This seminar is devoted to examining the intrapsychic and interpersonal injuries that shape one's character and sense of well-being over the arc of a person's life from childhood to old age. Building on the presenter's 2015 Routledge book, Micro-trauma:  A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury, the presentation will identify certain specific patterns of subtly damaging relatedness like "airbrushing," "unbridled indignation," and "uneasy intimacy." The speaker will show how these micro-traumas exert ongoing negative effects on a person's growth and functioning.  Clinical examples and literary portrayals will be used to illustrate the optimal response to understanding and repairing the impact of those psychic patterns. While some of the presentation's content will be drawn from the main text, further instances and more recently articulated types of micro-traumatic functioning will be elucidated and explored as well.  

Margaret Crastnopol (Peggy), Ph.D. is on the faculty of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a supervisor of psychotherapy and faculty, William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City.  She is also an associate editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and on the editorial board of Contemporary Psychoanalysis.  Dr. Crastnopol was a founding member of the board of directors of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She is the author of Micro-trauma:  A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury, Routledge, 2015. Dr. Crastnopol is in private practice for the treatment of individuals and couples in Seattle, WA.