[Music]
KREISLER: Welcome to a conversation with history.
I’m Harry Kreisler of the Institute of
International Studies. Our guest today is
Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, an M.D., Professor
of Clinical Psychology at Harvard
University Medical School, and Director
Of Training at the Victims of Violence
Program in the Department of Psychiatry
at the Cambridge Hospital, Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Her fields of research are
the psychology of women, child abuse and
domestic violence, and post-traumatic
disorders. A pioneer in the study of
post-traumatic stress syndrome and the
sexual abuse of women and children, her
numerous publications include Trauma and
Recovery and Father and Daughter Incest.
Welcome to Berkeley, Dr. Herman. HERMAN: Thank you.
KREISLER: How did your parents shape your
character?
HERMAN: my parents are first-generation
Americans. They’re themselves children of
Jewish immigrants from Central Europe,
but they both grew up in New York City,
and I think were… My father, child of
working-class parents, my father worked
in the garment industry. My mother was
the daughter of a doctor, of a family
practitioner on the Lower East Side of
New York. I think both of them were
raised in a secular socialist tradition.
Or I should say my mother was. My father
found his way to it from his father’s
observant orthodoxy. And when they both
became academics—my father became a
professor of classics, my mother became a
psychologist—I think they instilled what
I would call enlightenment values or
progressive values
in their children. KREISLER: And your mother
especially had a really strong influence
on you. You write in one of
your books, you write, “Her
psychological insight, her
intellectual daring and integrity, her
compassion for the afflicted and
oppressed, her righteous indignation, and
her political vision are my inheritance,”
you go on to say. Quite a powerful effect.
HERMAN: My mother I think was… She was
raised I think by her father, who was
this… family doctor, very much I think
in a tradition of service to others. If
she’d been in my generation I imagine
she’d have gone to medical school. That
was unheard of, or not totally
but very unusual for women of her
generation. She went to Barnard and then
did graduate studies at Columbia in
psychology and I think started off on
an academic track to become a research
psychologist and then was blacklisted
because of a short period of membership
in the Communist Party. And I think that…
So the early years of my growing up, when
I was around 10 for example, we were
introduced to the idea of political
persecution and what people do under
those circumstances in a very personal way.
My father had never been a member of the
Party, so when called to testify before
McCarthy he could in honesty say to the
question “Are you now or have you ever
been,” he could say, “No.” My mother took the
Fifth Amendment. It was clear that she
was never going to get an academic job.
And so, she then went
a different route and got clinical training. But
in her later work she tried to bridge
the divide between academic research and
clinical experience. I think she also
tried to bridge the divide between
academia and activism in a way that did
become a model for me. And I should also
say that her a lot of her righteous
indignation and her sense of… a kind of
an expectation of integrity and standing
up for your beliefs came out of actual
experience. There were a lot of dinner
table conversations about who was going
to testify, who was going to inform, who
was going to back up people who refused
to inform, and so forth. And she
had a really keen sense I think of
irony and indignation about all the
weaseling, all the kind of fancy excuses
that people made to compromise
with something that was morally
reprehensible. So I think that was
a pretty formative growing up
experience for me. KREISLER: Any other experiences
from your childhood—mentors, books read—
that had a profound influence before the
women’s movement, we’ll talk about that
in a second, but anything else stand out
in your mind? HERMAN: I had a college mentor that
I really should recognize I think and
an honor. This was a professor of French
civilization at Harvard named Laurence
Wylie, an anthropologist really. And he
had done a village study in France in
which he
applied the methods of anthropology
ordinarily applied in so-called
“primitive” societies to a French village.
He was a participant observer. He had
gone there with his family. He had written
about it in a deceptively simple manner
that I think actually was extremely
sophisticated but didn’t involve any
high sort of… KREISLER: Theoretical concepts. Yeah.
HERMAN: High… Well they were embedded in the KREISLER: Right.
HERMAN: observations and in the presentation so,
KREISLER: Lucidity. There was a lucidity.
