Selma Fraiberg
| Selma Fraiberg | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 8, 1918 Detroit, Michigan |
| Died | December 19, 1981 (aged 63) |
| Fields | Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Social Work |
| Institutions | University of Michigan, Psychoanalytic Training Institute |
| Known for | Psychoanalysis, Infant mental Health |
Selma Fraiberg (1918–1981) was a child psychoanalyst, author and social worker. She studied infants with congenital blindness in the 1970s. She found that blind babies had three problems to overcome: learning to recognize parents from sound alone, learning about permanence of objects, acquiring a typical or healthy self-image. She also found that vision acts as a way of pulling other sensory modalities together and without sight babies are delayed. In addition to her work with blind babies, she also was one of the founders of the field of infant mental health and developed mental health treatment approaches for infants, toddlers and their families. Her work on intergenerational transmission of trauma such as described in her landmark paper entitled "Ghosts in the Nursery" has had an important influence on the work of living psychoanalysts and clinical researchers such as Alicia Lieberman and Daniel Schechter Her seminal contribution to childhood development, "The Magic Years", is still in use by students of childhood development and early childhood education throughout the United States. The Magic Years, which deals with early childhood and has been translated into 11 languages, was written when she was teaching at the Tulane Medical School in New Orleans.
At the time of her death, Selma Fraiberg was a professor of child psychoanalysis at the University of California in San Francisco and a clinician who devoted her career to helping troubled children. She was also professor emeritus of child psychoanalysis at the University of Michigan Medical School, where she had taught from 1963 to 1979, and had also been director of the Child Developmental Project in Washtenaw County, Mich., for children with emotional problems.
Fraiberg's work is said to have paralleled that of Anna Freud, a pioneer in child psychoanalysis. Both were keenly interested in young blind people. For 15 years Professor Fraiberg studied the development of children who were blind from birth, and this led to her writing Insights From the Blind: Comparative Studies of Blind and Sighted Infants, published in 1977. In the same year, she wrote Every Child's Birthright: In Defense of Mothering, a study of the early mother-child relationship in which she argued that all subsequent development is based on the quality of the child's first attachments.
Selma Fraiberg was born Selma Horwitz on March 8, 1918 in Detroit, Michigan. Her mother was Dorella Horowitz and her father was Jack Horowitz. Jack Horowitz took over the family poultry business, while Dorella was a stay at home mother. In 1945, she married Professor and author Dr. Louis Fraiberg, who she met while studying at Wayne State University. The Fraibergs had a daughter, Lisa in 1956. In 1979 the Fraibergs moved to San Francisco. In August 1981, Fraiberg was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. She died four months later on December 19, 1981 at the age of 63.
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