Culture and psychism: the ethnopsychoanalysis of Georges Devereux

Brief biography

In several statements, Devereux traced back his first thoughts on the relation between psychism and culture to the historical, cultural and family background of his childhood. ⁹ Born into a Jewish family in 1908 as György Dobó, ¹⁰ he grew up in Lugos, a small Transylvanian village in the Banat region of Hungary (from 1919 annexed to Romania), a crossroad of different cultures and religions. This cultural atmosphere, together with his brother’s suicide in 1924, ¹¹ prompted some crucial questions, which the scientist Devereux tried to answer in his works: Where is the boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’? Where does a person ‘begin’ and ‘end’? Where do ‘the others’ and ‘the environment’ begin and end? ¹² Or, in other words, when does a cultural fact cease to be ‘outside’ and is transformed into a psychic structure, becoming an ‘inside’ (Devereux, 1966)?

In 1926 he moved to Paris to study physics at Sorbonne University, driven by a theoretical and ethical need to find rigour and clarity, as he wrote in some autobiographical notes. ¹³ His scientific education was brief but with prestigious teachers. He attended maths, physics and chemistry classes held by Nobel Laureates Jean Perrin and Marie Curie. From these lessons and from the work of Poincaré he learned a ‘specific philosophic point of view’ and the ‘methodological aspect in Science’. ¹⁴ The important teachings on the conventional and perspectival nature of knowledge and on a new operational and constructive view of science prepared the young Devereux to embrace the ‘epistemological lesson’ of quantum physics (Bohr, 1958), which became the theoretical framework of his thoughts; this was also the basis of his criticism – present throughout his work – of the lack of a scientific rigour in the human sciences. Frenetic and intense studying resulted in Devereux suffering a mental breakdown, forcing him to return to Lugos. Then, after a short stay in Leipzig, ¹⁵ he returned to Paris in 1929 and interrupted his physics studies to turn to the human sciences. Deeply immersed in the surrealist atmosphere during the années folles, Devereux wrote poems and joined the Jüngstes Deutschland Club together with Klauss Mann, Peter Mendelsohn, Yvan and Claire Goll (Beck, 1991). He also worked at the Compagnie Française de Traduction and took Malaysian lessons at the École des Langues Orientales, later focusing on ethnology.

In the early 1930s, Devereux was part of the first generation of ethnologists trained by Marcel Mauss at the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris (founded in 1925). ¹⁶ While there, he witnessed the birth of a new branch of French human sciences, which (like American cultural anthropology) was opposed to the colonial theories and to the race studies of physical anthropology, intrinsically linked to a biological and evolutionist paradigm (Conklin, 2002). Devereux started to learn the basics of field research at Berkeley University, California, under Alfred Kroeber, scholar of the ‘Father of American Anthropology’ Franz Boas. ¹⁷ This was a condition imposed by the Rockefeller foundation, in order to be eligible for a scholarship for a scientific mission in Indochina among the Sedang people from Thea Ha, the last village ‘pacified’ by France at that time. At the end of his time in Indochina, Devereux had no chance of being employed at the new Musée de l’Homme in Paris because of his Jewish origins and strict new laws for foreign workers in France, ¹⁸ so he moved back to the USA. Under the direction of Kroeber, he obtained a PhD in 1935 with a thesis on sexuality among the Mohave American Indians, ¹⁹ a people that he visited many times during his life; he loved them so much so that he wanted his ashes to be spread inside the Mohave Reserve.

However, Devereux’s real initiation as an anthropologist had happened in French Indochina between 1933 and 1935. Although he published only few articles on this experience, for him it was crucial, as shown by the copious documentation stored in the archive. ²⁰ In fact, in Indochina Devereux discovered that the relationship with the Other is the main tool of knowledge, making it impossible to avoid the implications of the subjectivity of the researcher in the field of research. This issue, which was central in his theoretical apparatus, is examined in his book From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (Devereux, 1967a), which he started just after he came back from Indochina. In this work, Devereux theorizes the anxious feeling of every researcher who, observing another man, is forced to look at himself. In this book he also sets out his theory on countertransference, which he developed embryonically in Indochina (without any knowledge yet of psychoanalysis), in an attempt to create a communication channel with Sedang people, analysing his own ‘outside’ (culturally) and ‘inside’ (psychologically).