HERMAN: There was a lucidity
and a warmth of storytelling in
this book, and it became a
very popular book and he ended up
becoming the Douglas Dillon Professor
of French Civilization at Harvard, which
was a funny fit for him, because he was
he was a very modest and unpretentious
person, and I don’t know if he ever
kind of lived up to the grandeur of this
endowed chair. But he was a wonderful
teacher.
KREISLER: So both of these influences strike me as
pushing you, leading you, guiding you in
the direction of thinking outside the
box, which one could say that that
characterizes your work. HERMAN: Yes, and also of
keeping your concepts very close to
direct observation and direct
experience. And in the case of Larry
Wylie, we had a seminar on village
culture that we read all the classics,
but then the idea was to immerse
ourselves in primary data and eventually
to go to the village and to keep the…
The assignment was basically to keep a
journal,
and to record your observations directly
and see what you could then infer from
your observations. The other thing he
taught me was cooperative learning, which,
there wasn’t a name for it then, but he
got these very high-powered students to
be in his seminar and they would all
kind of raise their hands and kind of
spout forth with their ideas, and he
would say things like, “That’s such an
interesting idea. And it sounds so much
like what so-and-so said. Why don’t the
two of you work together and see if you
can develop this idea together?” And we’d
sort of look at each other in horror
because that was sort of cheating. But
through his actions, through his
example, he modeled a different kind of
learning and a different kind of
intellectual enterprise, I think, for me.
KREISLER: And it’s something that you’ve carried
out in your work, namely the whole notion
of listening and reporting what
you’re observing but also learning in
the process from others. And in this
regard the women’s movement of the
sixties seems to have had an impact on you.
Now, I’m curious now after learning of
these other influences how it, the
ingredient that it added to the
education of Judith Herman. HERMAN: Well… For me
this was a logical extension of the
activism that I was already involved
with. I had been involved in the civil
rights movement, I had been involved in
the anti-war movement, prior to
the kind of explosion of second-wave
feminism in the late sixties. And Kathie Sarachild
of the New York Redstockings, who was
a classmate of mine at Harvard Radcliffe,
and who had been in Mississippi also
with me in 1964,
she’s the originator of the term
consciousness-raising, and like
many of the early feminists who came out
of the civil rights movement, her
organizing technique came out of the
work she had done in civil rights and
involved people speaking directly of
their experience as a way to study our
condition. She called
consciousness-raising basically an
empirical method of investigation. And
her view was that for people whose
experience was not articulated, not
recognized, not visible in the theory
class so to speak, the only way to begin
to make our experience known to
ourselves was to start
with the testimony about the concrete
conditions of our lives. So it was a
connect for me and many women of my
generation I think to start to apply
those methods not only to the social
issues of racism and war but to the
conditions of our own rather privileged
lives and to recognize that oppression
takes many forms. KREISLER: So that in a way was
a spark for your creativity and it
helped you sort of look at yourself and
your condition in the broader
context in which that condition was
created, here namely the oppression of
women. HERMAN: Right and also I mean the lesson
for me was that one becomes most
effective when one is speaking out
of one’s personal experience and one’s
action grows out of the understanding of
one’s immediate personal experience.
KREISLER: Now you went to Harvard you
went to Radcliffe then to Harvard
Medical School. You’re a medical
doctor. What were you doing in
Mississippi? Just part of the civil
rights movement? HERMAN: I was
recruited by a friend and colleague, and
now more recently a partner, named
Allen Graubard, who had gone to
Mississippi the summer before Freedom
Summer with Marian Wright, now Marian
Wright Edelman, and they had developed
this idea that it would be good to have
a kind of an academic exchange between
Harvard and Tougaloo College, which was at
that time, it’s based outside of
Jackson Mississippi and was a Black
college, and so they implemented this
program that involved an exchange of
students and faculty during that summer
and then, when SNCC and the other
organizations developed Freedom Summer,
we became an affiliated part of that
project. KREISLER: You got interested early on in
trauma, but specifically in the problem
of incest, and in one of your books you
described a paper, your first paper with
Lisa Hirschman, and it really was a case
where it almost was on the ground paper.
