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The headings of the Diagnostic Profile have been used to make a Developmental Profile of a blind child, Carol. It is based on material gathered over a period of 16 months, from 3.8 to 5.0 years, from the following sources:
Social History (Elizabeth Model)
Intelligence Test when Carol was 4.6 (Doris Wills)
Interviews with Mother (Doris Wills)
Reports from Clinic's Nursery School for Blind children (Annemarie Curson)
Reports from Clinic's Nursery School for Sighted children (Marion Burgner).
On the basis of the Developmental Profile, Nagera & Colonna (1965) have compared blind and sighted children, using for the purpose six profiles of children aged between 4.0 years and 8.6 years observed in our Unit for the Blind. In introducing this study they observed that there are:
two very different possibilities of development among children who are born blind (and … children who may have become blind very early in life, perhaps soon after birth). In a small number of such cases their development … does not seem to lag much behind the development of sighted children. Their ego processes, their drive development, their object relationships are not too far behind those of the sighted of similar ages. In another very distinct group, one finds blind children whose developmental processes are atypical. They lag behind in different degrees in the different areas, giving in some extreme cases the impression of a marked mental retardation (p. 268).
While they add that there are all sorts of possible combinations in between, the fact that there appears to be these two extreme groups suggests that there are hurdles in the blind child's early years which, if he surmounts them, lead on to comparatively normal functioning, and if he does not, to deviant functioning. It may be that the very early years, probably the first three, are a ‘critical period’ for the blind child, during which he has an impulse to move out from preoccupation with his own and his mother's body to cathect and organise the ex