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In Micro-trauma, Crastnopol identifies a series of ordinary interactional patterns, seemingly innocent everyday exchanges that can and frequently do end in disappointment, confusion, or humiliation for one or both parties to the exchange. She suggests that it is the accumulation of these subtle let downs and put downs that lead many of us and our patients to a chronic sense of demoralization and low self-esteem.
Subtitling her book “A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury,” the author acknowledges that in cataloging this series of disappointing and disruptive patterns, she is building on Masud Khan's (1963) notion of cumulative trauma in infancy and childhood. Khan points to repeated failures of attunement, situations in which caretakers frequently do not provide sufficient protection against encroachments
from the environment resulting in long-term psychological consequences for the developing child. Crastnopol sets out to extend Khan's project, to document patterns, not only in childhood but also in later life, that, at their least pathological, fly beneath the radar, but, as the disappointments and self-doubts mount, can seriously threaten psychic equanimity, and, she contends, can become dangerous.
Crastnopol argues that until now pop psychology and self-help books have done a better job than mainstream psychoanalytic literature in identifying patterns like these, making them accessible to the general public and suggesting remedial steps. She states that our project as psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists is to connect our patients’ current distress to character issues resulting from disruptions in earlier psychological formation. Taking issue with this emphasis on the childhood etiology of psychological issues, she argues that although the patterns on which she focuses in this book can and frequently do arise in response to particular conditions in the nuclear family, they can also develop in response to experiences in adolescence a