Micro-trauma

A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury

Margaret Crastnopol

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415800358
• eBook ISBN: 9781135968182
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Micro-trauma: A psychoanalytic understanding of cumulative psychic injury explores the "micro-traumatic" or small, subtle psychic hurts that build up to undermine a person's sense of self-worth, skewing his or her character and compromising his or her relatedness to others. These injuries amount to what has been previously called "cumulative" or "relational trauma." Until now, psychoanalysis has explained such negative influences in broad strokes, using general concepts like psychosexual urges, narcissistic needs, and separation-individuation aims, among others. Taking a fresh approach, Margaret Crastnopol identifies certain specific patterns of injurious relating that cause damage in predictable ways; she shows how these destructive processes can be identified, stopped in their tracks, and replaced by a healthier way of functioning.

Seven different types of micro-trauma, all largely hidden in plain sight, are described in detail, and many others are discussed more briefly. Three of these micro-traumas—"psychic airbrushing and excessive niceness," "uneasy intimacy," and "connoisseurship gone awry"—have a predominantly positive emotional tone, while the other four—"unkind cutting back," "unbridled indignation," "chronic entrenchment," and "little murders"—have a distinctly negative one. Margaret Crastnopol shows how these toxic processes may take place within a dyadic relationship, a family group, or a social clique, causing collateral psychic damage all around as a consequence.

Using illustrations drawn from psychoanalytic treatment, literary fiction, and everyday life, Micro-trauma : A psychoanalytic understanding of cumulative psychic injury outlines how each micro-traumatic pattern develops and manifests itself, and how it wreaks its damage. The book shows how an awareness of these patterns can give us the therapeutic leverage needed to reshape them for the good. This publication will be an invaluable resource for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and for trainees and graduate students in these fields and related disciplines.

Margaret Crastnopol (Peggy), Ph.D. is a faculty member of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a Supervisor of Psychotherapy at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology. She is also a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. She writes and teaches nationally and internationally about the analyst's and patient's subjectivity; the vicissitudes of love, lust, and attachment drives; and varieties of micro-trauma. She is in private practice for the treatment of individuals and couples in Seattle, WA.

“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 and 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

Micro-trauma

Micro-trauma: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury explores the “micro-traumatic” or small, subtle psychic hurts that build up to undermine a person’s sense of self-worth, skewing his or her character and compromising his or her relatedness to others. These injuries amount to what has been previously called “cumulative” or “relational trauma”. Until now, psychoanalysis has explained such negative influences in broad strokes, using general concepts such as psychosexual urges, narcissistic needs, and separation-individuation aims, among others. Taking a fresh approach, Margaret Crastnopol identifies certain specific patterns of injurious relating that cause damage in predictable ways; she shows how these destructive processes can be identified, stopped in their tracks, and replaced by a healthier way of functioning.

Seven different types of micro-trauma, all largely hidden in plain sight, are described in detail, and many others are discussed more briefly. Three of these micro-traumas— “psychic airbrushing and excessive niceness,” “uneasy intimacy,” and “connoisseurship gone awry”—have a predominantly positive emotional tone, while the other four—“unkind cutting back,” “unbridled indignation,” “chronic entrenchment,” and “little murders”— have a distinctly negative one. Margaret Crastnopol shows how these toxic processes may take place within a dyadic relationship, a family group, or a social clique, thereby causing collateral psychic damage all around.

Using illustrations drawn from psychoanalytic treatment, literary fiction, and everyday life, Micro-trauma outlines how each micro-traumatic pattern develops and manifests itself, and how it wreaks its damage. The book shows how an awareness of these patterns can give us the therapeutic leverage needed to reshape them for the good. This publication will be an invaluable resource for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and for trainees and graduate students in these fields and related disciplines.

Margaret Crastnopol (Peggy), Ph.D., is a faculty member of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a supervisor of psychotherapy at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. She is also a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. She writes and teaches nationally and internationally about the analyst’s and patient’s subjectivity; the vicissitudes of love, lust, and attachment drives; and varieties of micro-trauma. She is in private practice for the treatment of individuals and couples in Seattle, Washington.

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN A NEW KEY BOOK SERIES

DONNEL STERN

Series Editor

When music is played in a new key, the melody does not change, but the notes that make up the composition do: change in the context of continuity, continuity that perseveres through change. Psychoanalysis in a New Key publishes books that share the aims psychoanalysts have always had, but that approach them differently. The books in the series are not expected to advance any particular theoretical agenda, although to this date most have been written by analysts from the Interpersonal and Relational orientations.

The most important contribution of a psychoanalytic book is the communication of something that nudges the reader’s grasp of clinical theory and practice in an unexpected direction. Psychoanalysis in a New Key creates a deliberate focus on innovative and unsettling clinical thinking. Because that kind of thinking is encouraged by exploration of the sometimes surprising contributions to psychoanalysis of ideas and findings from other fields, Psychoanalysis in a New Key particularly encourages interdisciplinary studies. Books in the series have married psychoanalysis with dissociation, trauma theory, sociology, and criminology. The series is open to the consideration of studies examining the relationship between psychoanalysis and any other field—for instance, biology, literary and art criticism, philosophy, systems theory, anthropology, and political theory.

But innovation also takes place within the boundaries of psychoanalysis, and Psychoanalysis in a New Key therefore also presents work that reformulates thought and practice without leaving the precincts of the field. Books in the series focus, for example, on the significance of personal values in psychoanalytic practice, on the complex interrelationship between the analyst’s clinical work and personal life, on the consequences for the clinical situation when patient and analyst are from different cultures, and on the need for psychoanalysts to accept the degree to which they knowingly satisfy their own wishes during treatment hours, often to the patient’s detriment.

Vol. 25

Micro-trauma: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury

Margaret Crastnopol

Vol. 24

Understanding and Treating Patients in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Lessons From Literature

Sandra Buechler

Vol. 23

The Interpersonal Tradition: The Origins of Psychoanalytic Subjectivity

Irwin Hirsch

Vol. 22

Body-States: Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders

Jean Petrucelli (ed.)

Vol. 21

The One and the Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy

Robert Grossmark & Fred Wright (eds.)

Vol. 20

Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma

Sophia Richman

Vol. 19

Cupid’s Knife: Women’s Anger and Agency in Violent Relationships

Abby Stein

Vol. 18

Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich: History, Memory and Tradition

Emily A. Kuriloff

Vol. 17

Love and Loss in Life and in Treatment

Linda B. Sherby

Vol. 16

Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion

Lois Oppenheim

Vol. 15

Still Practicing: The Heartaches and Joys of a Clinical Career

Sandra Buechler

Vol. 14

Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art

Danielle Knafo

Vol. 13

Money Talks: In Therapy, Society, and Life

Brenda Berger & Stephanie Newman (eds.)

Vol. 12

Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment

Donnel B. Stern

Vol. 11

Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory

Bruce Reis & Robert Grossmark (eds.)

Vol. 1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontmatter 1
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter 2
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Credit Lines
• 1 Cumulative Micro-trauma that’s Hidden in Plain Sight: An Overview
• 2 Unkind Cutting Back and Its Navigation
• 3 Connoisseurship Gone Awry
• 4 Uneasy Intimacy: A Siren’s Call
• 5 Psychic Airbrushing and Excessive Niceness
• 6 Chronic Entrenchment and Its Collateral Damage
• 7 Unbridled Indignation
• 8 Little Murders and Other Everyday Micro-assaults
• 9 Toward Repair
• References
• Index