Georges Devereux and anthropology

Abstract

Georges Devereux is known as the creator of ethnopsychoanalysis, a discipline that articulates psychoanalysis and anthropology in understanding human phenomena. If in relation to psychoanalysis Devereux declared himself a classical and orthodox Freudian, in relation to anthropology we do not find statements in the same way. The objective proposed for this article is to understand Devereux's insertion in the field of anthropology, considering his formation, his position in the field and the criticisms that he made about anthropology of his time. Devereux's theoretical training took place in the early 1930s and was guided by French anthropology, having Marcel Mauss as his reference author. After the theoretical studies, Devereux went to the United States, where he carried out training for his field research and made his doctoral thesis supervised by Alfred Kroeber, under the foundations of the culture and personality school. Devereux entered to the anthropological field as an opponent of culture and personality school, critical relativism and cultural determinism, seen by him as naive, refusing to face ethical issues and using distancing as a defense mechanism for non-recognition in the other. Although Devereux ascribes the studies of physicists Bohr and Heisenberg as the foundation of complementarism, we can find similarities between Devereux's proposal and the concept of ‘total social fact’ proposed by Mauss; in both, pluridisciplinary is central, the non-reduction of one discourse to another and the proposition that different explanations of the same phenomenon complement each other.