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.
[1] In 1945, she married Professor and author Dr. Louis Fraiberg, who she met while studying at Wayne State University.
[1] Selma Fraiberg graduated from Wayne State University with a master's degree in social work in 1940.
Since blind infants lack visual perceptions, they rely on their mouth for perceiving the world well into their second year of life.
One technique she proposed was called "kitchen table therapy, by which she would go into the homes of parents with young children, typically under the age of two.
[6] There are three different approaches to kitchen table therapy: brief crisis intervention, developmental guidance-support treatment, and infant-parent psychotherapy.
[7] 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.
[6] These therapy techniques combine psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and social work practices to help parents and children establish foundations for development and attachment in the child's first few years of life.
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.
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.