Michel Meignant, born in Paris in 1936, is a well-known figure in the field of medicine and psychotherapy.

 

After graduating in Physics-Chemistry-Biology from the Paris Faculty of Sciences, he obtained a doctorate from the Faculty of Medicine in 1963.

 

At the turn of the 1970s, he taught sexology at the University of Paris VIII and hosted daily broadcasts on RTL and Europe1.

 

Michel Meignant went on to work as a psychotherapist, notably at the Hôpital de la Pitié in Paris. Trained in a variety of therapeutic approaches, he has taken part in international training courses with such psychotherapy greats as Masters & Johnson and Barry Goodfield.

 

Between 1995 and 2020, he was founding president, then honorary president, of the Fédération Française de Psychothérapie et Psychanalyse (FF2P).

 

In addition to his medical and therapeutic practice, his vocation for cinema has led him to make numerous innovative medical and ethnographic films.

 

Introduced to scientific cinema by Jean Rouch, his film "Tassili N'Ajjer" (1961) on prehistoric paintings in the Sahara, co-directed with Jean-Dominique Lajoux, won him the Bronze Lion for best documentary at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. He defended his medical thesis with the documentary "La phénylcétonurie, une arriération mentale évitable" (1966).

 

Halfway between its ethnographic and medical uses, cinema imposed itself on him as a means of educating and raising public awareness on subjects such as sexology, psychotherapy and violence against women.

A committed figure, his filmography bears witness to the events and major discoveries that have marked recent decades in the fields of medicine and psychology, from the sexual revolution to #MeToo, via the fight against ordinary educational violence.

 

An avant-garde thinker, Michel Meignant is interested in new therapeutic methods, which he has experimented with himself, such as EMDR, ICV and Non-Violent Communication. He met such emblematic figures as Francine Shapiro, Peggy Pace, Thomas d'Ansembourg, Pierre Rabhi and Matthieu Ricard.

He was one of the first to collect the testimony of Jeffrey Masson, who, in "L'Affaire Freud" (2011), was already warning of the correlation between Freud's abandonment of seduction theory for drive theory and violence against women and children.

 

He is the author of several books, including "Liberté-Égalité-Sexualité" (Robert Laffont) and "Amourologue" (Buchet-Chastel), which have helped to enrich public discourse on sexuality and therapy.