Selma Fraiberg (March 8, 1918 – December 19, 1981) was an American child psychoanalyst, author and social worker.
At the time of her death, Fraiberg was a professor of child psychoanalysis at the University of California, San Francisco and a clinician who devoted her career to helping troubled children. She was also professor emeritus of child psychoanalysis at the University of Michigan Medical School, where she had taught from 1963 to 1979, and had also been director of the Child Developmental Project in Washtenaw County, Mich., for children with emotional problems.
Personal life
Selma Fraiberg was born Selma Horowitz on March 8, 1918, in Detroit, Michigan. Her mother was Dorella Horowitz and her father was Jack Horowitz. Jack Horowitz took over the family poultry business, while Dorella was a stay at home mother. She then went to the Detroit Psychoanalytic Institute to complete her psychoanalytic training. One infant that was studied by Fraiberg contributed to two new findings. The infant, Toni, was considered normal blind, as defined by Fraiberg. Tactile perception is important to developing the difference between the inner and outer self. Since blind infants lack visual perceptions, they rely on their mouth for perceiving the world well into their second year of life. There are three different approaches to kitchen table therapy: brief crisis intervention, developmental guidance-support treatment, and infant-parent psychotherapy. Each type of therapy is used for different situations, depending on where Fraiberg or her colleagues thought the problems in the parent/child development relationship were stemming from. Brief crisis intervention was used when there was few, specific, situational events that resulted in a lack of helping the child develop. Developmental guidance-support treatment is used in situations where the baby may have a chronic illness or disorder and the parents are struggling to find a way to move beyond that problem. This therapy technique is used when parents are still capable of being good parents, but simply need assistance in how to practice that. Infant-parent psychotherapy is used when the parents have their own struggles from their past which prevent them from developing an attachment with their child. The main goal of this technique is to rid the parents of their problem so it does not transfer onto the child.
Psychoanalysis
Fraiberg's work is said to have paralleled that of Anna Freud, a pioneer in child psychoanalysis. Both were keenly interested in young blind people. For 15 years Professor Fraiberg studied the development of children who were blind from birth, and this led to her writing Insights From the Blind: Comparative Studies of Blind and Sighted Infants, published in 1977. In the same year, she wrote Every Child's Birthright: In Defense of Mothering, a study of the early mother-child relationship in which she argued that all subsequent development is based on the quality of the child's first attachments.
She studied infants with congenital blindness in the 1970s. She found that blind babies had three problems to overcome: learning to recognize parents from sound alone, learning about permanence of objects, and acquiring a typical or healthy self-image. She also found that vision acts as a way of pulling other sensory modalities together and without sight babies are delayed. In addition to her work with blind babies, she also was one of the founders of the field of infant mental health and developed mental health treatment approaches for infants, toddlers and their families. Her work on intergenerational transmission of trauma such as described in her landmark paper entitled "Ghosts in the Nursery" has had an important influence on the work of living psychoanalysts and clinical researchers such as Alicia Lieberman and Daniel Schechter Her seminal contribution to childhood development, "The Magic Years", is still in use by students of childhood development and early childhood education throughout the United States. The Magic Years, which deals with early childhood and has been translated into 11 languages, was written when she was teaching at the Tulane Medical School in New Orleans.
She was the author of several influential psychoanalytic texts such as: The Magic Years and Clinical Studies in Infant Mental Health
Legacy
Fraiberg developed a new technique to approach infant and parent treatment. This approach for developing infant relationships with their parents until the age of two brought the treatment into the home and is still used today. Her practice was the start of infant mental health development and is still being used today, only with small adjustments and modifications to account for changing urban and rural lifestyles.
Fraiberg's concept of "ghosts" in her infant mental health studies is still prominent in infant theories and studies today. In her paper "Ghosts in the Nursery," Fraiberg said problems in infant development and attachment stem from the ghosts of their parents. The unremembered ghosts prevent parents from fully developing a deep attachment with their child that is important to their development. This concept of ghosts is used as a function of psychotherapy. The function is helping the subject leave their ghosts behind and continue moving forward with their life.