22 Facts About Selma Fraiberg

Selma Fraiberg was an American child psychoanalyst, author and social worker.

At the time of her death, Selma 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.

Selma Fraiberg was professor emeritus of child psychoanalysis at the University of Michigan Medical School, where she had taught from 1963 to 1979, and had been director of the Child Developmental Project in Washtenaw County, Mich.

Selma Fraiberg was born Selma Horowitz on March 8,1918, in Detroit, Michigan.

Selma Fraiberg's mother was Dorella Horowitz and her father was Jack Horowitz.

Selma Fraiberg died four months later on December 19,1981, at the age of 63.

Selma Fraiberg graduated from Wayne State University with a master's degree in social work in 1940.

Selma Fraiberg then went to the Detroit Psychoanalytic Institute to complete her psychoanalytic training.

Selma Fraiberg's research revolved around discovering the effects of visual deprivation in infants.

One infant that was studied by Selma Fraiberg contributed to two new findings.

Selma Fraiberg distinguished the importance of a blind infant's mouth as a replacement to their deficiency in visual stimulus.

Selma Fraiberg noted that blind infants use their mouth as a way to perceive the world much longer than non-blind infants.

Selma Fraiberg was a part of developing new techniques for mental health treatment of young children.

Selma Fraiberg coined the phrase evocative memory to describe the phenomenon of remembering a person without needing a tangible object to refresh one's memory, and asserted that this form of memory starts in children at about the age of eighteen months.

Selma Fraiberg's work is said to have paralleled that of Anna Freud, a pioneer in child psychoanalysis.

For 15 years Professor Selma 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.

Selma Fraiberg studied infants with congenital blindness in the 1970s.

Selma Fraiberg found that blind babies had three problems to overcome: learning to recognize parents from sound alone, learning about permanence of objects, acquiring a typical or healthy self-image.

Selma Fraiberg found that vision acts as a way of pulling other sensory modalities together and without sight babies are delayed.

Selma Fraiberg was the author of several influential psychoanalytic texts such as: The Magic Years and Clinical Studies in Infant Mental Health.

Selma Fraiberg developed a new technique to approach infant and parent treatment.

Selma Fraiberg's 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.