Truth and Repair

In «Trauma and Recovery» (1992) Herman described healing in three stages: establishing safety, mourning the past and reconnecting with others. The new book adds a fourth: justice. The core argument is simple. If trauma is a social problem, recovery cannot be a purely private matter. The wound is not inflicted by the perpetrator alone. The silent relative, the neighbour who says «it's none of my business», the community that blames the victim often leave a deeper mark.

The most memorable part of the introduction is the author's own path. In 1970, at the start of Herman's psychiatric residency, the first two patients are women who had attempted suicide, and both disclose incest by their fathers. At the time a leading textbook put the frequency of incest at one in a million. Herman and a colleague collect just twenty cases, publish a paper and start receiving letters from across the country saying «I thought I was the only one». The story also explains the book's method: listening to survivors is a radical act, because in practice it almost never happens.

The emotional centre of the book is the story of Sarah Super. Sarah is raped at knifepoint by an ex-partner; police arrive within minutes and the attacker is sentenced to 20 years. In other words, the justice system works «perfectly». What wounds Sarah most is the response of their shared community: the attacker's parents launch a support campaign for their son, acquaintances stay silent. Sarah eventually gets a memorial to survivors of sexual violence built in a Minneapolis park. Herman uses Sarah's case to show that a court verdict and public acknowledgment are different things, and that survivors usually lack the second.

Chapter 1 sets out the «rules» of tyranny: the powerful do what they want, the weak submit, bystanders either keep quiet out of fear or take sides. Herman sets the Duluth «Power and Control Wheel» used in domestic violence work beside the coercion methods used on prisoners of war in Korea and shows they are almost identical: sleep deprivation, capricious enforcement of petty rules, random rewards, isolation, degradation. The most damaging method is forcing a person to betray their own values, because it produces shame rather than fear. The pages on shame are the strongest in the chapter.

The opening of Chapter 2 deals with survivors' anger, and it is one of the most interesting parts of the book. The legal system keeps victims at the margins because it fears they will be vengeful. Drawing on Orwell's essay «Revenge Is Sour» and the legal philosopher Jeffrie Murphy, Herman argues the opposite: anger turns into rancour when a victim is left alone, and into a demand for justice when the community stands beside them. Victim impact statements are the proof. Herman reports having read a great many of them and most ask not for harsh sentences but simply to be heard.

The second half of the chapter turns to bystanders. Drawing on Masha Gessen, Herman shows how corruption works as the glue of authoritarian systems, and through Michael Rothberg's idea of the «implicated subject» Herman argues that benefiting from others' oppression creates moral responsibility even without committing a crime. Herman rightly stresses that survivors often experience this betrayal as worse than the crime itself. This is also where the book is weakest: as «tyranny» stretches from dictatorship to the family and then to all of patriarchy, the argument loses precision and at times reads more like a political manifesto than an analysis.

• A personal voice drawn from fifty years of clinical practice
• Testimonies given in survivors' own words
• A broad view combining psychology, law and political philosophy