Dr. Judith Herman, who helped launch the field of trauma studies, has returned to publishing after a long, mysterious ordeal.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In the fall of 1994, the psychiatrist Dr. Judith Herman was at the height of her influence. Her book “Trauma and Recovery,” published two years earlier, had been hailed in The New York Times as “one of the most important psychiatric works to be published since Freud.”

Her research on sexual abuse in the white, working class city of Somerville, Mass., laid out a thesis that was, at the time, radical: that trauma can occur not only in the blind terror of combat, but quietly, within the four walls of a house, at the hands of a trusted person.