Tell us a little about that. That is, the
ideas that you were proposing, both
that there should be focus on the
subject, and to actually look at its
broader context was quite revolutionary,
quite radical. It went to the roots of
the problems. HERMAN: Well that’s what
we thought at the time, and the reason we
thought that was that we were seeing
cases.
Lisa had just finished her training as a
psychologist, I had just finished my
psychiatric residency. We were doing some
peer supervision really. And we’d seen
all these incest cases and we kept
wondering, “What’s going on
here? Why are we seeing all these cases?
Is there something about us that’s
attracting that, or is this something
that everybody starting out as a
therapist sees? And if so, why isn’t
anybody else saying anything about it?”
And we kept saying waiting for someone
else to say something about it, and we
waited and waited and nobody did, so then
we finally said well maybe we ought to. I
think what gave us the courage to do
that, besides our relationship with each
other, was having come out of
consciousness-raising, feeling that
we were part of a movement where it was
okay to trust your own observations even
if nobody else seemed to think that what
you saw made any sense. KREISELR: Before we talk a
little about trauma, which became a major
focus of your work, I want to have you
talk to us about something you say at
the beginning of your book on trauma
recovery. And that is, you relate the history of
psychological insight to the ferment of
the times. And in a short
history you show how Freud’s work on,
Freud and others’ work on 
hysteria came at a political moment 
in French history. That the work on
war veterans and trauma and war veterans
came as part of an anti-war struggle. And
then finally that insights on women and
the traumas that they suffered
came in the political climate, or the
aftermath of the political climate, of
the sixties. Tell us a little about that, because
that’s very important in your thinking
about these issues, especially the issue
of trauma. HERMAN: Well you know, psychology is a
very soft science, putting it at its most
charitable. What one observes about human
behavior, human consciousness human
relationships, is so embedded in, and
what we observe and how we conceptualize
what we observe, is so embedded in the
context of what we’re looking for and
how we name it.
This isn’t physics. And so, even the
paying attention, the selection of what
it is that we’re going to consider
interesting and significant in human
behavior is so formed by the social and
political context that we’re embedded in.
And I think that’s particularly true
about the emotions related to power and
control, the emotions related to one’s
place in society, one’s place in the
family, the emotions of shame, of
resentment, of pride, of a sense of
legitimacy or illegitimacy. So, even
to pay attention to what women say about
sex, motherhood, relationships depends so
much on what one thinks a woman ought to
be saying, ought to be feeling, is
legitimate to express, unless you have a
political movement that says, “Forget what
everybody else thinks you ought to be
feeling, what you ought to be saying.
Get down to it tell the truth. What did
you actually think and feel and notice
in your body?” You need a safe space to be
able to do that. You need a political
context to be able to do that. KREISLER: And in the
end, one of the intriguing points
that emerged from your book is that, in
focusing on the trauma endured by
children and mothers, which is a new
agenda, as you just discussed,
what you find is an insight that
actually extends just beyond
them to victims of political torture,
to war veterans, and so on, so that in a
way, in looking at the particular, you
end up with the universal. HERMAN: To me that’s
kind of… It seems so clear. I don’t
know why it’s so hard to figure out, you
know. Oppression is oppression. Being the
underdog is being the underdog. Being
treated with contempt is being treated
with contempt. Being treated violently is
being treated violently.
People kind of respond the same way to
it. When you get right down to it,
pain is pain. KREISLER: But I do think, showing that
obvious point is radical and was radical
at the time you did it because of the
boxes that are created to not make those
connections, actually. HERMAN: Well I mean, radical
ideas are always very simple it seems to
me, for precisely that reason. And
they’re only radical because
of those obstacles, if you know what I mean.
Not because of their complexity.
KREISLER: So you
focused on trauma especially, and
women and children.
Help us understand what
post-traumatic stress syndrome is. HERMAN: Okay.
Well I can tell you about what it says
in the DSM IV. KREISLER: Which is the official Bible
of the Psychiatric Association.
HERMAN: Right, right. The Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of the American Psychiatric
Association, 4th Edition. And I was on the
committee that helped write this
definition, so I have to take some
responsibility.
