Trauma and Recovery is the foundational text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a political frame, psychiatrist Judith L. Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. This edition includes a new epilogue by the author assessing what has-and hasn't-changed in understanding and treating trauma over the last three decades. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud, " Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we heal.