TheÉcole expérimentale de Bonneuil (Experimental school of Bonneuil) was founded on September 12, 1969 under the leadership of Maud Mannoni.

In his seminar, Jacques Lacan had asked analysts to take a somewhat closer interest in what went on in hospitals, in the belief that analytic discourse could be used to subvert the workings of these structures. In this context, Maud Mannoni began an institutional experiment at the Institut médico-pédagogique (Medical training institute) in Thiais, France. This experiment enabled her to produce Le Psychiatre, son "fou" et la psychanalyse (The psychiatrist, his "madman" and psychoanalysis; 1970), exposing the ways in which psychoanalysis betrays its vocation by participating in the institutional order. Her earlier works were The Backward Child and His Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study (1964/1972), in which she showed that in seeking to treat the symptom the patient's needs were...