Damaged Justice
On Judith Herman, trauma, truth, and repair
Abby Kluchin
“Was will das Weib?” Freud famously wrote to Marie Bonaparte. “What do women want?” This question is also at the center of Judith Herman’s new book, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. Unlike Freud, however, Herman has answers. What women want—or rather, what survivors want, survivors being, for Herman, paradigmatically women and women paradigmatically survivors—is justice. But pinpointing precisely what justice means for Herman proves vexing. And for her to even arrive at justice as an answer raises difficult questions about what she, her audience, and even psychoanalysis itself have wanted trauma to be and to mean, both historically and in the present.
Truth and Repair should be read as a sequel to Herman’s monumental 1992 Trauma and Recovery. Long before we all learned from Bessel van der Kolk (a longtime friend and colleague of Herman’s) that “the body keeps the score,” Judith Herman taught a generation of readers to understand trauma as simultaneously individual, social, and political. In Trauma and Recovery, she introduced not only the category of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), but also the notion of the “dialectic of trauma.” For Herman, trauma occurs in the register of both the exceptional and the unspeakable: it is the pain from which we turn away because it taxes the limitations of the human psyche, the horror for which we have no words. This is not just literary description but biological reality. As Herman and countless other trauma scholars have known for decades, the brain encodes traumatic memories differently than other memories; they are not verbal but persist as fragmentary images and sensations, experienced as timeless or out of time. For individuals, the dialectic of trauma, in its most fundamental expression, manifests as an unresolvable tension between the need to speak about the trauma and the need to deny or distance themselves from it. But one of Herman’s keenest insights in Trauma and Recovery is that this unsayability also manifests at the level of culture. The corollary to the dialectic of trauma on the collective level plays out in what Herman calls a kind of “intermittent amnesia” regarding trauma, which results in a continual cycle of (re)discovery and repression in the study of trauma itself.
The dialectical, cyclical character of trauma—and of the reception of the idea of trauma—is crucial for Herman. In her original telling in 1992, Herman outlined three historical moments in this (re)discovery and study of trauma, each bolstered and made possible by a political movement that kept the discovery from being immediately repressed once again. The first moment was at the end of the nineteenth century, in the period after Jean-Martin Charcot’s experiments with hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris, when students of his like Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud took hysterics, for once, quite seriously. As Herman writes, “for a brief decade men of science listened to women with a devotion and a respect unparalleled before or since. Daily meetings with hysterical patients, often lasting for hours, were not uncommon. The case studies of this period read almost like collaborations between doctor and patient.” The forgetting of this phase (more on which below), according to Herman, commenced when Freud quickly recanted his so-called seduction theory, shunting aside his hysterical patients’ traumatic memories of childhood sexual abuse from the domain of reality into the register of fantasy.
The second phase occurred outside the domestic sphere, on the far-flung battlefields of the twentieth century’s wars. The individual and collective traumas of the First and Second World Wars led to renewed psychiatric interest in returning soldiers who behaved, for all intents and purposes, like Freud’s hysterics. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) itself only emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War, supported by political agitation in the form of the anti-war movement. Earlier, after World War II, psychiatrists had determined that with a certain amount of exposure to combat, any soldier, no matter how strong or well-adjusted, would eventually “break.” Freud likewise turned his attention to soldiers returning from war. Indeed, the controversial theory of the death drive that he introduced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle was a direct response to his observations of shell-shocked soldiers and what he called their “compulsion to repeat” traumatic scenes that surely could not yield anything pleasurable. Yet these insights were accompanied by a kind of erasure. The memory of the hysteric had faded, and American conceptions of trauma began to coalesce around the figure of the combat veteran, back home but haunted by his ghosts from the war.
In Herman’s third phase, which she places in the 1970s, the pendulum swung back from the public to the private sphere yet again. During this period, the rise of Second Wave feminist theory and activism, insights from consciousness-raising groups, and new psychological research directly informed by feminist commitments forced a reckoning with the actual scale of the everyday hidden traumas of rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse.
