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Trauma and Recovery is a very ambitious book. Its aim is to offer readers nothing less than a unified statement about the psychological impact of diverse forms of trauma and a description of the healing processes needed to repair the consequences of such trauma. It seeks to identify common psychological elements among victims of rape, political torture, and concentration camps, combat veterans, battered women, and the survivors of domestic tyranny and childhood sexual abuse. In the author's words, “I have tried to unify an apparently divergent body of knowledge and to develop concepts that apply equally to the experiences of domestic violence and sexual life, traditional spheres of women, and to the experiences of war and political life, the traditional spheres of men” (p. 4).
In light of the grand scope of the author's intent, it seems to this reviewer that the book has achieved only limited success in reaching its goals. Clearly, Herman deserves credit for addressing some of the most pressing social concerns of our time, which are all too often overlooked in the psychoanalytic literature. (Her first book, Father-Daughter Incest,1 made an important contribution to the mental health literature by calling attention to the impact and incidence of father-daughter incest and childhood sexual abuse). Despite the timeliness and courage of the present volume, however, Trauma and Recovery suffers from a number of shortcomings that restrict its value for a psychoanalytic audience.
Most notable among these is Herman's rather skewed and limited approach to Freud. Unfortunately, her views of Freud rest too exclusively and uncritically on the writings of Masson2 and other authors unfriendly to psychoanalysis. Thus, she does not make clear in her discussion that Freud had good reason for renouncing the seduction theory (it could not support his initial claim to be the universal etiological factor in neurosogenesis), and she fails to comprehend the remarkable contribution that resul