And the committee, I have to
say, brought together people who’d
worked with traumatized people in many
different social settings: combat
veterans, accident victims, less from the
sphere sexual and domestic violence but
we were represented to some degree,
political violence. And what the
consensus came out to be was that
traumatic events were those that
instilled a feeling of terror and
helplessness. We used to say by the way
that these had to be events outside
the realm of ordinary human experience,
and we had to get rid of that
unfortunately, because if you’re living
in a war zone or you’re living in a
country emerging from dictatorship or that’s
experiencing dictatorship, these are not
out-of-the-ordinary experiences,
unfortunately. But experiences that
instill helplessness and terror. And
terror turns out to be different from
fear. Fear is something that we’re all
biologically wired to experience when
we’re in danger, and we share this with
many other animals. When we perceive
danger we alert, we startle, we look
around and figure out, do a quick
appraisal of the situation, and then we either fight
or flee. That’s being revised now by some
researchers looking more at women who say,
you know, fight or flight is a little bit
more the male response. Tend and befriend
tends to be, you know, there’s a
tendency to kind of huddle with one’s
kind that you observe more in females,
but okay fight or flight. And there’s a
whole biology of fear that’s involved.
Fight or flight doesn’t work in
conditions of terror and helplessness,
and under those conditions it appears that
some kind of biological weak
rewiring seems to happen in people, and
animals as well, so that
even after the danger is over, the person
continues to respond to reminders, to
both specific reminders and to generally
threatening situations, as though this
terrifying event were still occurring in
the present. So you have the activation
of the fear system, hyperarousal, you
have a kind of reexperiencing of the trauma
that takes the form of flashbacks,
nightmares, and so forth, and then you
have this other more poorly understood
part of the traumatic syndrome that has
to do with a kind of shutting down of
responsiveness, numbing, a sense of that
things aren’t real, there may be amnesia
for some or all of the event, a sense in the
aftermath that one is just kind of not
really oneself, one is going through the
motions. There’s a loss of connection of
things that are or previously of
interest, and these are called the
numbing or withdrawal symptoms of
PTSD. So hyperarousal, reexperiencing, 
numbing is the sort of triad. It’s a
descriptive formulation. We understand a
little bit about the psychobiology, not
a whole lot, and I think we’re coming to
understand more and more that
that’s the simple form. That’s what
happens to some people after a single
impact trauma. If you repeat it over and
over and especially if it begins early
on and one’s development is formed in
this environment, it gets a lot more
complicated. KREISER: And this is often the case
of women and children who are in
domestic situations where the cycle goes
on and on until… HERMAN: I think it’s true of
people in any situation, of course, of
control, whether you’re talking about a
hostage situation that goes on for a
long time, whether you’re talking about
domestic violence or sexual
child abuse, whether it is, some religious
cults have this same captivity kind of
situation, and then of course the
political situations of concentration
camps or political prisoners.
KREISELR: In summarizing or introducing your
discussion, you say “The dialectic of
trauma gives rise to complicated,
sometimes uncanny, alterations of
consciousness,” and then you go on to
compare the political doublethink in an
Orwell novel with the what the 
psychologists and the psychiatrists
called dissociation. So in a way you’re
suggesting that this kind of repression,
inability to confront both the
individual reality and the larger
reality is something that happens to the
individual and in some ways to the society.
HERMAN: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean if
you talk to survivors of especially the
prolonged and repeated trauma, where the
perpetrator, the captor, the torturer
isn’t content to just have external
compliance but wants the captive to
adopt and endorse his worldview, even
after liberation what you’ll get people
saying is “I’m living in a double reality.
I have the present and the past
coexisting in my mind. It’s not clear which
is more real to me. And I have what’s
left of my old value system or my old
way of seeing the world and the
perpetrator’s way of seeing the world
coexisting in my mind and I can go
back and forth between the two, and I’m
not sure which I belong to or which
belongs to me any longer.” So people have
the experience of living in a double
reality. And they describe, even with the,
even amnesia. People will describe
simultaneously knowing and not knowing
what happened, remembering and not
remembering what happened. When people
get their memories back they will often
describe it as simultaneously reliving
the experience and being outside of it
as though it happened to somebody else.
