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.

He was born into a Jewish family in the Banat, Austria-Hungary (now Romania).

His family moved to France following World War I. He studied the Malayan language in Paris, completing work at the Institut d'Ethnologie.

He was born György Dobó in 1908, in Lugoj, the Banat, now in Romania and then part of Austria-Hungary.

His family was Hungarian Jewish and bourgeois.

His father was a lawyer, and his mother of ethnic German Jewish background.

Devereux had a rather difficult relationship with his mother.

He said that the "insincerity of the adults", their "lack of respect for the world of the children" was a formative experience of his childhood and youth.

His cousin was Edward Teller.

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.

His older brother committed suicide.

Following the breakup of Austria-Hungary after World War I, the Dobó family left Romania for France.

as a youth, Georgy studied chemistry and physics with Marie Curie in Paris.

He was looking for ‘objective truth’ in physics and 'subjective' truth in music.

In his later writings, he often referred to notions taken from the natural sciences.

He became ill and had to interrupt his studies.

After recovering, Dobó moved to Leipzig, Germany, to begin an apprenticeship in a publishing house.

He returned to Paris upon completion and, taking a new direction, he enrolled at the École des langues orientales, known as INALCO, where he studied the Malay language, qualifying in 1931.

He became a pupil of Marcel Mauss and Paul Rivet in anthropology, graduating from the Institut d'ethnologie.

He also befriended Klaus Mann.

During this period, Dobó wrote a novel, Le faune dans l’enfer bourgeois (The Faun in the Bourgeois Hell), which has not been published.

From 1931 to 1935, Dobó worked at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (National Museum of Natural History) as a junior researcher.

After completing his licence ès lettres, he received a grant/scholarship in 1932 from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York to do fieldwork in the United States.

He moved to the southwest, doing fieldwork among the Mohave, Hopi, Yuma, and Cocopa in the California, Nevada and Arizona areas.

His early days in the United States proved to be difficult.

"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.”

In 1933 he converted to Catholicism and changed his name to Georges Devereux.

At that time, he traveled for the first time to the United States to do fieldwork among the Mohave Indians, completing his doctorate in anthropology at University of California at Berkeley in 1936.

In the postwar years, Devereux became a psychoanalyst, working with the Winter Veterans Hospital and Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

He treated Native Americans by drawing on his anthropology background.

A pioneer, he is "well regarded among French and American scholars interested in psychoanalytic anthropology".

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.

George Devereux is buried in the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) cemetery in Parker, Arizona.

The land is the CRIT reservation.

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 addition, he had a private clinical practice.

Devereux published more than 400 texts.

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.