Quotes by Judith Lewis Herman

About Judith Lewis Herman:

Judith Lewis Herman is a psychiatrist, researcher, teacher, and author who has focused on the understanding and treatment of incest and traumatic stress.
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Father-daughter incest is not only the type of incest most frequently reported but also represents a paradigm of female sexual victimization. The relationship between father and daughter, adult male and female child, is one of the most unequal relati...

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. p4

Judith Lewis Herman

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

Judith Lewis Herman

Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.

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. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed...

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 attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readil...

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 any moment.

Judith Lewis Herman

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, ...

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 trauma.

Judith Lewis Herman

Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was ninetee...

Judith Lewis Herman

The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that these people recover, they do so...

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 above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

Judith Lewis Herman

The traumatized person is often relieved simply to learn the true name of her condition. By ascertaining her diagnosis, she begins the process of mastery. No longer imprisoned in the wordlessness of the trauma, she discovers that there is a language ...

Judith Lewis Herman

Author Bio

  • NameJudith Lewis Herman
  • DescriptionAmerican psychiatrist
  • Born1942
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPsychiatrist; Author
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship