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The study undertaken by this group was based on regular visits to parents of blind children from the time the blindness was diagnosed, observation of children in our blind day nursery school (which ran for 18 years until 1976) and the psychoanalytic treatment of some disturbed blind children. Mrs Dorothy Burlingham was the Chairman of this group until her death in 1979. Her special interest was the blind child's inner experiences. She believed that, in passing through the various developmental stages, he took a path of his own, that he had his own secret life which ran parallel to his interaction with the world and that our task was to learn more about this. Her contribution, based on this belief, was central to the work of the group. The work continues largely as a follow-up carried out by Doris Wills, with four members of the group making themselves available for consultation.
As a result of this study, two films1 were made, and a book and a number of papers published. A further paper on the past work of the group will appear in this year's Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, which will be a memorial volume to Mrs Burlingham.
The general move in interest to the early development of handicapped children means that the films and other publications are still in demand. Further evidence of this was demonstrated recently by a request from the Open University for permission to republish one of our papers, and, at a recent conference in Israel, by a request for the translation into Hebrew of some of our material.