ABSTRACT
Many individuals in today's world chronically experience a sense of low-level depressiveness, anxiety, and malaise. This chapter discusses different types of micro-trauma. Masud Khan picked up a theme in calling the accrual of discrete injurious moments cumulative trauma. In identifying strain trauma, Ernst Kris was pointing to the type of damage inflicted habitually by an overall psychic environment that could erode an individual's well-being and be equivalent to the infliction of a massive psychic assault. In more recent years, Philip Bromberg has invoked the terms developmental or relational trauma to explore the role of ongoing shaping influences in the individual's psychic evolution. Psychic trauma inheres to the degree that the child's basic needs along these lines are not responded to effectively through the empathic ministrations of the parental selfobjects, with the result that the person emerges with a structurally damaged self.
