Looking Back / Looking Forward

For many feminist academics working outside the clinical study and treatment of trauma in the early 1990s, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery offered us an absorbing, detailed, and profoundly useful analysis of past and current clinical practice, as well as unparalleled insights into the relationship between traumatic experience and the path to recovery. Her analysis of trauma emphasized how gender bias had constrained the field’s earliest practitioners, thereby bequeathing a legacy of misogyny that the discipline would labor to reveal and expunge. This feminist historicization clarified a network of political, historical, cultural, and personal relations that had previously gone unremarked. Herman maneuvered contemporary trauma theory and treatment out of range of the field’s limitations so that it could benefit from feminist insights into gender developed since the 1970s. She used historical critique to chart the political transformations that enabled this reconceptualization of trauma theory and treatment: “The study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war. The study of trauma in sexual and domestic life becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordination of women and children. Advances in the field occur only when they are supported by a political movement powerful enough to legitimate an alliance between investigators and patients and to counteract the ordinary social processes of silencing and denial” (1992, 9).

As important as Herman’s work was to feminists outside her field, it was rooted in a feminist transformation of psychology, psychoanalysis, and trauma studies. The interplay across this disciplinary boundary and between disciplinary critique and institutional transformation, as well, was, by 1992, an established achievement and method of feminism. Building on this base, Herman brought trauma studies and feminism together to shift the known and knowable about human suffering, violence, and healing. Central to this was the feminist reconceptualization of power, victimization, harm, and redress. When the study of trauma borrowed its understanding of victims from legal and cultural notions of status, it took women and children as the subordinate subjects that the law had turned them into and wrote these unequal relations of power into notions of the human. Violence against women and children, when unaddressed, both creates and confirms their subordination. For example, the rape of a woman by her spouse was not a crime until the state considered it as such. Status, rather than injury, defined a legitimate victim. Feminism clarified this wrong. Once women could seek redress and support from structures that were created to offer it, the harm and trauma of rape within marriage could move out from under the cover of family norms and the legal and cultural constructs that subtend them. Feminist revisions of victimization claimed women as legitimate victims and, at the same time, refused to see women as perpetually victimized and vulnerable. Herman rejected the dominant construction of women’s victimization as natural, unavoidable, and minor and, instead, politi-cizedvictimization. Feminism constructed a different understanding of “victim” that refused the violent assertion that victimhood was an inherent identity and looked instead at the persons and policies that inflicted and permitted violence. Trauma sufferers fall victim to organized state violence as well as forms of violence that are disorganized and endemic to daily life, and feminists clarified how women are vulnerable to both. Herman’s work shifted who counts as a victim and through what forms of suffering, to whom one should turn for help and how, and how therapists should best manage the treatment of trauma survivors. In Herman’s analysis, men and women veterans, abused children, incest survivors, battered women, and bystanders caught up in multiple forms of violence stand together in the specificity and urgency of their differing need.

Herman’s work exemplifies the turning of second-wave feminism toward the twin goals of disciplinary critique and institutional transformation. It is perhaps this focus on engagement that makes Trauma and Recovery such a galvanizing and steadying read. In a world awash in violence, and in myriad situations that feel out of balance in profound ways, it is possible to feel that trauma has no boundaries, that we are irredeemably...