Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror Books
Product Description
When Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery was first published five years ago, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work. In the intervening years, Herman’s now classic volume has changed the way we reckon about and handle traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new introduction, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and clarifies how the issues surrounding the topic of trauma and recovery 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 ordinarily considered individually. Herman draws on her own cold-edge research on domestic violence, as well as on a vast literature of combat veterans and victims of political terror, to show the parallels between private terrors such as rape and broadcast 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 thought.
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Counsellors will like this. Psychologists will like this. Psychiatrists will like this. If you are one of them, buy this book, you will like this. I guarantee. But anyone who has really lived through any real trauma is going to roll their eyes.
Mainstream psychology seems to be absolutely based on books written by people who had never experianced the things they are writting about! It’s terrible! If any other author were to write a book on say, what it is like to like is Paris, when they have never lived there before, we would all laugh. But yet psychologists seem to get away with this all the time. And the usual therapy sheep have not yet been able to see this. The book is neatly written, and convincing, so that’s all that matters. But this is not a debate people -you are working with people’s lives here! There are consequences to getting it incorrect!
There are so many people out there who seem content on taking advice on trauma from those that had never been through it. You would not take lessons on how to drive a car from someone who has never been in one -only watched others -so why is this any different? Take a moment to reckon about it! The resolution may shock you!
I first read this book when I was 18, as a means to know myself. But as I have grown up, this books seems increasily immature and shallow. Much of it is incorrect -as anyone who has been through trauma of any kind can tell you.
It has all the ingredients to be well loved with therapists though. But if they were to really take a closer look away from the well-written text, they would see that the world nearly them is not like this. It is not catorgorisable and predicatable. And these are not the answers to why people act this way. Time to tune into your judgment and instinct here!
I certainly hope the author of this book is able to one day admit how egotistical it really is to claim such knowledge over topic she has not experainced. It honestly makes me quite mad that such a complex topic as trauma has been water-down to just this thin text that does nothing really to really help anyone.
Do you disagree with me? Well, someone that hasn’t been through trauma themselves has no aptly to sing the praises of this book, so sit back down please. Beacuse I can tell you from a very private top of view, that this book only starts to scrape the surface of the topic it claims to cover.
Very kindergarten level. Really only belongs on the shelf -next to the latest science fiction title.
Rating: 1 / 5
Fantastic book – may possibly not place it down, very fascinating.
Rating: 5 / 5
Dr. Herman has a new book out with nearly the same title; I have not read it, so don’t know how it compares to this one.
This seems to me to be a view of trauma from a feminist clinician and researcher’s top of view, not from a victim’s or survivor’s. The author is at pains to legitimize the fact of abuse to her psychiatric colleagues and to the broadcast. Male readers will probably have a lot of distress with it, since male survivors are mentioned nearly exclusively when they are combat veterans. When a pronoun is used as a use instead for the word sufferer or the like, it is effectively everlastingly “she” or “her” — never “he” or “his” (unless it is to converse in of the abuser). The author speaks of several periods of “amnesia” in the history of the psychology of trauma, the last one being reversed through the “political” efforts of the women’s movement. From this book it would appear that recognition of trauma affecting men outside of combat is still in a period of amnesia.
On the cover of the book is a quote: “One of the most vital psychiatric works to be published since Freud — New York Times”. Now of course the New York Times said no such thing. It must be *someone* *at* the New York Times. The author cannot be held responsible for the book jacket, but to me it is representative of the blind spots or omissions in the book itself.
Rating: 2 / 5
I am not sure if I missed the top here. This book was not compulsory by a Psychiatrist to help me know P.T.S.D. I really did not learn anything I did not know.
Rating: 2 / 5
This book is brilliant – but small-sighted. From the introduction Judith Herman provides a clear paradigm for understanding trauma and recovery: “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.” What she fails to know is how this applies to her – and those like her…that is, everyone.
The trauma Judith Herman defines is only the extreme echelon of trauma – the tip of the iceberg that rises into her conscious view. Although she rightly and masterfully connects the traumas – and posttraumatic reactions – experienced by Holocaust survivors, rape victims, children in severely abusive homes, combat veterans, and domestically abused women, because of her own denial she fails to link the traumas in these categories to the traumas experienced by the other 99% of humanity: the inflicted traumas that glide below the radar in every family nearly the world. Thus, if you are one of the 99% whose unresolved traumas don’t fit into her extreme categories (i.e. if you are alive, don’t fit into her categories, and are not yet fully enlightened), this book’s main value for you will be through metaphor – if, that is, you can translate the extreme cases and so be able to relate them to your own situation.
Traumas are inflicted on children nearly ubiquitously on subtle, chronic levels by those with the greatest emotional power to mold them – their parents. Traumas occur whenever a child’s right self is not witnessed in full. If a child were witnessed in full, he would have no need to develop an unconscious mind to protect himself from the knowledge of the horror he has experienced. But Judith Herman – who idealizingly dedicates this work to her mother, and is a mother herself – fails to grip this. She mistakenly views herself as outside the cycle of victim and perpetrator. This lack of insight into herself is at the root of why she has so small understanding of the mindset and motivation of the perpetrator.
Parents who are not fully conscious – that is, parents in denial of any degree of their own buried, unresolved traumas – inevitably traumatize their children without even realizing they are doing it, and thus can take no responsibility for it. Even in the mildest cases this is emotionally devastating for children, but because so few witness what is really going on and thus call it by its rightful name – including the novelist of this standard book on trauma – it goes unacknowledged, and thus is considered normal.
We know why the Vietnam combat vet drinks himself into oblivion, but do we know why the child in the normal family compulsively overeats or wets the bed or sucks his thumb or despises his younger brother? We know why the rape victim later becomes phobic of sex with her consensual partners, but can we reckon through the normal mother’s twisted motives for having children? We know why the Holocaust survivor has persistent, horrible nightmares about Auschwitz, but do we place the right face on the bogeyman in the dreams of the normal, middle-class child?
The norm is still very, very sick. Yet Judith Herman, who lives in the thick of it and writes for those who reckon within the box, has not figured that out. Her book is gorgeous, but it misses the deeper top.
Rating: 3 / 5