Bush could gloat, "By God, we kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all...
...A contingent of parasites—academic researchers and journalists—briefly parachuted into the community, but left as soon as they had collected their data...
...Purchase a video, melt away your disease...
...Otherwise the wound remains invisible, disbelieved, and barred from public consciousness...
...Traumatic events, Herman writes, "call into question basic human relationships...
...At the same time, as Susan Jeffords has argued, American culture gradually reinterpreted the nation's military loss through a remasculinization of the culture...
...In late-twentieth-century America, there is no such thing as tragedy or fate...
...In this elegantly reasoned work, Herman offers an important insight into the politics of trauma...
...During the 1970s, even as they were scorned as baby killers, an astonishing number of Vietnam veterans fought against their own nightmares—as well as society's negative depiction of their combat experience—to convince the psychiatric and medical communities that post-traumatic stress disorder was a horrifying and real consequence of their Vietnam tour...
...Yet here I see a gift, for in place of my narrow pragmatic world of cause and effect, I have burst into an infinite world full of wonder...
...Many civilians viewed them as cowards who aped women's hysterical symptoms...
...Every day we read about trauma: the rape of Bosnian women...
...Women who love too much...
...The Puritans tried to skirt predestination and an inscrutable God through a series of covenants that bordered on heresy...
...When the force is that of another human being, we speak of atrocities...
...After the loss of the war, the nation went into denial...
...Fortunately, Herman has not written a self-help book filled with lists and exercises that promise recovery...
...By the 1950s, all you had to do was stop at a drive-by church or read The Power of Positive Thinking and the goodies of American consumer society would come your way...
...But Herman's most important contribution is her exploration of the politics of trauma...
...People commit suicide and leave inconsolable survivors...
...If you just eat right and exercise enough, you'll live forever...
...WINTER • 1994 • 149...
...And that, alas, many traumatized individuals or communities do not have...
...A child dies...
...During the 1980s American popular culture refought the war in endless films and novels...
...Whether the person is an incest survivor, combat veteran, or political prisoner, trauma is experienced as a feeling of "intense fear, helplessness, loss of control and annihilation...
...Innocent children are molested by priests or wounded by stray bullets...
...A spouse suddenly leaves...
...How do survivors of shared trauma recover from these events...
...In every bookstore, shelves groan under the weight of self-help books that promise freedom from pain...
...Eventually, the task of healing helps some or all of these symptoms to disappear...
...By the nineteenth century, religious perfectionists had eased the road to redemption...
...A ruptured railroad car at a General Chemical Corporation plant sent a ghastly fifteen-mile-long toxic plume of sulfuric acid through the residential district of North Richmond, California, one of the poorest and most devastated African-American communities in the United States...
...At the very moment I was reading Herman's book, an entire community was traumatized by an industrial accident...
...First there is the numbing denial that protects individuals from the shock of trauma...
...Trauma does more than create terror...
...It is no accident that Rambo asks . "Do we get to win it this time...
...Sometimes the symptoms appear sequentially, sometimes simultaneously...
...Buy a book, find serenity...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
