Dr. Judith Herman, a psychiatrist and pioneering researcher of trauma, had her career on hold for two decades as she navigated her own chronic pain and several surgeries after an accident.Credit...Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
By Ellen Barry, The New York Times, April 24, 2023
In the fall of 1994, the psychiatrist Dr. Judith Herman was at the height of her influence. Her book “Trauma and Recovery,” published two years earlier, had been hailed in The New York Times as “one of the most important psychiatric works to be published since Freud.”
Her research on sexual abuse in the white, working class city of Somerville, Mass., laid out a thesis that was, at the time, radical: that trauma can occur not only in the blind terror of combat, but quietly, within the four walls of a house, at the hands of a trusted person.
More than most areas of science, psychology has been driven by individual thinkers and communicators. So what happened to Dr. Herman — as arbitrary as it was — had consequences for the field. She was in a hotel ballroom, preparing to present her latest findings, when she tripped on the edge of a rug and smashed her kneecap.
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