Integration and Self Healing: Affect, Trauma, Alexthymia

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinarily compassionate understanding of trauma
Review: Krystal conveys an exceptionally deep understanding of the constricting effect of trauma on the human mind, and he shows how healing entails opening one's mind to the full range of experience. He presents the finest model of caring and compassion for the self I've seen.

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinarily compassionate understanding of trauma
Review: Krystal conveys an exceptionally deep understanding of the constricting effect of trauma on the human mind, and he shows how healing entails opening one's mind to the full range of experience. He presents the finest model of caring and compassion for the self I've seen.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant confusion
Review: Krystal is clearly an intelligent theorist and has quite a good feel for the lived experience of the patient. He makes some very important theoretical moves here, such as showing how the Kohution notion of structure deficits is theoretically and empirically untenable. Krystal also gives a stylistically interesting account of how emotions relate to each other and develop in interconnection. However, his downfall is that his writing is rather muddled and it is often impossible to discern what he is really saying. One can perceive, as if through a fog, that Krystal is doing some very profound theoretical thinking. Yet this fog never dissipates, and that makes the book extremely frustrating for one who is trying to get a firm grip on his thinking. Moreover, Krystal's conceptualization of the emotions is mostly intrapsychic in focus, often marginalizing or totally leaving out the interpersonal realm. The theoretical sensibility in this work, though mostly having an ego-psychological flavor, is mixed and somewhat vague. Like the undifferentiated affect states of which he speaks, Henry Krystal is a potentially invigorating force who, disappointingly, is never able to sufficiently articulate himself. If one is willing to closely read him and cut through the fog of his unclear language, however, Krystal can be quite rewarding.