George Devereux

Who was George Devereux?

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

Devereux taught at several colleges in the United States, returning to Paris about 1962 at the invitation of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.