Maud Mannoni

Maud Mannoni (Kortrijk, 1923 – Paris, 1998) was a psychoanalyst of Dutch-speaking Belgian origin who became a French citizen and one of the central figures of the Lacanian movement. Her work, focused on children with psychosis and intellectual disability, sits at the meeting point of psychoanalysis, criminology and institutional practice, and she remains a key reference in French clinical psychology of the second half of the twentieth century.

She spent her early childhood in Ceylon, cared for by a Sinhalese nurse until a sudden separation left her lost and frightened. After a difficult period in Paris with her maternal grandparents and then in Amsterdam, where she was largely isolated, she studied criminology at the University of Brussels and trained as an analyst in Belgium, working in psychiatric services and in a Antwerp project that took in young psychotic patients. She later settled in Paris, married the ethnographer and psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, and drew close to Jacques Lacan, who encouraged her to develop her own approach.

Her best-known contribution is the idea that a child's symptom often serves a function within the family: the child may carry the unresolved conflict of the parents. For her, treating the child meant listening to the family drama surrounding him. In 1969 she founded the experimental school at Bonneuil-sur-Marne for children with autism and psychosis, whose model inspired early-childhood services in several countries.