Maud Mannoni

Maud Mannoni (French: [mod manoni]; 23 October 1923 – 15 March 1998) was a French psychoanalyst of Belgian origin, who married Octave Mannoni and became a major figure of the Lacanian movement.

Maud (Magdalena) Mannoni (maiden name: Van der Spoel) was born in the Belgian city of Kortrijk, 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, and had further analysis with Jacques Lacan, supporting him during the 1953 split, and again after that of 1963, along with her husband Octave, Serge Leclaire, and Jean Clavreul.

Lacan, in the first of his seminars to be published, singled out “our colleague Maud Mannoni, [with] a 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.

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.

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