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With her usual liveliness, Selma Fraiberg describes what happens to human attachment, prehension, gross motor development, and language when a child is born blind. Inspired by her work with D. A. Freedman in New Orleans in 1962, she assembled five boys and five girls with no handicaps other than blindness, for a longitudinal study in Ann Arbor. The children's ages at referral ranged from one to eleven months and the ages at the last contact were from two to six years. There is some overlapping in the twelve chapters (some of which have appeared in the same or other versions elsewhere) which describe New Orleans material as well as the longer Ann Arbor study.
The use made of the small sample of ten far surpasses the value of much larger, statistical studies. Following a strict methodology, Fraiberg and her team abandoned only one strict criterion of academic psychology (see Chapter IV). By training mothers and infants, they helped the blind children develop in an optimal way. Fraiberg's work is a prime example of a preventive program based on concomitant research.
Two chapters (II and III), one written with Freedman, are devoted to case histories of blind children who were not subject to the longitudinal preventive study. The chapter on human attachment focuses on the absence of differentiated and modulated facial expressions and on the delay in reaching gestures in the blind child. Observers of infants have become aware of the young baby's early response to oral configurations and other facial expression, as well as to finger play of the mother. Thus, it is not surprising to hear that the innate expressive facial apparatus and the expressive hand, usually put into the service of imitation in the first few days or weeks of life, are not developed in the congenitally blind. The unresponsiveness of the face and hand may also be due to a relative lack of sensory input from touch, from being moved and being talked to. The depressed mothers of blind infants talk