Insights From the Blind; Comparative Studies of Blind and Sighted Infants

Professor Selma Fraiberg is one of our foremost investigators of the ego development of blind children. She has designed and demonstrated the best program of intervention for the mental health of blind infants that we know. She is, additionally, one of psychoanalysis’ most graceful writers. Her early book, The Magic Years, is widely used in teaching concepts of child development because of its soundness, clarity, and wisdom. It is therefore a special treat to have now Insights f rom the Blind; Comparative Studies of Blind and Sighted Infants written with the overall collaboration of Louis Fraiberg and with the individual collaboration of co-authors of particular chapters, David Freedman, Barry L. Siegel, Ralph Gibson, and Edna Adelson. This is a summary of her fifteen years of work with blind infants and their parents. After a summary of observations and a review of the salient literature, she notes that when she began, in 1960, no detailed longitudinal studies of blind babies existed. Mrs. Fraiberg’s first study was of a five-month-old girl, blind from birth, who was visited monthly and recorded developmentally on film. The surprising discovery was made that the smiling response and stranger anxiety took place normally without vision, but interest in toys and mobility were delayed in spite of normal maturation. Material from the two-and-a-half-year treatment of a nineyear-old autistic blind child is then detailed. The data illuminate problems of the achievement of differentiation of erotic and aggressive drives and the attainment of an object concept. The last three-fourths of the book are devoted to Mrs. Fraiberg’s 1963-1973 Ann Arbor Study of ten children, blind from