Judith Lewis Herman

“Therapy requires a collaborative working relationship in which both partners act on the basis of their implicit confidence in the value and…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“In situations of captivity the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the…

— Judith Lewis Herman

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in an environment…

— Judith Lewis Herman

The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt.…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4”

— Judith Lewis Herman

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“The study of psychological trauma has repeatedly led into realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“The horror of incest is not in the sexual act. but in the exploitation of children and the corruption of parental love.…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“when traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. All the…

— Judith Lewis Herman

... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“In this climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable developmental task. She must find a way to form primary…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“Father-daughter incest is not only the type of incest most frequently reported but also represents a paradigm of female sexual victimization. The…

— Judith Lewis Herman

Recovery can only take place within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.

— Judith Lewis Herman

“...repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“As recently as 1975, a basic American psychiatry textbook estimated that the frequency of all forms of incest as one case per…

— Judith Lewis Herman

The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children…

— Judith Lewis Herman

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are…

— Judith Lewis Herman

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth,…

— Judith Lewis Herman

“In some instances, even when crisis intervention has been intensive and appropriate, the mother and daughter are already so deeply estranged at…

— Judith Lewis Herman