Maud Mannoni (; born Magdalena Van der Spoel; 23 October 1923 – 15 March 1998) was a French psychoanalyst of Belgian origin, who married

Octave Mannoni Dominique-Octave Mannoni (; 29 August 1899, in Sologne – 30 July 1989, in Paris) was a French psychoanalyst and author. Life After spending more than twenty years in Madagascar, Mannoni returned to France after World War II where he, inspired ...

and became a major figure of the

Lacanian movement Lacanianism or Lacanian psychoanalysis is a theoretical system that explains the mind, behaviour, and culture through a structuralist and post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis, initiated by the work of Jacques Lacan from the ...

Life

She was born as Magdalena Van der Spoel in the Belgian city of

Kortrijk Kortrijk ( , ; vls, Kortryk or ''Kortrik''; french: Courtrai ; la, Cortoriacum), sometimes known in English as Courtrai or Courtray ( ), is a Belgian city and municipality in the Flemish province of West Flanders. It is the capital and larg ...

, but spent her early childhood in Ceylon. After studying criminology at Brussels University, she began a training analysis with one of the pioneering Belgian psychoanalysts, Maurice Dugautiez. Thereafter she moved to France in 1949, where she married Octave Mannoni. While in Paris, she made contact with

Françoise Dolto Françoise Dolto (; November 6, 1908 – August 25, 1988) was a French pediatrician and psychoanalyst. Biography Born as Françoise Marette, she was the daughter of an affluent far-right royalist family of traditional Catholics in Paris. Her Als ...

, and had further analysis with

Jacques Lacan Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, , ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and ...

, supporting him during the 1953 split, and again after that of 1963, along with her husband Octave, Serge Leclaire, and Jean Clavreul.

On the backward child

Lacan, in the first of his seminars to be published, singled out “our colleague Maud Mannoni, itha book that has just come out and which I would recommend you to read...''The Retarded Child and the Mother''”. In that book she concludes that the subnormal patient has not been able to separate his or her ego from the mother. Instead, a kind of symbiosis takes place: the roots of such psychoses, in the words of the Lacanian Bernard Touati, “are inscribed in the maternal unconscious, with the psychotic child being unrecognised as a desiring subject...and frozen as partial object subjected to maternal omnipotence”. From 1964, and the launch of the Lacanian movement onwards, Mannoni began to have a revolutionary influence on an entire generation in France—parents, teachers, child therapists, and analysts alike—through her work. She died in Paris.

The child's speech

Mannoni drew a distinction between what she called ''parole pleine'' and ''parole vide''—full and empty speech—in relation to the language of the child. Empty speech refers to the language of a child saturated by the symbols of parental knowledge, as opposed to 'full speech'—spoken from the heart. Linking her analysis to Alice Miller's view of the over-dutiful child, Mannoni argued that “the subject of the words is not necessarily the child”, being particularly concerned with how an emotionally engulfing parent prevents the child from owning and inhabiting his or her own experience. Every child, she points out, is born into a pre-existing parental discourse; and in certain circumstances the alienating burden of parental expectation can block a child's sense of entitlement to its own speech—its own life.

Support centres and anti-psychiatry

Mannoni specialised in mental illness in children, and in 1969 established the school of

Bonneuil-sur-Marne Bonneuil-sur-Marne (, literally ''Bonneuil on Marne'') is a commune in the Val-de-Marne department in the southeastern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris. Population Transport Bonneuil-sur-Marne is served by no ...

, a community live-in project for children with

autism The autism spectrum, often referred to as just autism or in the context of a professional diagnosis autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental condition (or conditions) characterized by difficulti ...

and

psychosis Psychosis is a condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations, among other features. Additional symptoms are incoherent speech and behavi ...

. In doing so, she has been described as “profoundly influenced by the antipsychiatry of

R. D. Laing Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illnessin particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment o ...

and D. Cooper”, an influence which can also be seen perhaps in her view of the child as the

dysfunctional family A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often child neglect or abuse and sometimes even all of the above on the part of individual parents occur continuously and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such ...

's spokesperson. Until it was reformed as a

day hospital A day hospital is an outpatient facility where patients attend for assessment, treatment or rehabilitation during the day and then return home or spend the night at a different facility. Day hospitals are becoming a new trend in healthcare. The numb ...

in 1975, Bonneuil would be a leading institutional influence, known for its wide variety of therapeutic methods and its disregard for traditional boundaries. Mannoni was also instrumental in establishing LVA—"A Place to Live and Hospitality"—small medico-social support centres of which there were 446 by 2007.

Wider influences

After Lacan's death, and the fragmentation of the Lacanian movement, Mannoni, who had kept her membership of the IPA through the Belgian society, was able to play something of a unifying role, rather like that of Leclaire. Her unique synthesis of Lacanian theories with those of Winnicott meant that such new perspectives on child development could be brought into much wider prominence.

Literary explorations

Mannoni saw in the early death of

Poe Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widel ...

's mother, and his exposure to her corpse, the key to the Dark Romanticism of all his subsequent writings.Darien Leader, ''The New Black'' (2008) p. 30-1 and p. 212

Bibliography

* Maud Mannoni, ''Le Psychiatre, son "fou", et le Psychanalyse'' (Paris 1970) * Maud Mannoni, ''Amour, Haine, Séparation'' (Paris 1993)