So people really learn to divide their
consciousness under conditions of
captivity, under conditions of course of
control. And since we don’t even
understand unitary consciousness very
well, when people have got double
consciousness, double reality,
to me, I’m in awe. I think it’s a
fascinating window, in a way, into how the
mind works.
KREISLER: And did this experience that you’re
describing. In your book you actually
quote extensively from the memoirs
of everyone from a former star of, or
a forced participant in pornographic
films, but also a political prisoner, and
there are common themes that
run through their sense of this
experience which you have just
summarized. HERMAN: Well and to
me that’s not surprising, given that the
methods of the torture and the methods
of the pimp or the pornographer are
often similar, and I think when we
understand more about criminal gangs
as an intermediary form of organization
between say state-sponsored terrorism
and one-family cells of domestic
violence, we’ll understand more about the
transmission of methods of torture,
methods, of course, of control. But if you
use the same methods on people, whether
you’re doing it in the name of the state,
in the name of a criminal gang that’s
marketing your body, or whether you’re
doing it in the name of the authority of
a father or the name of some religious
cult, the methods are the same and so the
mental processes that they produce are
likely to be the same. KREISLER: In your work you
enter this realm of such apparent
hopelessness and despair, but the
other side of your work is identifying
the features of essentially hope and
recovery, and the road back. I
want you to discuss with us the
elements of a survival. That is, survival
and recovery, which is the other part of
the title of your book. So 
what are the elements that we see?
The common elements in people who
experience this but make it back?
HERMAN: First of all I guess I should say that
that’s the other reason I stick with
this work. I’m constantly in awe of
the resilience of the people we work
with. They really do get better, they
really do make new lives for themselves.
They find incredibly creative ways to
put the pieces of their lives back
together, and a lot of times, since a
lot of the work I do now is supervising
students, teaching them how to be
therapists, I get to observe the way the
patients re-instill hope constantly not
only in the students and
those who are privileged to watch
and observe this process. The students
will come in and say, “I just met with
this woman from Rwanda and she, you know,
she lost her whole family, she managed
finally to get out to Uganda with two of
her brother’s kids, and they’re, you
know, staying with a minister in Uganda,
and she came here, and they only could get
papers to bring her, she’s working under
the table cleaning houses or cleaning
offices at night, she has no money, she’s
living in apartment with ten people, and
she has the worst PTSD I ever saw, and
she’s here for a political asylum
evaluation. What do I possibly have to
offer this person?” And in the first
interview, here’s a woman who speaks in
monosyllables. Her eyes are down, her
head is bowed, her shoulders are like this,
she’s hunched over. If you drop
something on the floor or a car backfires
outside she jumps out of her seat,
otherwise she’s immobile like this. You
think, “This is the worst depression, this
is the worst PTSD I’ve ever
seen.” PTSD is post-traumatic stress…
“What am I going to do” And so you work on
documenting her case for her political
asylum hearing. And you also work with
her on trying to understand,
is she safe now? What’s her environment
like now? What can she do to… what does
she need now to begin to rebuild her
life? And within a few months the same
person comes back into our office and
she’s lively, she’s smiling, she’s talking.
She’s gotten her asylum, so she’s safe
now. She’s starting to work and bring
those kids over. She’s joined a church, or
she’s started an English class. A lot of
work we do is through interpreters. She’s
found, on her own, some kind of community,
with our encouragement, and she will come
back and say, you know, “You listened to me,
you seemed to care, you helped me out, you
gave me what I needed to get what I
needed. That restored my faith in people.”
And we sort of feel like all we did was,
you know, we did so little, but it was enough.
There’s a way in which survivors, many
survivors, make do with the least little
bit of human caring, human concern, to
put back the pieces of their lives. And
so from my point of view, if we can
provide that, it’s a gift that comes back
to us many times over. KREISLER: And so as you’ve
just said, there were really three
elements. It’s sort of providing them a
zone of safety then, they remember and
tell their story, and then but very
importantly, they have to reconnect.