Like her historical narrative of the study and repression of trauma, Herman’s model for the clinical treatment of trauma comes in three stages. First is the establishment of safety, beginning with the safety of the body; second is remembrance and mourning, which includes the reconstruction of a verbal narrative of the traumatic event or events from the fragments of images and sensations; and third is reconnection to the community, the repairing of shattered internal and external structures. But as Herman herself insists, this is not a tidy narrative of progress wherein the various stages resolve into one another. On the contrary, throughout the treatment of any traumatized person, there will be movement back and forth throughout the long process of recovery, which may—for both survivor and therapist—feel some days like moving backward or even like failure. There is no final boss to defeat at the end of each level; a survivor many years into recovery may still have days when she feels physically unsafe in her own body despite all the progress she has made in her healing.
This last point is key. While offering an elegant model of how trauma functions at the level of both individual cases and collective memory, Herman also underscores that trauma is not something that can ever fully and finally resolve. We may be able to track the pendulum of the discovery and the forgetting of trauma across the past century and a half, much as we may be attuned to the vicissitudes of trauma in any given clinical treatment. But trauma itself retains an irreducible dimension that frustrates dialectical synthesis. We may want to be done with trauma, historically speaking, and to overcome our personal traumas too, but trauma frustrates these wishes, time and again, while still demanding attention and care. We want lots of things from trauma, but trauma doesn’t want anything from us—it just is. Herman’s ability to navigate all these registers, and to do so with nuance, compassion, and a quality I would even call wisdom, goes a long way to account for Trauma and Recovery’s influence and staying power.
There is no final boss to defeat at the end of each level; a survivor many years into recovery may still have days when she feels physically unsafe in her own body despite all the progress she has made in her healing.
And yet, in Truth and Repair, Herman goes further and takes a step back all at once. In this new book, Herman revises her model of recovery from trauma by proposing a fourth stage—justice—which seems to hold out the promise of a more complete resolution for individuals and society alike. Yet while Herman has always insisted that the work of recovery happens in and through community and interpersonal relationships, as well as through intrapsychic change, the proposal of justice as a fourth stage of recovery nonetheless marks a profound departure from her earlier work. Despite the deep continuities between Trauma and Recovery and Truth and Repair, Herman’s demand for justice moves her onto new and shakier ground, especially to the extent that this demand involves the contemporary criminal justice system and a rejection of restorative justice. In other words, the question of what survivors of trauma want—like the question of what we collectively might want the study and therapy of trauma to accomplish—is overridden by dubious answers offered by institutions that promise resolution yet ultimately deliver little more than additional trauma.
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To fully understand the stakes of this departure, we must return to hysteria and to Herman’s quarrel with Freud. That fight hinges upon Freud’s work with hysterics, and more specifically his elaboration and near-immediate disavowal of the seduction theory. In 1896, the year after Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, a series of case studies (including his mentor Josef Breuer’s case study with “Anna O.,” the founding patient of psychoanalysis and the coiner of the expression “the talking cure”) came out, he published “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” Born out of clinical work with twelve female and six male hysterics, Freud’s hypothesis is that hysterical symptoms without exception have their origins in childhood sexual trauma: “at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood but which can be reproduced through the work of psychoanalysis in spite of the intervening decades.” The proximate cause for a hysterical neurosis, in other words, reflects the activation of an underlying, anterior trauma, and paradigmatically the experience of a child “seduced” (as it were) into the overstimulating, overwhelming, and incomprehensible position of being the object of someone else’s sexual predation. Although Freud didn’t know just how wildly unpopular the seduction theory would prove to be, “The Aetiology of Hysteria” is written on the defensive: Freud conjures and parries anticipated objections throughout. In particular, he shadowboxes with the question of just how widespread child sexual abuse might be. At one point, countering the imagined objection that there are victims of childhood “seduction” who do not display hysterical symptoms, he compares it to the “ubiquitous” germ for tuberculosis, although he swiftly walks back the comparison for fear that anyone should think he is claiming that childhood sexual abuse is “an almost universal occurrence.” Trauma, Freud suggests, is everywhere, even though, and perhaps in no small part because, we may reflexively want to disavow it.
