George Devereux
Georges Devereux (born György Dobó; 13 September 1908 – 28 May 1985) was a Hungarian-French ethnologist and psychoanalyst, often considered the founder of ethnopsychiatry.
In the postwar years, Devereux became a psychoanalyst, working with the Winter Veterans Hospital and Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.
[1] Devereux taught at several colleges in the United States, returning to Paris about 1962 at the invitation of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
He was appointed as director of studies of Section VI at the noted École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in Paris, where he worked from 1963 to 1981.
In 1993 the Centre George Devereux was founded in his honor at the University of Paris 8 Saint-Denis, to offer care to students and people in the community.
His 1951 work, Reality and Dream, about his ethnopsychoanalysis of a Native American Blackfoot man, was adapted as a French film, Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (2013), written and directed by Arnaud Desplechin.
[3] As a youngster growing up in that imperial and cosmopolitan world, and later in France, Dobó learned and spoke four languages: Hungarian, Romanian, German, and French.
He studied piano seriously as a youth but, after an unsuccessful operation to correct a problem with his hand, had to give up his dream of performing professionally.
He returned to Paris upon completion and, taking a new direction, enrolled at the École des langues orientales, known as INALCO, where he studied the Malay language, qualifying in 1931.
"Among the young American anthropologists with whom he collaborated during his preparative stage he encountered only distrust and contempt; when, being asked about his teachers, he mentioned the names Mauss, Rivet and Lévy-Bruhl, he said.”[5] Devereux considered his time with the Mohave to have been the happiest of his life.
[7] He treated and studied several Native Americans suffering from mental illness in this period, including Jimmy Picard, a Blackfoot whom he wrote about.
[4] In this period, Devereux was finally accepted as a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and also of the Société psychanalytique de Paris.
On the initiative of noted anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had introduced structuralism to the field, Devereux was invited in 1963 to teach at Section VI of the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in Paris.
He believed that the researcher's goal of making his observations from a strictly objective point of view was impossible to practice and could be counterproductive.
In addition to using his own experiences, Devereux closely studied Claude Lévi-Strauss' Tristes tropiques [A World on the Wane], a classic work of his anthropology studies among indigenous peoples in Brazil; Georges Balandiers Afrique ambiguë [Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision]; and Condominas' L'Exotique au quotidien.
In France, Tobie Nathan and Marie Rose Moro continue Devereux's ethnopsychiatric work, especially in psychotherapy with immigrants.
In Switzerland the second generation of the "Zurich School" of ethnopsychoanalysis, Mario Erdheim, Maya Nadig, Florence Weiss, etc., has been deeply influenced by Devereux's methodological approach.
