ABSTRACT

This chapter presents some general considerations about microtraumatic currents and explores how they affect cross-generational relating, and how they can be dealt with and worked through. It discusses the sort of analytic attitude that offers the most promise for repairing micro-traumatic injury. Building on precursors in the trauma literature, Dana Amir speaks about the critical role of the inner witness in registering and working through traumatic experience. In her view, the witnessing capacity develops within the infant as a response to his or her helplessness in the face of the primary violence of the failures of a good-enough mother's ministrations. In a close exploration of rupture and the capacity to catalyze repair, the psychoanalyst Robert Karen writes about the pull to engage the other in one's psychically painful scenarios via projection, projective identification, and externalization.