In “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” Freud figures himself as an “explorer,” an archaeologist of the unconscious. “Saxa loquuntur!” he exclaims; “stones talk!” Whether the talking stones that he deciphered are hysterics or their symptoms or the unconscious itself is not clear. Regardless, Freud’s belief in what he read in those stones was short-lived. The following year, he walked back the seduction theory in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess; he publicly recanted it in an essay published in 1906, “My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses.” Retracting the claim that all hysterical symptoms had their origins in actual sexual abuse in childhood, Freud now treated those hysterical memories as his patients’ fantasies. According to Herman, “the late nineteenth-century studies of hysteria foundered on the question of sexual trauma. At the time of these investigations there was no awareness that violence is a routine part of women’s sexual and domestic lives. Freud glimpsed this truth and retreated in horror.” Instead, and, in the wake of his shift from the belief in the ubiquitous sexual abuse of children to the theory of their fantasy of that abuse, Freud went on to work out not only the Oedipus complex but a broader theory of infantile sexuality.
For Herman, the repression of the reality of child sexual abuse is the foundation upon which the edifice of the entire psychoanalytic enterprise was built. As she writes: “Out of the ruins of the traumatic theory of hysteria, Freud created psychoanalysis. The dominant psychological theory of the next century was founded in the denial of women’s reality. Sexuality remained the central focus of inquiry. But the exploitative social context in which sexual relations actually occur became utterly invisible. Psychoanalysis became a study of the internal vicissitudes of fantasy and desire, dissociated from the reality of experience.” In other words, what Freud once posited to be real, arising from behavior by the other, and external to the patient’s own fantasies, wishes, and fears, he subsequently transformed into something that was interior or at least interiorized. Another way to say this is that Freud listened to women and believed them, until he didn’t.
In the end, the tendency to repress trauma got Freud too, and what’s more, it got psychoanalysis itself. Where sexual abuse was concerned, psychoanalysis lost the plot and forgot the reality principle. From believing women in pain who said they had been sexually harmed by adults as children, Freud reversed course to saying that as children, they had fantasized the very abuses of which they later complained. Even the most sympathetic reader can see this Freud on the page in the “Dora” case study, in which Freud famously discovered transference by egregiously mishandling it. He wonders, genuinely, why on earth his young female patient would be horrified by the unwanted sensation of her father’s friend’s erection against her leg and suggests that her hysterical cough arose from fantasies of performing oral sex. Perhaps, a charitable reader might say, this betrays Freud’s own unwillingness to grapple with Dora’s trauma qua moral injury, since Dora had previously described holding adolescent romantic feelings toward the older man. Or perhaps it marks a failure to compassionately consider how Dora’s own narrative might have reflected an understandable disavowal of any autonomous bodily responses on her part (which would have magnified the trauma of the man’s unwanted and overwhelming sexual advances). Regardless, it was certainly a clinical failure, and arguably even a kind of retraumatizing betrayal perpetrated on Dora by Freud himself. In Freud’s failure to see through clinical treatment with Dora, and in his rejection of the seduction hypothesis, we can, with Herman, perceive a turn from listening to survivors to litigating what Freud (and psychoanalysis) wanted trauma to be, to mean, or to do more generally.
In the end, the tendency to repress trauma got Freud too, and what’s more, it got psychoanalysis itself
But what if we reject this reaction formation, bracket our own wants, and ask: Where is the healing of trauma really located? Trauma may be inflicted from without, whether in the home or on the battlefield. But once trauma arrives, whatever its cause, it is yours to carry. Freud’s betrayal aside, the entirety of Trauma and Recovery is about the endless intrapsychic work that is required to heal from trauma, whether inflicted once or repeatedly over the course of years of abuse. Trauma, in Herman’s account, destroys the coherent sense of self, shatters trust in other human beings, and sunders the possibility of community bonds.
