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Micro-trauma: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury, the twenty-fifth volume in the Psychoanalysis in a New Key book
series edited by Donnel Stern, clearly achieves Stern's goal of offering the analytic community something “that nudges the reader's grasp of clinical theory and practice in an unexpected direction.” The subject matter is the concept of micro-trauma, Crastnopol's original and seemingly oxymoronic term that describes the effects of subtle, relationally based injurious events that have “lesser degrees of insult and injury” than “capital T” trauma and that can chip away slowly at one's sense of self and well-being, often with the additional effect of undermining future relationships in their aftermath (p. 6). The author's conceptual framework of micro-trauma veers in a direction away from trauma as an acute event that overwhelms the individual's adaptive capacity. Instead, she posits that micro-trauma, though challenging rather than overwhelming, still requires adaptive and defensive psychological maneuvers to manage its effects. The author enjoins her readers to be open to her new terminology, preemptively countering the argument that applying the word trauma to anything other than “capital T” situations trivializes the concept. She offers some commonalities, proposing that micro-trauma, “like real-world trauma … reflects events in the external world and is not merely a private experience involving unconscious impulses and fantasies” (p. 6). Additionally, she notes that micro-traumas, like “capital T” traumas, are “real occurrences … that are experienced and absorbed to shape the intrapsychic world in particular ways that have lasting negative consequences …” (p. 6).
Crastnopol's book is clinical but provides ample theoretical inquiry and discussion on the genesis and psychological outcome of micro-trauma in nonclinical settings. Most significant are two important contributions she brings to contemporary psychoanalysis. First, she