I’m curious as to how you would
characterize what you do beyond what you
just said. Obviously you do some
interviewing. And is it an important
element of that interviewing to be a
witness? And to provide the essential
elements of this safety,
this support for telling the story?
HERMAN: I think bearing witness is important.
You know, I also don’t want
to minimize the skill or the
sophistication of the treatment that we
do because people, a lot of people who come
to us do have complicated both medical
and psychiatric conditions and they
don’t just necessarily have
post-traumatic stress disorder. They need
all of their needs attend to,
and they’re often quite complex. I’m
thinking of a woman for example,
who it turned out… Here’s an
example of how complicated it became. It
turned out that this is someone who had
been repeatedly raped, this is another
political asylum case, and was having
persistent vaginal bleeding,
and had never had a medical exam,
but because of the vaginal bleeding also
was considered unclean, couldn’t have
intercourse, also couldn’t enter the
mosque. This was an Arab woman,
a Muslim woman from Algeria.
Getting her proper GYN attention on
the one hand, the medical part of it
needed to be attended to, and on
the other hand, we needed to
find sort of a friendly mosque. We needed
to find someone in the clergy who could
actually begin to reconnect her with a
spiritual community. And we needed to do
some family work in order to start
helping her repair her relationship with
her husband. And this is someone who
really felt dee— The meaning
of the trauma in terms of a sense of
stigma, contamination, ostracism and so on,
it was not metaphorical. It was carried
on in the physical symptom of bleeding,
and until the bleeding was addressed,
there really wasn’t any hope of the
making new meaning out of what happened
to her. So we pay a lot of attention to
the meaning of specific symptoms in
individual cases and we really take an
approach that ranges from the biological
to the social. KREISLER: In your work this
emphasis on community
and broader issues such
as power recur again and again. In the
specific case of your careful
examination of the problem of incest
where you end up if I can summarize, and
I hope I’m not being unfair, is in a way
to look at the broader society and to
ask the question, well, will this kind of
problem ever go away in a patriarchal
society? And in a way your answer is no
on the one hand, and but that leads you
to propose essentially the need for
political action, in the sense that 
what you have to then look
at is the family in which the partners
are equal, the male is not the dominant
one, and it’s only in such an environment
that one can find a kind of equality,
where men for example are involved in
the rearing of children, more than
involved, are equal partners, and
that’s how you really get at the root of
the problem. So in a way, this analysis
goes back to what you learned at the
dinner table. That
psychological insight cannot be
separated from political insight and
action. HERMAN: Absolutely.
KREISLER: So would you add anything to that?
I hope it wasn’t an unfair summary of
where… But in the end, the
individual can’t deal with this alone is
what I’m trying to get at. HERMAN: No, and I think
that’s the take-home message that I try
to give whenever I teach and
whenever I do my therapeutic work,
whether… I don’t think patients, that
survivors, victimized people, can recover
in isolation. They need other people. They
need to take action in affiliation with others.
I don’t think therapists can do
therapeutic work alone. When we’re
isolated with this we do give into
despair, we do burn out, or we
lose our perspective. And 
ultimately, you know, if you’re talking
about horrible abuses of power, you’re
talking about the atrocious things
that one person does to another person.
And just when you think you’ve heard
everything and there’s simply nothing
else that you could imagine that one
person would intentionally do to another,
somebody comes along with a story that
just blows you away all over again. So
you’re dealing with very profound
questions of human evil, human cruelty,
human sadism, the
abuse of power and authority. And the
antidote to that is the solidarity of
resistance. Nobody can do that alone.
KREISLER: You say at one point, “We do know that
the women who recover most successfully
are those who discover some meaning in
their experience that transcends the
limits of personal tragedy. Most commonly
women find this meaning by joining with
others in social action.” And this means
concrete things. It means hearing other
people’s stories. It means mentoring in
the context of a tragedy. But also
joining organizations to change the
laws about what the criminal justice
system says is a violation of human rights.
HERMAN: Right. It means going down and
testifying before the legislature, or
taking part in some kind of public
education campaign, or going to court, or
accompanying someone else to court, or
demonstrating
in favor of the assertion of victims’
rights. KREISLER: In looking at your career,
you combine political activism with
accomplishment in a professional field.