In the case of children, trauma can prevent feelings of safety, security, trust, and coherence from forming in the first place. At the heart of trauma is what Herman calls “damage to relational life,” starting with the relation to a newly fractured or refractured self. (This quality of fragmentation, in Herman’s view, also accounts for the widespread misdiagnosis of women suffering from complex PTSD with conditions like borderline personality disorder and multiple personality disorder.) The condition of the possibility for healing one’s relationships to other people and to the world beyond the boundaries of one’s own skin is the slow, dogged, imperfect work of a lifetime in relation to that self, to a differently wired nervous system that needs to relearn or learn for the first time what it means to relax its vigilance. “Traumatized people suffer damage to the basic structures of the self,” she writes. “The identity they have formed prior to the trauma is irrevocably destroyed.” After trauma arrives, as Herman would be the first to admit, one is never the same. That bell cannot be unrung, and there is nothing that any third party, even the most gifted clinician, can do on their own to restore someone to their previous self. That is, in the end, on them.
Some thirty years after Trauma and Recovery, autonomy and empowerment remain the watchwords of recovery for Herman. This conviction arises out of her clinical practice, specifically from her observation that autonomy is precisely what trauma destroys. But it is also underwritten by her feminist politics. Herman’s feminist commitments remain firmly Second Wave and are indebted to both Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, for whom heterosexual sex under conditions of patriarchy is fundamentally inseparable from dynamics of violence, coercion, and domination. This influence is especially visible in how Herman approaches the trauma of sexual violence. While the twin figures of the combat veteran and the rape survivor recur throughout Herman’s work as “the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men respectively,” sexual violence—specifically rape—has a special status with respect to trauma for Herman. There is something distinctive, for her, about the act of rape as a violation of personhood that makes it, even more than the psychic wounds incurred on the battlefield, uniquely representative of trauma. “The purpose of the rapist,” Herman claims, “is to terrorize, dominate, and humiliate his victim, to render her utterly helpless. Thus rape, by its nature, is intentionally designed to produce psychological trauma.”
This elevation of rape to the status of paradigmatic trauma and of rape victims to paradigmatic survivors is doubtless a function of Herman’s years of clinical work with incest survivors. But it also goes far beyond that. In Herman’s view, rape expresses an essential truth about the reality of the relationship between men and women, which is fundamentally a relationship of violence, opposition, domination, and subordination. Clearly influenced by MacKinnon’s writing on rape, which treats heterosexual sex as deeply inflected by violence and casts doubt on the meaningfulness of consent, Herman writes in 1992: “The subordinate condition of women is maintained and enforced by the hidden violence of men. There is war between the sexes. Rape victims, battered women, and sexually abused children are its casualties. Hysteria is the combat neurosis of the sex war.” In 2023, looking back at a lifetime of work with incest and abuse survivors, Herman affirms this view, calling incest “a paradigm of women’s sexual oppression.”
In Truth and Repair, Herman sets herself the task of interviewing and listening to survivors, asking what might constitute justice for them in a meaningful way. Most of these interviews are twenty years old, from a project that she undertook and then shelved, although she has also conducted some new interviews and reinterviewed previous subjects. Herman pursues her task with her eyes wide open to the systematic failures of the criminal justice system with respect to rape survivors; indeed, I would argue that the entire book is underwritten by MacKinnon’s animating insight that “the injury of rape lies in the meaning of its act to its victim, but the standard for its criminality lies in the meaning of the act to the assailant.” Herman rehearses a litany of how our criminal justice system performs what is often called a “second rape” of the survivor in the courtroom, with a particular attunement to the ways in which this is not only a retraumatization but an active deterrent to recovery:
“Victims need to establish a sense of power and control over their lives; the court requires them to submit to a complex set of rules and bureaucratic procedures. . . . Victims need time for recovery; the court sets the timetable for justice. . . . Victims need an opportunity to tell their stories in their own way; the court requires them to respond on the witness stand to a set of direct questions from the prosecutor and then to endure crossexamination. . . . Victims often need to control or limit their exposure to specific reminders of the trauma; the court requires them to relive their experiences in great detail. Victims often fear direct interaction with their perpetrators; the court requires a face-to-face confrontation with the accused.”
