Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Transference
in
Social
Research
:
beyond
Georges
Devereux
by Alain Giami*
Biography
George Devereux was born in 1908 in Lugos in the Hungarian
Transylvania [1] . At the age of 18 he immigrated to Paris to study
physics with Marie Curie and Jean Perrin and to learn the Malesian
language. His studies led him to the works of Marcel Mauss and
Lucien Lvy-Bruhl. He was awarded a Rockfeller grant in 1932 to
carry out fieldwork among the Hopi in California and the Sedang Moi
in Vietnam. He obtained his PhD in anthropology at the University of
California (Berkeley) in 1935 and went on to train as a
psychoanalyst. He worked at the Meninger Clinic in Topeka (Kansas)
and in 1959 he established himself in New York as a psychoanalyst.
In 1962 he was invited by Roger Bastide and Claude Lvi-Strauss to
teach ethno-psychiatry at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales in Paris. His work is still influential in France mostly in clinical
psychology and in the treatment of mental disorders among people
from non-western cultures. More recently, Devereuxs work has
received renewed attention in the US through Gilbert Herdt, an
anthropologist, and Robert Stoller, a psychoanalyst, who worked
together on the subjective dimensions of erotic culture in New
open in browser PRO version
pdfcrowd.com
Guinea, Sambia.
Transference
countertransference
and
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
Counter-transference in
behavioural research
Georges Devereux was the first scientist to attempt to generalise the
notion of counter-transference beyond the field of therapeutic
practice and introduce it into the practice of social and behavioural
sciences. Devereux had trained in both anthropology and
psychoanalysis and he developed a method for studying social
phenomena that drew on these two disciplines in a complementary
manner. He elaborated the theory of the counter-transference of the
researcher in his most important book - "From anxiety to method in
the behavioural sciences" published in 1967. Roger Bastide, a
French anthropologist, noted that the assessment of the implication
of the observer inside the observed subject had been well-known
since the work of Marx and Mannheim and the foundation of
sociology of knowledge (Bastide, 1970). However, the recognition of
the importance of the social and political interests of the scientist
relating to social class and nationality did not take into account the
subjective, unconscious dimensions at work in the construction of
knowledge. The social influences affecting the scientist can be
considered as a form of ideological functioning involving "false
open in browser PRO version
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
Devereux did not locate the origin of his own insights in the field of
social science. Indeed, he acknowledged Albert Einstein as his most
important source of inspiration when he quoted the phrase: "we can
only observe the phenomena that occur near or inside the
experimental apparatus and the observer himself is the most
important part of this apparatus". Devereux considered that he had
gone further than Freud by suggesting that counter-transference,
rather than transference, was the central datum in the behavioural
sciences. In other words, Devereux introduced a major change by
focussing on the role of the researcher and by proposing that the
influence of the researcher in the construction of knowledge is the
central phenomenon in the social and behavioural sciences.
According to Devereux , in behavioural sciences data comprise three
elements. These elements are: (1) the behaviour of the observed
subject; (2) the "perturbations" induced by the presence of the
observer and by the activities he performs in the context of
observation and, last but not least, (3) the behaviour of the observer
including his anxieties, his defence mechanisms, his research
strategies and the ways in which he chooses to attribute meaning.
Thus scientific knowledge is produced from these three sources.
However, in the introduction to his book, Devereux warns that
information concerning the behaviour of the observer is rarely
available or taken into account in scientific work.
A researchers counter-transference can be defined as the sum of
unconscious and emotional reactions, including anxiety, affecting
his/her relation with the observed subject and situation. These
reactions produce distortions in the process of knowledge
construction that remain hidden from the researcher. Notions of
"inappropriateness" and "resistance", as defined by Schimek, become
central in understanding the cognitive processes affecting the
researcher, because they highlight the researchers reactions to
aspects of reality emerging in fieldwork. Counter-transference points
open in browser PRO version
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
that talking about this practice raises with women. One possible
interpretation of this reluctance to address questions about
masturbation is that the researchers on this project were all women
and it has been established that women tend to underreport the
practice of masturbation (Bjin, 1996).
Devereuxs insistence on taking account of researchers countertransference provides a new perspective in the consideration of bias.
Researcher bias is not only viewed as having negative effects but
further, that these biases become part of the construction of the
research object. Subjectivity should not only be viewed as an
obstacle in the research process but may also provide a "royal path"
to knowledge.
Recently, Herdt and Stoller proposed another perspective inspired by
Devereux. They defined a new form of ethnography called "clinical
ethnography": "Clinical ethnographies are reports that study the
subjectivity of the researcher as well as the people who inform
him/her." (Herdt and Stoller, 1990, p. 29). Major sources of
knowledge for the clinical ethnographer are gained through subjective
experiences of discomfort and shock occurring during fieldwork. Herdt
and Stoller operationalized the analysis of counter-transference
through discussions among themselves of their own subjective
reactions as well as scientific ideas that arose during fieldwork in
Sambia. The conversation between both of them became the basis
for the analysis of narratives gathered among the Sambia. The
confrontation between their differing points of view allowed them to
consider the limits and the benefits of subjectivity over and above
their rational, scientific work. This approach can therefore be
understood as an enhancement of rationality rather than as
regression away from rationality.
An appeal to psychoanalysis brings with it an openness about
subjectivity on the one hand but on the other hand it suggests a
open in browser PRO version
pdfcrowd.com
The
analysis
transference
of
counter-
pdfcrowd.com
The
components
transference
of
counter-
The researcher is, in one way or another, the subject and object of
the knowledge that he/she elaborates. The specific position he/she
occupies in the field allows at the same time for a specific kind of
focus and for specific blind spots. From any one position, there are
aspects of the world that one can perceive and aspects that one
cannot. Absolute objectivity is, by definition, impossible and one has
open in browser PRO version
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
Notes
open in browser PRO version
pdfcrowd.com
pdfcrowd.com
Correspondance : giami@vjf.inserm.fr
re tour au site du C e ntre Ge orge s De ve re ux :
pdfcrowd.com