by Kevin Groark
Paper presented at the 2011 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Psychological Anthropoology
In Devereux’s classic anthropological text “From Anxiety to Method,” the existence and role of unconscious dynamics is... more
In Devereux’s classic anthropological text “From Anxiety to Method,” the existence and role of unconscious dynamics is postulated as a fundamental variable that must be accounted for in order to understand the observational and interactional field of the human sciences. In other words, the "subjective response" is part and parcel of the observational field, and is thus a piece of “data” to be understood. Despite his commitment to what we might refer to as a proto-intersubjective field theory, Devereux’s tendency to emphasize the “distorting” impact of subjectivity retains elements of a positivist approach in which the subjective element—no matter how valuable—is a “factor” to be corrected for in the pursuit of a more objective and “scientific” accounting. In this paper, I bring Devereux’s epistemological and methodological approach into dialogue with parallel developments in psychoanalytic hermeneutics, namely Heinrich Racker's seminal 1957 work on transference-countertransference dynamics. While Devereux tends to take what we might call the “negative path” in his work, drawing our attention to the myriad countertransference interferences that arise in the course of the ethnographer’s data collection and interpretive work, Racker highlights the positive uses of countertransference, setting out to clarify the processes underpinning the interpretive attitude—the work involved in the “intention to understand.” Through this discussion, I balance Devereux’s tendency to emphasize the “distortions” brought about by countertransference reactions—namely anxiety and its derivatives—with a focus on the ways in which positively inflected “subjective factors” might allow for increased insight and empathically-mediated understanding of the interpersonal field in which self and other emerge and become knowable. I close with an exploration of the implications of a transference-based interpretive model for anthropological hermeneutics.
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