During this experience, Devereux discovered the need for a dialogue between an anthropological approach and a psychological one, in order to fully understand the Sedang people and, more generally, all human behaviour. Most of the notes he made concerned cases of suicide and sexual perversions, and the young anthropologist realized that, behind the apparent cruelty, this population was hiding a profound psychic suffering. He thus became aware of the theoretical limits of anthropology and of the need to complete his anthropological analysis with psychological concepts that he did not have at that time.

In the years before the Second World War, Devereux, rebelling against Kroeber’s theoretical positions, ²¹ learned these ideas mainly by himself. He read books on psychopathology ²² and conducted research in several psychiatric hospitals – such as the Worcester State Hospital of Massachusetts (1939–40) ²³ – and travelled all over the USA with short-term scholarships and teaching jobs. ²⁴ In an interview in 1980, Devereux said that it was just after another visit to the Mohave people, ²⁵ who had some psychopathological theories similar to Freud’s, ²⁶ that he overcame his reticence as an anthropologist towards psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, it is necessary to underline the importance of his encounter with Niels Bohr in 1937, during a series of conferences on ‘Modern atomic theory and its philosophical implications’ held by the physicist in Berkeley as part of the Hitchcock Lectures. ²⁷ Indeed, because of Bohr’s suggestions, Devereux started to be interested in the epistemology of psychoanalysis, finding several similarities with quantum physics. ²⁸

After the war, during which he was recruited as a volunteer officer of the US Navy at Chongqing (China), and after a short stay in Paris, ²⁹ Devereux moved to Kansas to join the Topeka Institute of Psychoanalysis at the famous Menninger Clinic. Here, from 1946 he ran a course on psychiatric and psychoanalytic anthropology for the residents of the clinic, and in 1948–52 he did his psychoanalysis training. ³⁰ During his time at Topeka, Devereux wrote his first book, Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (1951), the first complete report of psychotherapy of a ‘culturally alien’, who was treated by Devereux at the Menninger Clinic. This became his best-known work in the USA; it was also the least theoretical of his publications. These, based on the dialogue between anthropology and psychoanalysis, fitted into the everlasting dead-end dispute between the two disciplines, which arose in the Anglo-Saxon world just after the publication of the 1918 English edition of Totem and Taboo (1912–13) by Freud (Assoun, 1993; Charuty, 1992; Deluz and Heald, 1994; Pulman, 2002; Stocking, 1986).

Devereux continued to practise psychoanalysis with patients of the institutes and university clinics where he taught from 1953 to 1963, such as the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, ³¹ where, from 1956, he ran a university course on ethnopsychiatry – apparently the first in the world. In fact, he could practice psychoanalysis only for ‘research purposes’, ³² since he did not have a medical and psychiatric education which, at that time, was essential in order to practise in the USA (Gifford, 2008). Devereux could not start his private psychotherapy practice in New York until he had obtained his degree in psychology in 1959.

Devereux always complained that he was not considered a fully-fledged analyst, although it is important to stress that his interest in psychoanalysis was mainly related to its theoretical framework and method of investigation, and only secondarily as a therapy (Devereux, 1967a). Indeed, he always defended the epistemological value of psychoanalysis, opposing both neo-Freudians and culturalists. Considering himself an ‘orthodox Freudian’, Devereux never accepted the scientific results of a progressive medicalization of American psychoanalysis or its culturalist developments, which he believed turned the Freudian theory into a mere technique aimed at adapting the individual to his environment. ³³

With his unprecedented suggestion of a connection between anthropology and psychoanalysis in the epistemological framework of quantum physics, Devereux spent the following years in the USA isolated both scientifically and institutionally. This ‘polemical confinement’ (Severi, 1984) forced him to move back to France in 1963, to teach at Section VI of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.

