George Devereux

George Devereux, born on September thirteenth, nineteen oh eight, was a pioneering figure in the fields of anthropology and psychoanalysis. Hailing from a Jewish family in Banat, Austria-Hungary, he relocated to France after World War I. His academic journey began in Paris, where he studied the Malayan language and completed his work at the Institut d'Ethnologie. In nineteen thirty-three, he converted to Catholicism, adopting the name Georges Devereux, and embarked on his first fieldwork in the United States among the Mohave Indians, culminating in a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in nineteen thirty-six.

In the years following the war, Devereux transitioned into psychoanalysis, contributing his anthropological insights while working at the Winter Veterans Hospital and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. His innovative approach to treating Native Americans earned him recognition as a significant figure in psychoanalytic anthropology, particularly among scholars in both France and America.

Devereux's academic career included teaching at various colleges across the United States before he returned to Paris in nineteen sixty-two, invited by the esteemed anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. He served as the director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) from nineteen sixty-three until nineteen eighty-one, while also maintaining a private clinical practice. Over his lifetime, he authored more than four hundred texts, leaving a lasting impact on the field.

In nineteen ninety-three, the Centre George Devereux was established at the University of Paris VIII in his honor, aimed at providing care to students and the community. His influential work, Reality and Dream, published in nineteen fifty-one, explored the ethnopsychoanalysis of a Native American Blackfoot man and was later adapted into the French film Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian in two thousand thirteen. George Devereux passed away and is interred in the Colorado River Indian Tribes cemetery in Parker, Arizona, on the CRIT reservation.