Trauma Recovery Theory Essay

Trauma Recovery Theory and the Evolution of Holocaust Testimony

In her 1992 book Trauma and Recovery, American psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman MD proposed a three-stage model for trauma recovery. The first stage is characterized by trauma survivors working to establish safety first in their own bodies, then outside of themselves in their environment. Once a survivor has procured a sense of safety and security, they enter the second stage, which involves remembering, identifying, retelling, and grieving past traumas.
The second stage is considered to be a time full of uncertainty, questioning, and mental turmoil for a trauma survivor, but with time the third stage can be entered. The third stage is characterized by recovery. While trauma

But a significant minority, as a result of the trauma, feel called upon to engage in a wider world. These survivors recognize a political or religious dimension in their misfortune, and discover that they can transform the meaning of their personal tragedy by making it the basis for social action. While there is no way to compensate for an atrocity, there is a way to transcend it, by making it a gift to others. The trauma is redeemed only when it becomes the source of a survivor mission.
This “significant minority” that Herman writes about is noteworthy because for many Holocaust survivors and witnesses, creating film or other works could serve as an outlet or form of communication at any point in the healing process. The validity of expression-focused therapy as a treatment for trauma-related stress is supported by scientific evidence. A 2021 research article published in the Child Abuse and Neglect International Journal describes a study in which both mothers and school-age children living in domestic violence shelters were provided with art therapy and play therapy over a 12 week period. By the end of the period, probable PTSD levels were shown to decrease in a nonsignificant manner, anxiety symptoms were shown to have significantly reduced,

California State University film lecturer Joshua Hirsch writes about this in his book “Afterimage,” where he identified Night and Fog as a founder of posttraumatic cinema. Hirsch writes, “This traumatization may have betrayed the ideological goals of the film’s producers by setting in motion powerful emotional responses that could not be controlled by the rhetoric of, and the rhetoric surrounding, the films.” Because of the uncertainty and lack of security and safety that many people who would be among the original audience for Night and Fog would have experienced, it is reasonable to assume that Night and Fog would be met with criticism and very strong emotional reactions. This further aligns Night and Fog with the first stage of Herman’s trauma recovery model because this stage is characterized by a lack of safety and security. Because many would still be searching to have this basic need met, they would not yet be healed to a point that engaging with the content of Night and Fog would be