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I first encountered the writing of Selma Fraiberg as a first-year resident in psychiatry. My son had just been born, and my daughter was two years old. I received, as a gift, a copy of The Magic Years. It was recommended reading for our course in child development. It turned out to be required reading for understanding and appreciating my children. I recommend it now for the beginning child psychiatry residents whose training I supervise, and it is still one of my favorite gifts for the young couple with a new child.
After I finished The Magic Years, I checked the bibliographies of my teachers for more Fraiberg. I next encountered the 1954 essay, "Tales of the Discovery of the Secret Treasure," in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Reading The Selected Writings of Selma Fraiberg, edited by Louis Fraiberg, is like discovering one secret treasure after another. In fact, I believe the reader will find that her approach to a wide variety of subjects reflects a continual search for hidden treasures, for answers to questions of behavior, development, psychoanalysis, and social work. Louis Fraiberg states that he selected the papers in this volume to "show the quality of her best work in the clinic and at the typewriter," and to show the variety of her interests, from literature to social problems. He is eminently successful in this endeavor, and he has honored the memory of his wife.
The book is divided into five sections. In the first, titled "Developmental and Theoretical Considerations," there are seven essays. It begins with a paper I frequently recommend to people working with severely disturbed inpatients, "The Origin of Human Bonds." This essay uses research in ethology and psychoanalytic theory to explain the tragic lives of people with "the diseases of nonattachment." It demonstrates that for the human child, infancy is a critical time for the establishment of human bonds and for the subsequent adaptive use of aggression. The next inclusion, "Lib