Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

Judith Lewis Herman

Dec 2019 · Hachette Audio · Narrated by Alison Mathews and Xe Sands

About this audiobook

The groundbreaking work on trauma that remains a “classic for our generation” (Bessel van der Kolk, MD, author of The Body Keeps the Score)

Trauma and Recovery is the foundational text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a political frame, psychiatrist Judith L. Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.

This edition includes a new epilogue by the author assessing what has—and hasn’t—changed in understanding and treating trauma over the last three decades.

Hailed by the New York Times as “one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud,” Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we heal.

Ratings and reviews

Very thorough on the very melancholy fate & aftermath that befalls a trauma survivor - what was especially pleasing is Judith Herman's compassionate understandings of the survivor. The pluses & negatives of individual/group therapy are discussed alongside the immense obstacle course of the 3-phase approach. The tragedy of the injustice system before & after traumas and that trauma is a universal experience of being a human being alongside the tragic bonding survivors have to the abusers.

Very well spoken well written well delivered. This is a timely message. Many people are on drugs due to this type of trauma.

About the author

Judith L. Herman, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and is a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.