View/Open - Scholarly Commons Home

Chapter Two Part Two – Methodology - Page 65
anthropological and psychoanalytic case reports, he describes at length the showing of
an ethnographic documentary film of ritual subcision of a man’s penis to two audiences,
an anthropological one and a psychoanalytic one. He describes at length the responses
of members of both audiences, and then gives further data, particularly in the
psychoanalytic setting (the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas) of a series of follow-
up interviews with psychoanalytic colleagues, involving disclosure of their responses
which include dreams. It would appear that Devereux and his colleagues actually make
use of these interactions for therapeutic purposes. They are framed as research, but the
phenomenon is familiar to that reported by many investigators in the overlap between
psychoanalysis and ethnography of being pressured by respondents to repeat the
interview process. The psychiatrist and ethnographer Levy (1973) in his study of
Tahitians, noted both their concern to present ‘smooth and fragrant surfaces’ to others,
yet also the hidden distress, and the frequency with which respondents would request a
second or subsequent interview because of the relief they experienced at being able to
be more direct and honest in a confidential setting with a stranger. A particular
argument of Devereux’s, which is ahead of its time and fits well with this study and its
concern with metonymy, is his response to critics of Freud and of Freud’s major
reliance in his theorizing on data from Viennese patients between the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. In defending against the claim that Freud’s very particular sample
of patients (and hence his conclusions) lacked breadth, Devereux puts forward very
firmly the notion that breadth is equivalent to depth rotated through ninety degrees, and
that what Freud’s studies and theories might lack in breadth they more than make up for
in a depth that breadth of scope would always struggle to emulate.
Hocoy (2005), in a more recent example of inter-weaving, notes how Harry Stack
Sullivan in 1940 described the psychotherapist as most essentially a "participant-