‘The psychic unity of mankind’ and the role of culture

Following decolonization, the number of migrants arriving in France increased exponentially, and the problem of their sociocultural and psychological adaptation had to be dealt with urgently (Bastide and Raveau, 1965). In this situation, and in a university institute traditionally focused on interdisciplinarity and ‘original research’ (Mazon, 1988), Devereux’s work was at last recognized. During the 1960s–70s, ³⁴ after the systematic publication of his works, Devereux became famous in Europe as one of the founders of ethnopsychiatry.

Until then, as mentioned earlier, his best-known work in the USA had been Reality and Dream (1951), maybe because in this book Devereux had coined the term ‘transcultural psychiatry’ – which became very widely used – as a conceptual box in which to place his early studies. However, for the second edition in 1969, he explicitly distanced himself from this term, declaring that he had changed to the term ‘Ethnopsychiatry’, ³⁵ ‘borrowed’ from the Haitian psychiatrist Louis Mars (Devereux, 1969). ³⁶ He made this choice when the neo-Kraepelinian view, which spread widely after the Second World War, started to use the label of transcultural psychiatry in the sense of a ‘psychiatry for the culturally aliens’, thus misinterpreting the meaning conferred by Devereux to the term ‘trans-cultural’ as ‘beyond any particular culture’. ³⁷ Indeed, with this concept he wanted to create a new ‘generalized’ and ‘culturally neutral’ psychopathology, which was ‘equally applicable to the treatment of patients belonging to the therapist’s own cultural subgroup and to culturally alien or marginal persons’ – as he had already written in the Introduction to his 1951 book (Devereux, 1969: 39).

Unlike classical transcultural psychiatry – harshly accused in 1969 of ‘incorrect usurpation’ (Devereux, 1969: 26) – Devereux’s theoretical purpose was to found a psychopathology based not on the study of specific cultures, but rather on the study of the very concept of ‘Culture per se’, as a ‘universal human phenomenon’, lived all over the world and experienced by both normal individuals and ‘psychiatric patients’ (p. 21). In other words, he wanted to found a new psychopathological theory able to take into account the role of culture in the structuring of the psyche, in both healthy and pathological modes; it should therefore be oriented not just to the culturally alien but to every individual, as both a psychic and cultural being. The assumption of this is, of course, ‘the fundamental identity of the psychic structures and processes of normals and ab-normals alike, in every location, and during every period of history’. ³⁸

With these words, Devereux refers to ‘the psychic unity of mankind’ – already highlighted in an article in 1937 ³⁹ as a ‘fundamental postulate’ of his entire theoretical framework – taking a cue from Elementargedanken theory by Boas’ Professor Adolf Bastian. This postulate implies the existence of a sort of ‘universal common denominator of psychic contents’, and, above all, of ‘dispositions and potentialities’ [Anlagen] of all human beings, which then have the same ‘limited possibilities’. ⁴⁰

In this way, Devereux explains – as already highlighted by his two mentors Mauss and Freud – similarities between myths, rituals, dreams and symptoms. These equivalences show how the same psychic contents can be repressed in a specific culture and actualized in another one, always in accordance with universal psychodynamic processes (like sublimation and repression). In other words, every culture-trait and belief would have, for Devereux, an equivalent inside one’s psyche, and every ‘psychic fantasy’ would have an equivalent as a habit somewhere in the world (Devereux, 1955). The difference is, on the one hand, the cultural filter that actualizes one content rather than another, and on the other hand, the final bricolage of these contents within every individual who differs from every other (Devereux, 1967b). ⁴¹