And some concluded you know in the sixties
that that was not possible. That is,
to bring sort of radical insight, you
know, to expertise in given areas. I’m
curious as to what your advice would be
to students who might, you know, read this
interview and say you know, “Gee, that’s
the kind of thing I would want to do
with my life.” How do you prepare to be
both an activist and a professional, you
know, in a field like medicine and law?
HERMAN: Oh I think it was a lot easier in my
generation. We didn’t have to
find the movement, it just found us. I have
a 21-year-old daughter who has just graduated
from college. She’s trying to figure this
out now. But the truth is that you could
start almost anywhere. Whatever, I mean,
there are so many things in the world
that need to be set right, you can start
with whatever
fires you up, whatever excites you,
whatever fires your indignation, and put
your energy there, and it’s as good a
place to start as any. I think that if it
speaks to your heart, if it engages
your imagination, if it makes you want to
get out of bed in the morning and do
something, that’s probably the best place
to start, and that to me is the
inside of the
political movements that I was part
of, is you know, organizations come and go.
Intellectual theories come and go. The
power to change the way people think
and what people do comes out of
small groups of people who care enough
about something to try something new.
And that can be done anytime. KREISLER: And it’s
also about ideas right? I mean, embedding
yourself in history, in a way, to sort of
go with those new ideas and formulate
them yourself. HERMAN: Yeah. I mean…
There is an intellectual tradition of
political activism, I think. It’s one
of these things that isn’t as strong in
this country as in many others and often
needs to be kind of reinvented,
rediscovered in each generation, but yeah,
it helps if you know that other people
have thought these things before, you
have tried organizing before, you
don’t have to invent everything from
scratch. But on the other hand, one’s
immediate historical circumstances
are always new, and I’d rather see people
sort of take the plunge and try
innovating and then have to study up
because “Oh my god I better inform myself
because I need to arm myself with
knowledge,” than try to deduce from the
history of the past what should be done now.
KREISLER: But for you the study of history and
politics is absolutely fundamental to
the study of psychiatry and psychology?
Or is that an overstatement. HERMAN: To me it is.
It’s absolutely fundamental. Let’s just
stop with that. KREISLER: You express a
concern in your book where you have a
concern that new researchers will lack
the passionate intellectual and social
commitment of your generation, and you
go on to say, “They will not see the
essential interconnection between
biological, psychological, social, and
political dimensions of trauma.”
HERMAN: Oh I think that’s happening already. It’s the
price of respectability,
unfortunately. The trauma field is now, you know…
KREISLER: Legitimate. HERMAN: We’re legit! Yep.
And people write dissertations, and
people apply for research money,
and, you know, drug companies get approval
for their drugs for treatment of
post-traumatic stress disorder, and so
I can see it happening already
in the traumatic stress field. It’s, you
know, if you want to kind of
keep it clean it’s nice to have some, you
know, a nice clean auto accident victim
study. and hopefully
not where there’s any sort of corporate
liability in the accident,
corporate negligence, but where it was
truly an accident, and then you can, you
don’t have to get into any of this murky
messy social issue stuff, and you can
just do a nice psychobiological study,
and you can randomly assign people to
eight sessions of cognitive behavioral
therapy or eight sessions of a serotonin,
or you know eight weeks of a
serotonin reuptake inhibitor or a
combination of the two or a placebo and see
what works best.
That’s probably a legitimate study. I’m not
against it. I just think that’s not
really where the interesting questions lie.
KREISLER: And so finally the
interesting questions really lie in values
basically. Is that the answer or…?
HERMAN: They lie in those areas that we don’t
understand yet that are so murky and so
confusing and so emotionally laden and
so riddled with controversy that, you
know, if you want to
get your research funding you probably
should stay away from there. But, if you
want to really figure out how the mind
works or how society works, that’s the
place to go. KREISLER: Dr. Herman, thank you very
much for being here today, sharing your
story with us, and your example, actually,
for future generations. HERMAN: Thank you for
having me. KREISLER: Thank you. And thank you very
much for joining us for this
conversation with history.
[Music]
