Truth and repair: How trauma survivors envision justice; Judith L. Herman,  Basic Books, 2023,  265 pp., ISBN: 978-1-5416-0054-6

Published online: 21 June 2024

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024

Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (2023) is Judith Herman's follow-up to Trauma and Recovery (1992), the foundational text of trauma studies and one of the most important mental health books in the last half-century. In Trauma and Recovery, Herman was the first to define the symptoms that follow prolonged, repeated trauma as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), linking the experience of combat veterans and survivors of rape, and opening up a new direction for trauma studies. C-PTSD has now been accepted as a diagnosis by the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), the World Health Organization (WHO), Veterans Affairs (VA), and the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, but the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) remains a hold-out.

Within Trauma and Recovery, Herman traced the trajectory of trauma recovery through three stages: the establishment of safety in the present, the exploration of the past to grieve and make meaning of trauma, and the process of reconnecting with others in the broader community. Her identification with psychoanalysis is evident here, especially the version of psychoanalysis that honors the social as part of theory and practice. Herman is the daughter of Helen Block Lewis, a psychoanalyst who studied eating disorders and who was the first editor of Psychoanalytic Psychology.

In her latest book, Truth and Repair, Herman draws on her expertise in working with survivors of sexual abuse to chart a fourth and final stage of trauma recovery—justice.