In the history of the dispute between anthropology and psychoanalysis, always under the postulate of ‘the psychic unity of mankind’, Devereux saw the validity of psychoanalysis, in contrast to culturalism, which labelled it as merely a sociology for the early-century bourgeoisie. Devereux (1955) defines psychoanalysis as an ‘ethnographic monography’, which, by studying in depth a single social class in a specific historical period, nevertheless gave rise to concepts applicable to the whole of humankind. According to the postulate of ‘the psychic unity of mankind’, indeed, we would reach the same achievements, through either an extensive study of all the existing cultural traits (or of all variables of the same cultural trait in different ethnic or social groups) or an intensive analysis of a single individual or social group (Devereux, 1955). ⁴²

Like Freud and unlike Róheim, Devereux states that social and cultural rules are passed down during the resolution of the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1930/1961), during which – in the forming of the superego and ego ideal – the different cultural filters generate behaviours that are specific to each culture, ⁴³ and, at the same time, generate the ‘unconscious segment of the ethnic personality’ which ‘contains what each culture forces its members to repress’ (Devereux, 1978b: 375; see also Devereux, 1956). Unlike Freud (1930/1961), who considered culture mainly in its repressive role, Devereux (1967b) looks at it as the founder dimension of Human, able to actualize all the potentials of an individual, providing him a wide range of tools of differentiation, individualization and socialization, through which to reach his fulfilment in a unique and particular way.

Every individual has dialogues with the outside, thanks to the mediation of culture, which is, in turn, mediated in a continuous process of internalization. Human psyche and culture are ‘coemergents’, and the latter is simply a ‘manner of apprehending the outside’ through which the psychological reality becomes perceptible and understandable in an intersubjective and social context (Devereux, 1957). All the cultures are ‘organizational structures of behavior’, ‘standard sets of defenses’ (like myths and rites) (Devereux, 1952, 1953), ‘tool boxes’ that allow the individual to function as a human in a given society (Devereux, 1975b). Indeed, Devereux considers mental pathology as a failure of this process of differentiation, individualization and sublimation, as a renunciation of the cultural potentialities and a ‘regression’ which disregards the socially accepted meanings of the cultural tools, using them in an arbitrary way (Devereux, 1952, 1953, 1967b). Unlike Freud, who focused on the disorganization of the psychic disturbance, Devereux (1940) instead highlights its reorganization, considering ‘social negativism’ as a mechanism that shapes every pathology through ‘patterns of misconduct’ (Linton, 1936) – cultural items that are latent but still present. This system explains why a mentally ill person is maladjusted in every culture or society (but for Devereux, as we will see later, this does not justify the use of the maladjustment principle as a diagnostic criterion to define the pathological traits of a behaviour).

Pathology basically reveals how the psyche works, but it also shows the nature of ‘culture per se’, as already guessed by Freud (1930/1961), who found, in the antisocial behaviour of pathology, the unveiling – in its reverse – of the compensation between sexual and social (sublimation or repression) which structures the culture (Assoun, 1993). According to Devereux, these ‘universal operation mechanisms’ of psychism and culture are the specific subjects of anthropology and psychoanalysis; however, it is important to remember that both aim to formulate general laws on differentiation and individualization processes and not on their final products, which are so diversified that, depriving them of such diversity, there is a risk of destroying their essence (Devereux, 1953).

This was basically the theoretical stance of his two mentors Mauss and Freud, with whom Devereux totally agreed. He also agreed with their idea of a continuity among all the cultures and between normal and abnormal, and with the method of investigation that derives from it; this positions the ‘alien’ (the cultural other/the pathological individual) as a privileged laboratory through which to observe human nature. In this sense, Devereux totally embraces Mauss’s and Freud’s proposal of a necessary collaboration between anthropology and psychoanalysis in order to understand fully both the clinical data and the ‘social facts’.

So the whole of Devereux’s theoretical work can be read as an effort to found, in the first place, an ‘epistemology and a methodology’ aimed at combining these two disciplines (Devereux, 1967a). As he declared several times during the 1970s, this is basically what his ethnopsychoanalysis is: an epistemology aimed at exhaustively studying the human being in its integrity and complexity, avoiding all cultural determinism or psychic reductionism.

