In conversation with Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. 

Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture

A professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for more than 40 years, Judith Lewis Herman, M.D., is one of the United States’ foremost experts on the treatment of post-traumatic stress and incest. “One of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud” (The New York Times), her groundbreaking 1992 book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror redefined medicine’s understanding of trauma survivors. Herman is the director of training at the Victims of Violence Program at The Cambridge Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a founding member of the Women's Mental Health Collective. Her many honors include the 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, the 2000 American Medical Women’s Association Award, and in 2003 the American Psychiatric Association bestowed upon her the title of Distinguished Life Fellow. A manifesto for a new framework of justice, Truth and Repair argues that survivors’ voices should be central elements in our criminal justice system. 

Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., is the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, a watershed examination of the ways traumatic stress affects the physical health of human beings. The founder and medical director of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, he is a professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine and is the director of the National Complex Trauma Treatment Network.