This is all quite accurate, as countless rape survivors, legal advocates, activists, and others have documented. But why, then, does Herman insist upon justice as the new fourth stage of recovery from trauma? If our criminal justice system, such as it is, is vastly more inimical to the care and healing of sexual trauma than even the clinical situations Herman critiques, why should the former be seen as a necessary and therapeutic supplement to the latter? By the end of the book, I still did not know the answer to that question. Herman is possessed of a deep and abiding understanding of the ways in which courts retraumatize survivors but a wildly undertheorized conception of justice. Her forays into political philosophy, particularly into notions of justice and what she calls tyranny (characterized by dynamics of dominance and submission rather than those of mutuality, which she swiftly conflates with democracy) are brief and sketchy. They rely heavily on appeals to literal dictionary definitions, along with passing references to social contract theory, John Rawls’s concept of justice as fairness, and allusions to John Stuart Mill’s harm principle. Readers even passingly familiar with these thinkers and traditions will know they offer little in the way of resources for thinking about the psyche and psychic harms, and largely proceed as though sexual difference—to say nothing of sexual trauma—is a mere detail, if it even exists at all.
If our criminal justice system, such as it is, is vastly more inimical to the care and healing of sexual trauma than even the clinical situations Herman critiques, why should the former be seen as a necessary and therapeutic supplement to the latter?
Herman provides the most robust version of justice in the book when she attends to what survivors say they want: acknowledgment, apology, and accountability. Acknowledgment clusters around the idea of truth-telling: survivors report the desire for the harm that has been done to them to be publicly aired and understood as harm, and they want their friends, family, and communities to believe them and to believe that what was done to them was wrong. Apology is an area where survivors differed in particular: many or even most would not wish for an actual verbal apology. Indeed, some survivors express that any explicit apology from those who have harmed them might well be just another form of manipulation. Thus while Herman uses the language of apology, she is clear that what she means by it is more of a genuine admission of harm. On these two counts, although the precise details of what they want differ, “survivors wish for moral vindication.” Acknowledgment and apology—not only from perpetrators but also bystanders—are the conditions for survivors to be able to reconnect with their communities. “When the community embraces the survivor,” Herman writes, “justice is served.”
Like justice, accountability is another term that, when considered in the context of the existing criminal justice system, can also collapse into punishment and incarceration. Yet accountability, Herman notes, is rarely framed by survivors in terms of a desire for punishment. Rather, they want to see perpetrators “make amends.” It is in this context that Herman explores a whole suite of possibilities of restitution and rehabilitation. It is also here that a theologically minded reader might suspect Herman of seeking a solution to the problem of evil rather than the meaning of justice.
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Herman points to a few interventions within and beyond the criminal justice system that have helped center survivors rather than perpetrators. Notable among those is the relatively recent practice of victims’ impact statements, as brought to public attention in the well-publicized Brock Turner case and further by Chanel Miller’s memoir Know My Name. But if Herman is so thoroughly convinced that sexual abuse is paradigmatic of trauma—and acknowledges that the criminal justice system is an institution that, to borrow language again from Catharine MacKinnon, at best “regulates” rape rather than prohibiting it, while almost inevitably retraumatizing survivors—we must ask: Why look to the criminal justice system at all for something resembling justice? Why not, for example, go in the direction of feminist legal scholar Alexandra Brodsky, whose recent book Sexual Justice Herman cites approvingly? Brodsky, also a founder of the campus activist network Know Your IX, points out that while we ought not to place our faith in institutions to do the right thing by survivors, it is nonetheless a mistake to understand the adjudication of interpersonal harms by institutions other than the criminal or civil justice system as somehow out of the normal order of things. This mistake, for Brodsky, reflects a collective “incorrect assumption that sexual harms are inherently criminal and that therefore every adjudication must look like a criminal trial.” As Brodsky notes, “institutions have always had to make decisions about allegations of misconduct within their ranks . . . they regularly investigate allegations of all kinds to determine what happened and who was responsible, and then make decisions about what should be done as a result.” It is only when those allegations involve sexual violence or sexual harassment that we see these procedures as somehow overreaching, or as irresponsibly handling conflicts that ought to require police or legal intervention.