Neither an ‘exotic psychiatry’ nor a ‘psychiatry for migrants’: ethnopsychoanalysis as an epistemology

In the 1970s, when ethnopsychiatry was spreading everywhere in the world, but in its main meaning of a ‘psychiatry for the culturally alien’, Devereux distanced himself. In several statements of that period, he underlines the differences between his theoretical project and the official perspective of transcultural psychiatry, which he often polemically calls ‘exotic psychiatry’ (e.g. see Devereux, 1975a). At the same time, he attacks a kind of ‘critical’ ethnopsychiatry targeted at migrants, which, especially in Europe, was becoming popular at that time, together with a sociocultural and relativistic view of mental illness. ⁴⁴

Besides stressing his ‘diagnostic universalism’ (as he had already done several times in his writings, against American culturalism), ⁴⁵ Devereux is explicitly stating that ethnopsychiatry is neither a specialized branch of psychiatry or anthropology; nor ‘the study of psychic disturbances in different cultural environments’ or of the ‘“traditional ideas” related to this kind of disturbances in the so called “traditional” societies’; nor as a ‘frame of reference’ to ‘contest the so-called official psychiatry’ (Devereux, 1975a: 251). He had even more ambitious goals. Like Freudian psychoanalysis, Devereux shapes his ethnopsychoanalysis ‘first of all as an epistemology and a methodology’ for human sciences (p. 251). Or rather, he says, as ‘the most comprehensive among human sciences’, because it studies the ‘basic problem’ that underpins them all: the complementary relationship ‘between the comprehension of the individual and of his society and culture’ (Devereux, 1978a: 7). Devereux inextricably links ethnopsychoanalysis to complementarism, the cornerstone of his epistemology, which imposes the necessity of different explanations and also their irreducibility, separation and non-simultaneity. In other words, according to this principle, every ‘human fact’ can be fully explained only when it is observed from both a psychological and a sociocultural perspective. However, these two perspectives cannot be adopted simultaneously.

The principle of complementarity was enunciated for the first time by Niels Bohr at the International Congress of Physics in Como in 1927, to solve a paradox that was engaging physicists at the time. ⁴⁶ This paradox was the existence of two theories about the nature of light (wave mechanics and matrix mechanics), which came to the same results but from incompatible assumptions (the corpuscular or wavelike quality of light) (Bohr, 1928). For the physicist, the paradox was a false problem, because what scientists really see in the microscopic realm is the reaction of the phenomenon to their interaction and not the phenomenon itself, especially because the two types of reaction of light, as a particle or a wave, were occurring in two different and mutually exclusive experimental settings. It was not then a matter of choosing between two contradictory interpretations of the nature of microphysical phenomena, but of considering the conditions to observe and describe them. The principle of complementarity was then presented by Bohr (1928) as a ‘methodological generalization’ of the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg (1927); he proposed it as an alternative conceptual framework to be used instead of the principle of causality, in every situation – not only for physics but also for all the fields of knowledge such as human sciences (Favrholdt, 1999; Rosenfeld, 1963) – where we cannot talk about autonomous behaviour of an observed phenomenon and where more than one level of explanation is necessary to fully understand it. ⁴⁷

As already mentioned, archival documents show that Devereux met Bohr in 1937 during a seminar on ‘Modern Atomic Theory and its Philosophical Implications’ at the conference on ‘Causality and Complementarity’, held by Bohr at Berkeley University. ⁴⁸ At that time, Devereux was trying to understand his notes on the Sedang people, and the principle of complementarity inspired him as a fundamental epistemological tool to link psychological and anthropological data. Only by renouncing the principle of causality would it have been possible for him to avoid every kind of reductionism in the study of Man. In terms of epistemological problems, for the young anthropologist there were, in fact, many analogies between microscopic phenomena and human complexity: phenomena that were similar, not ‘by nature’ but because of the difficulties in observing and describing them scientifically.

