Insights From The Blind

Selma Fraiberg, author of "The Magic Years", one of the most beautiful evocations of the joys and sorrows of childhood every written, here turns here extraordinary gifts of perception to these joys and sorrows as they are experienced by children who are massively handicapped. Her subject is the development of children forced to become members of the human community without the aid and benefit of visual images. She first became involved with blind children when, as a young therapist, she was called in to study a group whose behavior showed many of the marks of autism. With the help of some gifted mothers, and through her own remarkable capacity to wait for and respond to the most fleeting communications, she began to decipher the special body language in which the blind infant tries to tell us what we otherwise read in the expressive and animated faces of the sighted.In a long and intensive study, Dr. Fraiberg and her associates found many illuminations in the dark worlds of their small, but not necessarily helpless, subjects: about how the bonds of love, once thought to depend on a baby's visual recognition of its mother, are truly formed; about the growth of intelligence; about the importance of physical venturesomeness to the growth of intelligence; about the necessity for proper ego development of the infant's knowledge that there is a real world beyond the crib.With Selma Fraiberg as their loving and invaluable translator, these blind children are able to tell us not only about themselves but about all children, and to tell us something in general about what it means to be human.