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This valuable book deserves an audience of clinicians and interested public alike. Crastnopol applies contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of early development: the micro-analytic study of early patterns of communication between parents and infants, and assessment of attachment styles in infancy (she cites the work of Beebe & Lachmann, 2014; Tronick & Beeghly, 2011). She builds on the formulations that different styles of relating, predictive of later psychopathology, evolve in childhood, and that attention to the details of repeated interactions can yield important truths about the emotional life of an individual.
Micro-trauma, as Crastnopol will define it, is made of small, subtle, interactive moments that are repeated, most often between parents and children, which accrue into a style of relating that will distort adolescent and adult relationships both within and beyond the family. Evocative titles capture seven common patterns of relating: Unkind Cutting Back, Connoisseurship Gone Awry, Uneasy Intimacy, Psychic Airbrushing, Chronic Entrenchment, Unbridled Indignation, and Little Murders. Some of these patterns twist communications with forced kindnesses, others depend on exchanges that can intrude, usurp, condescend, and annoy, all with the result of fracturing the individual's capacity to be confident and authentic with others, and with themselves.
The analytic relationship is also colored by each person's experience of micro-trauma, and indeed identifying the unique style and emotional impact of micro-trauma is crucial to psychoanalytic work. Crastnopol clearly explains how psychoanalytic treatments can be complicated or derailed by the subtle play of these patterns of relating, but that psychoanalysis can also enable a shift in relationship, and the realization of more satisfying contact with others. The clinical examples, drawn from Crastnopol's psychoanalytic practice, resonate equally well with challenges more typical of psychotherapy; however, it is m