For physicists, ‘waves’ and ‘particles’ were just descriptions of two different modes of the behaviour of light within two mutually exclusive experimental settings (and were not part of its nature) and, in the same way, ‘psyche’ and ‘culture’ are ‘conceptual constructs’ (Devereux, 1945) based on two different and incompatible ways of observing human beings that allow us to separate theoretically what, in reality, is inseparable and indistinct. Of course, Devereux’s consideration on complementarism fits in with the epistemological way opened by Poincaré with his criticism of positivism, and specifically with the consciousness of the difference between phenomenon and scientific datum. No phenomenon belongs a priori to a specific discipline; only its explanation turns it into a datum, psychological or anthropological (Devereux, 1972: 9–22). Like Poincaré, Devereux considers the scientific method as a ‘sifter’: a selection of facts related to the explicative necessities of every discipline; this must necessarily exclude some aspects to bring out some others, and revealing, in the hypothetical residues, new phenomena to explain.

Psyche and culture are, in fact, ‘coemergents’. There can be no culture, indeed, that is not experienced by a psychism and there can be no psychism that is perceptible without a cultural symbolism. In the study of Man, it is impossible to separate culture and psychism, but – as Lévi-Strauss (1950) also stressed – they cannot be considered through the principle of cause and effect and it is not a matter of making a choice between a psychological or a cultural explanation of each human behaviour; both are valid and necessary, but become contradictory when used together. In other words, what is different between psychoanalysis and anthropology is not the ‘subject of investigation’, which is basically the same, but the perspective from which to observe it, from the ‘inside’ or the ‘outside’, one excluding the other.

Through the method of complementarity, and on the basis of the postulate of ‘the psychic unity of Mankind’ which allows us to observe, like in a kaleidoscope, the same psychic contents among symptoms, dreams, myths and rituals, Devereux founded a new ‘double discourse’ epistemology. This method predicates that an exhaustive understanding of every human phenomenon can therefore be reached only by continuously switching from one level of explanation to the other (psychological/cultural). This alternation is similar to the eye’s perception of the doubleness in the famous pictures of Gestaltpsychologie; the eye, unable to grasp the whole picture simultaneously, focuses on one element at a time. ⁴⁹

Devereux based his ethnopsychoanalysis on complementarity, proposing a third way in the debate on the relationship between psyche and culture, which was historically polarized on what exactly is cause and what is effect between them. This very question was the basis of the controversies between anthropology and psychoanalysis. In the late 1930s the two alternatives that polarized the debate were the Culture and Personality School of Anthropology, which Devereux joined in 1937 thanks to Margaret Mead and Ralph Linton but soon left (Devereux, 1939), and Géza Róheim’s psychoanalytical anthropology. Devereux read Róheim’s work during his stay in Indochina and he met him in 1939 at the Worcester State Hospital. ⁵⁰ Focusing on the issue of the causality between psyche and culture, these two perspectives fell into cultural determinism and psychic reductionism, respectively. According to Devereux, their main mistake was the ontological approach to the matter instead of an epistemological one.

Through the ‘methodological antidotes’ (Inglese, 2007) of quantum physics epistemology, Devereux rejected every attempt to establish a disciplinary totalitarianism and, during his staying in the USA, examined every theoretical position and concept born in the field of the behavioural sciences in the twentieth century, opposing all those fancy scientific trends. As already mentioned, he cut the connection between psychological normality and adaptation (Devereux, 1940, 1958), the scientific paradigm which was very successful in the field of psychopathology and American anthropology, and which was the basis of the theoretical alliance between culturalists and neo-Freudian psychiatrists; ⁵¹ Devereux thought that both groups were unable to accept the existence of insane societies. In accordance with complementarity, which requires that different levels of explanation are kept separate, Devereux believed the connection was a scientific fallacy. According to him, not every maladjusted person is necessarily insane and not every integrated person is psychologically normal.

