ABSTRACT
Maud Mannoni begins her book The Child, His “Illness”, and the Others, in the original French version, in the following manner: “The psychoanalysis of children, is psychoanalysis”. For Mannoni there is no fundamental difference between the psychoanalysis of a child and that of an adult. Each child must discover his own perversion, a version of the child that is forbidden and negated by the parents. But in discovering his perversion, by making it his own, the child is effecting what we can call a de-formation of the surplus that he has inherited through the original sin of the parents. Such a version of the child is then the possibility of his de-formation, of emancipation from the self-imposed minority that Immanuel Kant attributed to his version of enlightenment. The authors draw together the question of the training or formation of the analyst with that of the child’s advent to the place of subject.
