Susan Suleiman Responds to Judith Herman

Judith Herman’s comments made me realize that I had expressed myself clumsily in places, and I am glad to have this chance at clarification. My aim in my essay was to try to understand the stakes in a major contemporary debate, not to take sides. As concerns the question of memory and the definition of trauma, the conflicted issue is not memory disturbance, but total obliteration of the traumatic event in consciousness. I’m afraid there is disagreement on this issue among theorists, and the DSM-IV’s listing of “inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma” does not resolve it; it is one thing to be unable to recall an important aspect of a traumatic event, and another not to remember that the event occurred at all.

It was clumsy of me to say, without apparent qualification—and Judith Herman is right to reproach me for it—that we live in a “cultural and legal environment where being a victim ‘pays.’” Yet I am not the first to point out that contemporary society, especially in the United States, has a tendency to wallow in stories of victimization—which does not mean that victims don’t suffer and often lead sad and miserable lives, as I think I acknowledge in my essay. Judith Herman herself was a bit hasty in attributing to me the “presumption” that “all patients who recover traumatic memories after a period of amnesia are . . . either overly suggestible (read feminine) or frankly malingering” (284). The link between suggestibility and femininity is not one that I make, nor do I imply it. I am careful to point out that even Richard McNally, who rejects theories of repression and dissociation, recognizes that people may forget an event for many years, and then remember it if there is a “trigger” for remembrance. I explicitly say, in my own name, that the existence of some false claims of posttraumatic stress disorder does not invalidate the many true claims. Finally, I stand by my statement that “wherever possible, it is a good idea to supplement the personal memories of trauma victims with historical research.” On September 27, 2007, the New York Times ran a long article about a woman named Tania Head, who for the past six years has told a heart-rending story of survival and loss in the World Trade Center to avid audiences. Head was for a time president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network and often told the story of how her fiancé died in the North Tower while she herself was on the seventy-eighth floor of the South Tower when the second plane hit. The Times’s careful investigation revealed that every piece of information Head provided about her work, her education, and her involvement with the man she said was her fiancé has turned out to be false. This fact does not discredit or cast “scorn” on all the traumatized survivors of September 11; it does confirm the need for extreme caution in treading on the delicate grounds of memory, imagination, and trauma.