2025 Theses Doctoral

The Child and the Norm: Psychoanalysis and Maladapted Childhood in Postwar France

Desjardins-Mooney, Zachary

This dissertation traces the psychoanalytic critique of rehabilitation in child psychiatry, education and special education in France from the 1950s to the 1970s. More specifically, it examines how and why psychoanalytic ideas were used by various thinkers working in these fields to counter the adaptive and normative tendencies of the social maladaptation model developed in child psychiatry during the interwar period and institutionalized under Vichy.

What could psychoanalysis accomplish that other approaches to childhood could not? What role did psychoanalysis play in subverting and undermining the ideas and methods of the maladapted childhood sector? What was the impact of psychoanalysis on educational and psychiatric practices and institutions in the aftermath of the Second World War? To answer these questions, I consider four individuals whose innovative work with children was marked by a seminal engagement with various forms of psychoanalysis: Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, Fernand Oury and Fernand Deligny.

The study of these figures reveals that psychoanalysis provided a dynamic understanding of the child’s psychic development, in contradiction with the finalistic categories and quantitative understanding of intelligence of maladaptation. However, the notion of adaptation, and the possibility of adapting the child to society, as well as the role of the analyst in this process, elicited contradictory perspectives and was problematized differently across the psychoanalytic field, thus highlighting the protean nature of psychoanalysis and its variety in postwar France. In contact with antipsychiatry and the New Education movement in France, psychoanalytic ideas also gave rise to alternative educational and therapeutic practices oriented towards the emancipation of the child and not towards his social reintegration.