In the golden age of the relativism of Boasian American anthropology, Devereux (1967a) described the relativistic position underlying this paradigm as a ‘subterfuge’ – a defensive strategy against the identification with the other, camouflaged as a scientific method. He considered this paradigm to be scientifically ineffective, unable to see similarities among the differences, and to notice the psychic suffering behind some behaviours that are socially accepted or even ritualized, as in the case of shamans, who Devereux regarded as neurotics (Devereux, 1956, 1961a, 1961b). ⁵²

Against culturalists – who found in the ‘culture-bound syndromes’ another justification for relativism ⁵³ – he always aligned with a ‘diagnostic non-relativism’. At the same time, he criticized the neo-Kraepelinian descriptive and comparative universalism for its lack of critical approach to the concept of culture and of his role in the setting up of psychism. ⁵⁴

The epistemological role of countertransference

In the conceptual framework of complementarism, Devereux (1978b: 381) saw the ‘founding act’ of a real multidisciplinarity which ‘makes all sociological or psychological reductionisms impossible’, creating a connection among the plurality of the possible explanations of human phenomena while maintaining mutual control. Furthermore, because of the scientific acceptance of the interaction between observed phenomenon and observer – not only unavoidable but also a condition for observing phenomena – Devereux rereads the problem of the unavoidable intrusion of the subjectivity of the observer while observing a human behaviour. The researcher, in fact, never observes a human behaviour in a ‘natural’ condition, but instead he observes the reactions to his presence, that inevitably modifies this behaviour.

According to Devereux, only Freudian psychoanalysis had faced and problematized this crucial problematic point. For this reason, he chose it as a ‘paradigmatic model’ of all human sciences, rereading it with the consciousness of the conventionality of scientific concepts, as well as inside the perspectival, operational and constructive view of science, introduced by Poincaré, Bohr and Bridgam (Devereux, 1967a). In order to remedy the impossibility of direct observation of the other’s inside and to ensure the experimental control of the observed phenomena that every science requires, Freud had based psychoanalytic epistemology on transference (Stengers, 1992). According to Devereux, in this way Freud followed an intuition similar to that which had led physicists to observe atoms and electrons. In the new physics, the scientist creates experimental settings allowing observation of the properties of atoms because of their reaction to collisions and radiations (Bohr, 1934); similarly, the psychoanalyst, in the laboratory setting of the analysis, turns the symptoms of the patient into an ‘artificial illness’ (the transference neurosis), which actualizes his unconscious traumas, allowing them to be observed, because of their projection on the analyst (Freud, 1912/1958a, 1914/1958b).

The assumption of this interpretation of psychoanalysis is, inevitably, the acceptance of the idea of a universality of mankind, the condition that makes it possible to experience the other’s inside by observing oneself. Devereux’s universalism underlies his method based on countertransference – the reactions of the analyst to the patient’s productions. This concept, together with complementarism, forms the basis of his epistemology, theorized in From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (1967a); ⁵⁵ this book, together with the introduction to Ethnopsychanalyse complémentariste (1972), contains the essence of Devereux’s thought. ⁵⁶

In fact, only with the assumption of the existence of a ‘psychic unity of mankind’ can Devereux affirm that every man can always find a psychic segment of himself inside someone else or even find a segment of his own culture in someone else’s one. If it does not happen immediately, it is because these traits are psychically or culturally repressed in one, and psychically or culturally actualized in the other, as in a photographic negative. It is precisely this complementary matching between manifest and repressed content that triggers the ‘anxiety’ that arises in the encounter with the alien and generates countertransference reactions. But at the same time, analysing them both psychically and culturally, it is this very matching that is the gateway to the other (Devereux, 1967a).

