Interviews

Naomi Feil is the developer of Validation. She was born in Munich in 1932, and grew up in the Montefiore Home for the Aged in Cleveland Ohio, where her father was the administrator and her mother, the head of the Social Service Department. This unique background gave her insight into the world of the elderly. They were her neighbors and her friends growing up.

After graduating with a Master’s degree in Social Work from Columbia University in New York, she began working with the elderly. Between 1963 and 1980 Naomi developed Validation as a response to her dissatisfaction with traditional methods of working with the severely disoriented old-old people who were her clients.

In 1982 she published her first book, Validation: The Feil Method. Her second book, The Validation Breakthrough, was first published in 1993. Feil and her husband have made many films and videos about aging and Validation. Since the mid-1970s, Feil has done over 900 workshops in the United States and Canada, plus almost 1000 workshops in Europe and Asia.