Judith Lewis Herman

Judith Lewis Herman (born 1942) is an American psychiatrist, researcher, teacher, and author who has focused on the understanding and treatment of incest and traumatic stress.

Herman is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a founding member of the Women's Mental Health Collective.

She was the recipient of the 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and the 2000 Woman in Science Award from the American Medical Women's Association.

In 2003, she was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

Herman was born in New York City to Helen Block Lewis, who was a psychologist and psychoanalyst and taught at Yale, and Naphtali Lewis, who worked as a professor of classics at City University of New York.

She received her education at Radcliffe College and Harvard Medical School.

Herman's work focuses on the understanding of trauma and its victims, as set out in her second book, Trauma and Recovery.

There she distinguishes between single-incident traumas – one-off events – which she termed Type I traumas, and complex or repeated traumas (Type II).

Type I trauma, according to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, "accurately describes the symptoms that result when a person experiences a short-lived psychological trauma".

Type II – the concept of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) – includes "the syndrome that follows upon prolonged, repeated trauma".

Although not yet accepted by DSM-IV as a separate diagnostic category, the notion of complex traumas has been found useful in clinical practice, although the 11th revision of ICD (ICD-11), released in 2018, included that diagnosis for the first time.

Herman also set out a three-stage sequence of trauma treatment and recovery.

The first and most important involved the establishment of safety, which might be especially difficult for those in abusive relationships.

The second phase involved active work upon the trauma, fostered by that secure base, and employing any of a range of psychological techniques.

The final stage was represented by an advance to a new post-traumatic life, possibly broadened by the experience of surviving the trauma and all it involved.

Herman is studying the effects of the justice system on victims of sexual violence to discover a better way for victims of crimes to interact with what she perceives as an 'adversarial' system of crime and punishment in the U.S.