In other words, the researcher, observing the other, is forced to look into himself. This is the point where the parallelism between atoms and men ends: when the feeling of anguishing commonality appears, which, instead of being considered as an impediment, becomes a tool of knowledge of the human being, the only possible scientific knowledge. For Devereux, this ‘anxiety’ is the specific object of the behavioural sciences and their most important cognitive moment. Once again, Devereux takes inspiration from Freud. However, Freud – a son of his time and with a positivistic view of science – considered countertransference as the main problem undermining the scientificity and credibility of psychoanalysis (Freud, 1910/1957). ⁵⁷ In contrast, Devereux chose countertransference as the ‘crucial datum’ of the behavioural sciences, through which to embrace a new method for human sciences (Cerea, 2013).

Even if he is never cited in this context, Devereux’s thoughts complemented a positive revaluation of countertransference, ⁵⁸ which started in the 1950s and resulted in the most recent ‘inter-relational’ and ‘constructivist’ developments of psychoanalysis. ⁵⁹ However, in Devereux’s writings the countertransference issue is extrapolated from the strictly analytic sphere to become a conceptual tool to explain the involvement of every observer in relation to the object and the field of research. In this sense, Devereux (1967a) reads countertransference as an analysis of the more or less unconscious motives underlying the scientific research, which, through the complementarity, is placed at the double level: individual and cultural, historical and social. In his thinking, the main criterion of objectivity in any ‘science’ – the elimination of the subjectivity and neutrality of the observation – undergoes an unexpected reversal in the field of human sciences: it is not scientific to believe that the results of our research are the product of a neutral and unselfish observation when, in reality, they are the result of a game of reactions and counter-reactions between observed and observer. Theories are then scientific only if they question the role of the observer and if they clarify their observational choices, theoretical assumptions and operations performed to obtain data, and, moreover, the strategies used to face and elaborate the ‘anxiety’ in the encounter with the other. In the awareness of the inevitability of the distortions caused by the observation, psychologically or culturally imbued with the subjectivity of the researcher, which is inevitably an integral part of the data but also the condition to observe human phenomena, Devereux chose countertransference as the main critical tool determining scientificity in the study of behaviour. Countertransference becomes, for Devereux, the crucial concept of a new epistemology and of a new method of observation, which includes the subjective residues and which starts the research from taking them over and analysing them.

Devereux’s keen analysis of the cultural models of thought and of ideological foundations which underlie science, ⁶⁰ psychiatric science in particular, in some aspects cross-referenced the studies on the sociology of science in the 1960s–70s, inspired by Kuhn, and anticipating even the most recent ideas that suggest following the scientist at work (e.g. Latour, 1987). Without any doubt, Devereux’s analyses complemented the debate on the topic of the anthropologist’s self in the production of science, which began with the publication of Malinowski’s diaries (1967) ⁶¹ and which led to the reflexive anthropology of the 1970s–80s. ⁶² They also anticipated some key topics of present-day epistemology, such as the reintegration of the point of view of the observer and the concept of complementarity, now recognized as the most efficient constructive strategy for scientific discourses.

As this article has shown, the wide range of Devereux’s studies highlight the non-reducibility of his ethnopsychoanalysis to a therapeutic theory and practice aimed at cultural alterity. But deep down, in spite of the different names and perspectives, ethnopsychiatry has always meant this (where the cultural alterity was referred to the ‘primitive’, the ‘colonized’, the ‘migrant’). It may therefore be necessary to go beyond the almost mythological idea of Devereux as the ‘father of ethnopsychiatry’, created in France during the 1970s. Of course, he exploited this title in order to introduce his theories, but he did it using ethnopsychiatry basically as a disciplinary and institutional space where he could channel his thoughts on the human being. In the dialogue between anthropology, psychoanalysis and quantum physics epistemology (on the basis of the concepts of complementarity and countertransference), Devereux faced, in an unprecedented way, some of the problematic issues that had characterized the human sciences since their birth. These include the complexity of humans and its irreducibility to monocausal explanations, the controversial scientificity of the disciplines that deal with it, and the even more difficult problem of the intrusion of subjectivity in research. Devereux made a theoretical contribution that oversteps the boundaries of ethnopsychiatry and that is still able to speak with the present.