Indeed, Herman is intrigued by the possibilities of institutional solutions. She is also attuned to various therapeutic innovations and experiments that might bring survivors the vindication and acceptance they seek from their moral communities. Yet her focus in thinking about justice bewilderingly centers on a search for solutions from within the criminal and civil justice systems. This choice feels increasingly peculiar as the book goes on, given her open admission that these systems can only dole out punishment in the form of incarceration and monetary damages in the vanishingly small number of cases where survivors succeed in having charges brought on their behalf (in criminal cases) or bring charges themselves (in civil cases) and go on to win their cases.
More bewildering still is what I read as her rejection of the promises of restorative justice (RJ), especially in the details of the example she rehearses. Herman recounts the details of an RJ procedure mediated by prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba within a community of Black social justice activists and initiated by a survivor committed to seeking justice outside of carceral solutions. Restorative justice is, as she notes, time-consuming for the community, and in this case, it fails in one major way: the perpetrator goes on to re-offend within the community that was seeking to heal itself along with the survivor. While restorative justice, like all processes, is imperfect, I was baffled by Herman’s selection of this example to stand in for the promises and failures of restorative justice in general, as well as by her failure to see it as a genuine example of survivor’s justice by her very own definition of vindication from a moral community. After all, as part of the restorative justice process, the survivor was provided with a support group that “helped her to process the trauma and develop her ideas for the kind of amends she wanted.” Meanwhile, the harmdoer, although he re-offended, was also given a support group “to help him understand the consequences of his actions and what kind of changes might be necessary to repair the harm he had done.” He apologized and made amends, but he continued to re-offend, which fractured the community yet again. But is this a failure of restorative justice—which, after all, provided the survivor with a supportive moral community that affirmed her harm and helped her to heal and envision what would constitute genuine healing on her own terms—or is it reflective of the harsh reality that there will never be a solution to the problem of people who unrepentantly set out to harm others?
The problem, it seems, comes back to what Herman—and we—want, how we structure our questions in light of what we want, on whom we put the onus for answering them, and what those answers look like. As Herman describes, Freud, in asking after what his female hysteric patients wanted, listened to them, but soon became overwhelmed by what he heard, and reeled backward in favor of tidier, more familiar, and less-distressing answers (at least for him). And as Herman’s still-resonant argument in Truth and Repair spells out, our social script for processing historical traumas is a cyclical process of attunement, disconnection, and motivated forgetting—a collective exercise in wanting to listen, becoming overwhelmed, and falling back on familiar but insufficient answers.
A pioneer in his attunement to psychic pain more than a century ago, Freud, as Herman astutely observes, eventually grew overwhelmed by it and took flight into theory. Herman is a luminary in her own right, especially when it comes to listening to such pain on its own terms and making sense of it, no matter how excruciating. Her new book arrives in a moment when the collective tendency to repress trauma as a culture has been—at least temporarily—overcome by an equally collective tendency to speak about it constantly. But is talking about trauma all the time the same as reckoning with it, let alone genuinely metabolizing it on a social and cultural level? Between continual rumination over individual trauma on the one hand and structural inertia in the face of mass death on the other, it’s understandable that we crave some kind of dialectical resolution, a path forward. But if there’s any one lesson that Herman teaches us, it’s that trauma does not simply resolve, and the task of listening to it may be interminable. By the same token, the past few years, so saturated with collective trauma, have been an object lesson in the hollowness of promises of resolution offered by institutions like the criminal justice system. And in that way, Truth and Repair is very much a symptom of its time.