The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 1957, 26, No. 1: Blank, H. Robert. 'Psychoanalysis and Blindness.'

The author reviews five years' experience with the problems of the blind. He emphasizes the relationship of blindness to ego development and disturbance. Congenital blindness in itself need cause no such disturbance. Much depends on parental and family attitudes, and careful investigation is necessary to find what is the major stress in problems presenting as the reaction to the diagnosis of blindness. Acquired blindness, however, is always traumatic. In adults it is followed first by depersonalization, then depression. The second is essentially a mourning for the loss of the eyes, and should not be abrogated. The author goes on to describe the subsequent characteristic attitudes of the blind. In children he lists the five main factors on which the child's definitive reaction to acquired blindness depends. These are the health of the ego, the sexual phase in which the blindness occurs, the previous relationship with the parents, the parents' reaction, and, above all, the ophthalmologist's relationship to both child and parents, which is often decisive. Blind children suffer much from disturbances of motility, but none is peculiar to them. The equation of cutaneous introjection with visual introjection stresses its importance for their ego-development, and the need to foster the child's use of all the sensory resources of the skin is therefore evident.