ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Growing Up Without Sight: Child Psychoanalysis, Observational Film and the Blind Child in Postwar America and Britain

• In Event: Film and the Mind Sciences at the Margins: Research, Diagnosis, Popularisation

English Abstract

Between the 1950s and the 1970s there was a surge of interest on both sides of the Atlantic in the education and psychology of the blind child. This was triggered by the postwar retrolental fibroplasia (RF) epidemic, a condition found in premature infants where the eyes fail to develop normally, later discovered to be caused by the overuse of oxygen in experimental neonatal practice. The RF epidemic led not only to the study of large cohorts of blind children and their vulnerability to autism or secondary handicaps, but also to a significant number of psychoanalytically-informed observational studies of individual children. The insights generated by these studies formed the basis of a new therapeutic and educational protocol for the blind, regardless of the original cause of sight loss. Two female psychoanalysts pioneered this work in parallel: Selma Fraiberg, who was based in Michigan, and Dorothy Burlingham, who set up her own Research Group for the Blind Child in Anna's Freud's well-known Hampstead Nursery in London. In their case-histories, we find direct evidence of blind children's rich emotional lives, as well as detailed descriptions of their day-to-day confrontations with the sensory world.
This paper discusses the films that were made by Fraiberg and Burlingham about the blind infants and children they studied and nurtured, for both diagnostic and documentary purposes. Observational studies of blind children were shaped methodologically by postwar psychoanalytic research films of mothers and babies, and analysis of the non-verbal messages embodied in facial expressions and gazing patterns. This led Fraiberg and Burlingham to ask how, if vision was structural to normal development, blind children found adaptive 'detours' to a stable sense of self, loving relationships and mastery of the material world. The unique psychology of the blind both challenged and enlarged psychoanalytic practice with young children, generating radically new thinking about alternative developmental pathways. Somewhat paradoxically, the visual essay became a highly effective medium for exploring these issues, while also posing perennially interesting questions about disability, phenomenology, and interiority.

Author

• Katie Joice, Birkbeck College London