Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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CATEGORY: BOOK REVIEWS  written by Michael S. Scheeringa Read time: 2.5 minutes Judith Herman says the quiet part out loud in her latest book. One intention of my Trauma Dispatch posts is to demonstrate the pervasiveness of progressive ideology in trauma research, how the purpose of most trauma research has not been to discover slivers of truth in the slow, incremental march of science; the purpose has been to promote a dogma, either to weaponize intellectual ideas for social justice reforms, or, simply for ideology’s sake to make the outer world appear seamless with researchers’ internal worlds. Those who approach trauma as a true science—unbiased, skeptical, empirical—are a small fraction of academia. If any doubt lingers that ideology is the underlying driver of the intellectual leaders of postmodern trauma research, Herman dispelled that in the opening sentences: “When I first wrote the forgotten history of trauma, in Trauma and Recovery, I argued that the suffering of traumatized people is a matter not only of individual psychology but also, always, of social justice. Because the violence at the source of trauma aims at domination and oppression [emphasis mine], even to recognize trauma, to name it, requires the historical context of broad social movements for human rights...”
In 1992, Herman published a paper that would make her a revered figure in the trauma world; she proposed a new disorder, called complex PTSD, which redefined borderline personality disorder as a trauma disorder caused solely by oppressive life experiences [3]. Primarily a community clinician, rigorous research was not one of her skills. Her research methods could be generously described as flawed—always samples of convenience, cross-sectional, mostly small, and predominantly non-standardized qualitative data. Book Summary Part One explained that sexual assault trauma is derived from tyranny, inequality, and patriarchy. Part Two began describing principles of restorative justice--peace circles for apologies instead of incarceration. Chapters stressed the value of acknowledgment of crimes by perpetrators and methods of holding them accountable. Part Three described restorative justice’s healing potential of restitution from and rehabilitation for perpetrators. The totality of her evidence for Parts Two and Three came from her interviews of 30 informants, 26 women and 4 men, spread over twenty years. The interviews were unstructured; most interviews were recorded (she neglects to give a number). Herman’s prescription to salve the world is a dismantling of perceived oppression to provide the only worthwhile version of justice, which includes repair of relationships. Analysis Herman’s prescription is, by her own admission, only a vision. She wrote, “At present, the RJ movement is still too new to have amassed a convincing track record on preventing recidivism for violent crimes.” The book omits the history of massive improvements in acknowledging trauma in society, laws to punish it, and efforts to prevent it. In Herman’s telling, you might think human civilization had never addressed sexual assault. The book lacks a serious literature review. Not a single research study was described in any detail. Her evidence, being from a tiny sample and an unsound methodology, is not publishable in a moderately good, peer-reviewed journal. The overall lightness of the book suggests it was a patchwork attempt to publish a treasured idea at the end of her career. Herman, now 82 years old, admitted she started this project twenty years ago, but was interrupted by personal illness and a move to assisted living. Herman's ideology that she has been pushing for forty years is that human nature is highly malleable and oppression—labelled erroneously as trauma—is the evil that causes all problems. Her prescription for justice, based on this faulty view of human nature, will fail like her recommendations about borderline personality and complex PTSD, and will not truly help any victims, but it does create a simulated reality to appear seamless with her beliefs. REFERENCES [1] Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman (1977). Father-daughter incest. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2(4):735-756 [2] Judith Lewis Herman (1986). Histories of violence in an outpatient population: An exploratory study. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 56(1):137-141 Judith Lewis Herman, J. Christopher Perry, Bessel van der Kolk (1989). Childhood trauma in borderline personality disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry 146(4):490-495 [3] Judith Lewis Herman (1992). Complex PTSD: A syndrome in survivors of prolonged and repeated trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress 5(3):377-391 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. Comments are closed.
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