Description:
Micro-trauma: A psychoanalytic understanding of cumulative psychic injury looks at "micro-traumatic" subtle psychic hurts that build up to undermine a person's self-worth.
Review Quotes:
Crastnopol's book divides up the world in a whole new way. "Micro-trauma" is a convincing conceptualization of some of the most problematic happenings between people. But despite its novelty--and it is brand-new--what Crastnopol describes will be immediately recognizable to any clinician. Add lucid and entertaining writing that is often actually gripping, and you have the makings of a book that will be read at all levels of the field, from students to seasoned analysts. - Donnel Stern, Ph.D., William Alanson White Institute and New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
Margaret Crastnopol's "Micro-trauma: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury" is an exceptional book in that it's a genuinely original contribution to understanding ourselves and others in our day in/day out, lifelong, prosaic, and most intimate interactions. Crastnopol draws on the full range of psychoanalytic thinking to articulate the many ways that we undermine the self-worth and well-being of one another and of ourselves. Reading this book will help therapists and others, all of us, to better understand and catch ourselves as we subtly and unconsciously invalidate, misrecognize, and are misattuned to ourselves and each other. Her creative and literary explications of such relational dynamics as "unkind cutting back," "psychic airbrushing," "chronic entrenchment," and "uneasy intimacy," among many other characterizations, are both immediately useful and unforgettable. - Lewis Aron, Ph.D. Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis.
In our contemporary "in-your-face" culture, nuance and subtlety have all but disappeared. Yet these barely-registering phenomena live on in the sounds and silences of the psychoanalytic consulting room. Indeed they are the heart and soul of psychoanalytic discourse. In this superb new contribution, Margaret Crastnopol, an astute observer of those quotidian minutiae that fly under the radar, provides a comprehensive survey of micro-traumas that make up the fabric of our existence but may go unaddressed and unobserved in the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives. She deftly depicts the little murders, the withdrawals, the slights, and the stifled emotions that can wreak havoc on one's sense of well-being, and she shows how psychoanalysis is unique among the panoply of treatments in today's marketplace in its potential for ameliorating the effect of those painful experiences. I highly recommend this book to both beginning clinicians and experienced analysts. -Glen O. Gabbard, MD, Author, Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting