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 Lévy-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 Lévi-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, Devereux’s 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 Guinea, Sambia.
Transference and countertransference
Counter-transference cannot be understood without reference to the notion of transference. Transference is one of Freud’s most important contributions and describes a process that takes place in therapeutic interaction and, more generally, in all interpersonal interactions. In psychoanalytic theory "transference" refers to the process by which the unconscious desires of the analysand become actual and are projected ("transferred") onto the person of the analyst. The process involves "a repetition of infantile prototypes that are lived out with a deep feeling of reality" (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1967). Joan Schimek summarised the criteria used by Freud to identify transference as "inappropriateness, resistance and repetition of the past" (Schimek, 1983, p. 436). "Inappropriateness" relates to the analytic "here and now" of therapeutic social interaction. The "inappropriateness" of the patient’s reactions and behaviour, from the analyst’s point of view, becomes the source of interpretative work. It is precisely this "inappropriateness" as a resurgence of the past projected onto the analyst that provides the material to be interpreted. This approach stands in direct opposition to those that have a more positivist framing within the social sciences and thus aim to work with a subject’s "appropriate" reactions, i.e. their compliance when answering questions posed in questionnaires or interview schedules. Within a positivist framing, non-responses and "don't know" response in questionnaires are rarely considered worthy of interpretation. However, as Giami (1996) has pointed out, "don’t know’s" and non-responses should be considered as relevant research material since they represent a statement of the subject in response to the question of the researcher and have the potential to provide crucial insights.
Transference affects both participants in the therapeutic setting. This means that the analyst is not free from the unconscious and inappropriate reactions that he/she observes in the patient. The concept of counter-transference refers to the unconscious processes specifically affecting the analyst. It is defined as "the overall reactions of the analyst to the patient as a person and towards his/her transference" (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1967). According to this definition transference and counter-transference refer to the reactions of the two people in the "here and now" of the therapeutic setting as well as to the repetition of the past of both participants actualised in the setting. Strictly speaking, counter-transference refers specifically to the analyst’s reactions to the patient’s transference. In the analytic setting, counter-transference is thus considered a secondary process that derives both from the analyst’s own neurotic conflicts and his/her reactions to the analysand. The analyst’s counter-transference is normally viewed as "inappropriate" because it may provoke negative reactions and resistances in his/her emotional reactions to the patient. According to Freud, the analyst should try to overcome his/her counter-transference. However, since the patient’s and the analyst’s reactions are of the same nature, there is a question about whether or not we need to specific concepts to describe the analyst’s reactions.
Some writers, such as Otto Kernberg, find it difficult to distinguish the patient’s and the analyst’s unconscious reactions and suggest therefore that the notion of transference should include the reactions of both. "A totalistic concept of transference does justice to the conception of the analytic situation as an interaction process in which past and present of both participants, as well as their mutual reactions to past and present, fuse into a unique emotional position involving both of them." (Kernberg, 1965, p. 41).
This conception implies that transference also occurs in the analyst towards his/her patient. However, if we follow this formulation, it becomes difficult to distinguish reactions that arise from the analyst’s biography from those that arise in reaction to the patient and therefore to assess how each might be affecting the analyst's work.
Counter-transference can be differentiated from transference in so far as it appears as a perturbation of the normal work of the analyst involving his/her own neurotic dimensions. According to this definition counter-transference is something "negative" that needs be eliminated. But this raises the issue of the definition of the "normal" work of the analyst excluding the neurotic reactions of the analyst himself.
In a more positive vein, counter-transference can be seen to represent the major source of information for the analyst. That is, the way he/she reacts to the patient’s reactions is his/her primary source of information. Thus, the analyst has to interpret his/her own reactions in relation to the patient’s transference. This implies that there is no objective knowledge, but only subjective knowledge derived from the analyst’s own reactions. Accordingly, counter-transference can be used to gain.. greater understanding of the patient through the analysis of the analyst’s personal reactions to him/her.
Counter-transference can be broadly defined as the analyst’s global orientation including his/her subjective choice of profession and the remaining, non-analysed, parts of his/her unconscious. This approach maintains that all the analyst’s reactions, whether they occur as a response to the patient or not, are part of counter-transference. Therefore, counter-transference is not considered solely as a secondary reaction of the analyst to the patient, but precedes it and indeed contributes to the structuration of the interaction. Ronald Searles (1979) suggests that psychoanalysts are individuals who have not managed to renounce the possibility of curing their own parents. Didier Anzieu (1959) proposes that Freud’s invention of the analytical apparatus, excluding body and eye contact was a reaction to phobic attitudes towards his patients. Otto Kernberg (1965) proposed that with psychotic patients, counter-transference becomes an invaluable tool giving the analyst information about a patient’s degree of regression.
However, from a practical perspective, the question remains about what the analyst should do with his/her own reactions. Different definitions of counter-transference imply different strategies. These include, for example:
- getting the analyst to reduce counter-transference because it is considered an obstacle to therapeutic work;
- accepting and using counter-transference while encouraging the analyst to control it as much as possible;
- allowing counter-transference to inspire the analyst and inform interpretations.
Counter-transference, as theory and as practice, emerged within the field of psychoanalysis. Michael Balint was one of the first to extend the model by pointing out that the clinician’s subjectivity and counter-transference are present in every caring relationship, and that it’s influence extends beyond the professional identity of the clinician. Balint captured this by stating that in most cases the doctor is the first medication administered to the patient through the expression of himself or herself in the clinical setting (Balint, 1957).
In summary, counter-transference is a concept that recognises that the analyst as well as the patient is affected by unconscious processes in the construction of his/her personal and professional identity and in interactions with patients. It acknowledges that the analyst is not a neutral expert and that "working through" unconscious attitudes ought to form a continuous part of the analyst’s everyday practice that may lead to a greater understanding of the therapeutic relationship.
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 consciousness". Some social scientists, inspired by psychoanalysis had already observed this influence on the researcher in the collection and the treatment of data.
For example, Siegfried Kracauer, a literature historian and a media scientist, once a member of the Francfurt School and of the Institute of Social Research at Columbia University, had already noticed the importance of taking into account what he called a "disciplined subjectivity" (or a "discipline related subjectivity") in scientific work. "Far from being an obstacle, subjectivity is in effect indispensable for the analysis of material, which vanishes before our eyes when subjected to a treatment confounding them with dead matter. Quantitative analysis is not free of such nihilistic influence. Many quantitative investigations in effect mark the spot where a misplaced desire for objectivity has failed to reveal the inner dynamics of an atomized content." (Kracauer, 1952, p. 642.). The important point is that Kracauer did not confine the presence of subjectivity to qualitative research, but also recognised its presence in quantitative research when he remarked that quantitative treatments transform "live" data into "dead matter". All fields of scientific practice, considered as a human and social activity, involve the subjective influence of the researcher and therefore need to take account of counter-transference. The anxieties of the researcher are being projected in quantitative as well as in qualitative methodology.
In the methodological chapter of The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno and his colleagues noted the influence of the interviewers’ social appearance on data collection. They tried to take this influence into account and control it in their study of anti-Semitism by using Jewish and Gentile interviewers. By doing so they attempted to control the influence of the interviewer’s personality on data collection (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, Nevitt Sanford, 1950).
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 researcher’s 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 researcher’s reactions to aspects of reality emerging in fieldwork. Counter-transference points to the researcher’s difficulty in clearly distinguishing material that comes from outside (the subject, the field) and from inside (his/her own emotional reactions). The researcher has to struggle with these emotional reactions and anxieties.
Methods: defense or sublimation ?
Devereux elaborated the opposition between the use of methodology as a defence mechanism against anxiety that prevents the researcher from gaining knowledge, and the sublimatory use of methodology when tools appear appropriate to the scientific work and help to gain knowledge. According to Devereux, methodological tools are sublimatory when, at the same time, they help to reduce the researcher’s anxieties and produce valid knowledge. Devereux contrasts the given reality of the external world, which can sometimes be unbearable for the researcher, and the subjectivity of the researcher’s internal world that has the potential to reduce the unbearable aspects of the external world. He suggests that the relation between the internal and the external world is mediated by a complex cultural matrix that imposes meanings on contents. According to this view, culture, and especially the researcher’s local culture can reinforce misunderstanding.
Devereux’s approach originates in the view that psychoanalysis can provide an epistemology for the behavioural sciences. This approach questions the nature of objectivity, of subjectivity and of the relation between the "researched" as a subject and also the researcher as a subject. In other words, the observer is also observed by the research subject. Data are not only produced in an objective way but they are co-constructed in the complex interaction between the researcher and the subject.
Therefore in the social sciences it is quite common to analyse bias. These biases include those related to the subject of research, to the chosen research tools and to the investigator. Classic methodological work on questionnaire-based surveys often considers the interviewer to be one of the major sources of measurement error and bias during data collection, independent from the subject of the survey (Hyman, 1954; Turner and Martin, 1980). More recently, Johnson and DeLamater, working in the field of sex research, have suggested that the "major problem is the attitude of researchers and interviewers to research into sexuality". Concerning methodology, they state that "concern with the threat of the subject matter is a projection of the interviewer's own discomfort". They suspect that as researchers they have been "insensitive to the important source of sensitivity in research on sexuality -ourselves and our interviewers- and have overestimated the extent to which our respondents are sensitive to these topics and to reporting them." (Johnson and DeLamater, 1976, p. 181).
As an illustration of this, it is interesting to note that the British survey on sexual attitudes and lifestyles did not include any questions on the topic of masturbation, an omission that is quite rare in surveys on sexual behaviour. The authors of this survey justified the absence of such a question as follows: "It is regrettable that questions about masturbation were excluded from the survey because discussions addressing this practice led to disgust and embarrassment among subjects questioned during the qualitative pre-survey to establish the formulation of the questions." (Wellings et al., 1994, p134). There was absolutely no mention of the researchers or interviewers discomfort about "this practice" which may well have been projected onto the respondents. The omission of the question had a negative outcome in that we do not now know the frequency of occurrence of masturbation in Britain. However, it also serves as a valuable source of information about the discomfort 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 (Béjin, 1996).
Devereux’s insistence on taking account of researchers’ counter-transference 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 blind-spot. Freud’s theory of the unconscious, which was one of Devereux’s starting points, does not take into account the social and ideological position of the individual as a component in the construction of knowledge and "mis-knowledge". It is primarily concerned with the psycho-sexual dimension of subjectivity in the construction and reconstruction of knowledge and to a lesser extent the researcher’s cultural positioning.
In his book "Homo Academicus", a study about the academic institution and academic actors in France, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) gives an overview of the social dimension of "misknowledge" grounded in the specific position occupied by the researcher in the field. He poses these questions. How can a prominent French sociologist occupying a central place in the French academic system study the functioning of an institution to which he belongs? And in what ways does his specific position in the field influence his representation of the field? In other words, he places himself at the same time, both as the subject and the object of his own research. Bourdieu brings us back to Marx and Mannheim’s initial insights by reminding us of the interests that the researcher brings to the study through his/her involvement in a (local) milieu and as a member of a social class. By integrating both dimensions of counter-transference: the psycho-sexual and the social-ideological, we can generalise and expand Devereux’s work.
The analysis of counter-transference
While it is important to recognise the existence of subjective, active and unconscious influences on the researcher and in his/her research work, it is even more important to ask the pragmatic question; how these influences be detected and analysed? In other words, how are we to perceive these effects in the research process? In a study of the representations of sexuality of the mentally retarded (Giami, 1987; Giami, Humbert, Laval, 2001) developed a specific research tool to confront the different points of view that arose in data analysis. Herdt and Stoller developed a similar approach by commenting upon the material they had collected either separately or together. The conversations that ensued can be understood as equivalent to the kind of supervision that is practiced among clinicians. That is, the clinician discusses the difficulties that he/she comes across in work with a patient with others who share a psychological insight yet who do not share the clinician’s position with respect to the patient. The confrontation between these different points of view may help to uncover blind spots in the clinician or researcher’s perspective. Nevertheless, the analysis of the effects of counter-transference in research cannot go far beyond some insight into the "inappropriateness" of the researcher’s reactions. After that, the researcher remains free to decide what to do with the information.
The components of counter-transference
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 to find the appropriate focus, the "good distance", according to one’s research objectives. The position of the researcher in the field defines (1) what he/she can know, (2) what he/she might be able to know, (3) what he/she cannot know and last but not least (4) what he/she actively refuses to know for some social or psychological reason [2] . In some cases, researchers know what they do not know and what they cannot know; in others they do not even take account of what they cannot know.
In considering the researcher’s position the first component to take into account is gender. Gender identity and sexual orientation allow one to know some aspects of reality and prevents one from knowing and understanding others.
The second component is the researcher’s age and position in the cycle of generations.
The third component is the researcher’s position and social attitudes towards the topic being researched.
The fourth component is the way the researcher’s is positioned and understood within society as a whole.
In some instances the researcher is recognised as an individual but in most cases he/she is referred to as a collective subject. The notion of the researcher as a collective subject can be tracked according to the way science has developed as technology, a processes documented by historians of science such as Ludwig Fleck and Thomas Kuhn. This kind of historical analysis has brought to light the role of folk theories in the production of scientific theories on the one hand and to the way scientific paradigms (or general conceptions) are shared and assessed by communities on the other. What is recognised as knowledgeable and true in one social-scientific community, is not necessarily recognised as such in another.
These four components play different key-roles depending on the topic that is being researched. The methodological intention that underpins counter-transference theory is to go beyond the limitations that the four components impose on the production of knowledge so as to allow new ways of making sense to emerge. Thus it can be seen that when researchers draw on research tools without this awareness, unconscious fears surrounding the research topic and/or ideological beliefs act to limit the production of knowledge and methodology comes to act as a defence mechanism. Devereux refers to this as the sublimatory use of methodology.
In research practice all or some of these components come to bear in complex ways. Political and ideological constraints may reinforce and justify unconscious, personal and counter-transferential attitudes of the researcher.
I will illustrate these ideas with two examples. In the first one, I will demonstrate how we attempted to reduce the negative bias of the researcher by constituting a team of researchers to represent different positions with respect to the research topic. Each member of the team had something in common with one of the groups under study and less in common with others. Discussions among team members helped to build a global perspective of the field. In the second example, I will illustrate how the counter-transference and personal involvement of the interviewers collecting data in a survey on sexuality can itself be treated as an object for study in it’s own right.
Representations of the sexuality of the mentally retarded by parents and special educators (Giami, Humbert, Laval, 2001)
This was a comparative study of the representations of two groups of individuals who had different positions and different kinds of involvement with mentally retarded individuals : special educators and parents. The aim of the study was to describe the representations of both groups and to understand the differences between them on the basis of their respective relationships with the mentally retarded individuals. The most important underlying principle of the study was that one cannot evaluate or compare representations of sexuality with the so-called actual sexual life of mentally retarded individuals. A logical extension of this principle meant that the primarly research objective was to compare parents’ representations and special educators’ representations with different aspects of the global system of representation elaborated by the research team.
From a methodological and political point of view, being a researcher in psychology placed me in a closer position with respect to the special educators than to the parents, particularly since I am not the parent of a mentally retarded child. At some point in the research, I realised that my social proximity with the group of special educators might be provoking a blind spot in my analysis of both groups’ representations (the educators and the parents). Since I had no experience of being a parent of a mentally retarded child, the danger was that I would consider the representations of the educators more "real" or "true" than the representations of the parents. This in turn would reinforce the stigma attached to parents of mentally retarded children, and maintained by special educators among others. In order to make sure that the discourses collected from each groups retained an equal status — as complementary parts of the same global, yet contradictory, system — I decided to include one person who worked as a special educator and one parent with a mentally retarded child on the research team. In consequence, I was able to ensure that that during analysis the two sets of narratives were treated with the same level of understanding.
In this study, the most important dimension of counter-transference was identified as the researcher’s proximity and identification with one target group rather than the other. The knowledge of the possible risk posed by such an identification, in which the educators appeared to be more similar to me and the parents more strange, was used to construct research apparatus that included individuals from each these groups.
Interviewing on sexual behaviour and AIDS (Giami, Olomucki, de Poplavsky, 1997, 1998)
In this project we tried to describe and understand the attitudes and representations of the interviewers that were selected to administer a telephone questionnaire in the French National survey on sexual behaviour (Spira, Bajos, ACSF group, 1994).
The use of interviewers is not the only source of bias in the production of data. The establishment of an interviewer-respondent relationship is also one of the main requirements in ensuring the successful collection of data. In this study we confirmed the importance of the quality of the interviewer-respondent interaction through the daily monitoring of the interviewers.
We tried to assess the psychological processes and in particular incidents of counter-transference that were affecting the interviewers. We took from Devereux’s work the assumption that: "An interview about sex even in the case of a scientific interview is in itself a kind of sexual interaction, which can be lived out on a symbolic, verbal and emotional level as shown in the analysis of the sexual transference in psychoanalysis" (Devereux, 1967, p. 29). This assumption has the merit of emphasizing the importance of fantasies developed during this type of communication.
Completing a questionnaire verbally involves a relationship between two people. The situation is, however, asymmetric. For the interviewer, the relationship forms part of a professional activity, whereas it is the private life of the respondent that is being addressed. During telephone interviews, the interviewer occupies his/her place of work where he/she enjoys a professional status. Respondents, however, are questioned in the privacy of their homes and asked questions about the most intimate aspects of their private lives. The questionnaire itself served as a mediator in the interviewer-respondent’s communication. The interview was designed to proceed according to a well defined scenario that progressed by alternating questions that were considered banal with those considered sensitive.
However, the professional nature of the involvement of the interviewer does not exclude conscious and unconscious manifestations of his/her subjectivity even when interviewers use tightly structured. We therefore considered it necessary to study the interviewers' representations of sexuality and AIDS in order to identify the difficulties we anticipated they would confront and to investigate their spontaneous interpretations to responses that might have affected the quality of the data collected.
In contrast to the first example, this study did not aim to use analysis of the researcher’s counter-transference as a central research tool, but to map in a systematic fashion the dimensions of the interviewer’s personal involvement and investment in the interview process. The knowledge of these subjective attitudes helped to establish a protocol of training and supervision of the interviewers, which in turn helped them to deal with the personal and subjective difficulties arising in the interviewer-respondent interaction.
Aside from its psychoanalytical origin, counter-transference raises the broader question about the nature and extent of human involvement in scientific work. A serious consideration of this question may encourage a little more modesty in the desire for absolute objectivity in science and remind us of the limitations in our quest for knowledge.
The English version of the paper has been edited by Gabrielle Ivinson (Cardiff University)
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Notes
[1]. I wish to thank Professor Tobie Nathan (Director of the Centre George Devereux at the University of Paris 8 — Saint — Denis for having directed me towards biographical data about Devereux. (cf. "Sarava " pp. 229-237 in T. Nathan : Psychanalyse païenne. Essais ethnopsychanalytiques. Editions Odile Jacob, Paris, 1988.
[2]. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has named this process : the "passion for ignorance".
*Alain Giami is a social psychologist. He works currently as a full time researcher at Inserm (French National Institute of Health and Medical Research) in Paris and teaches in the doctoral program in Psychology at Université Paris 8 (Saint-Denis). He is responsible for the research team : "Sexuality, society, individual". He published several books and papers about representations of sexuality, handicap and AIDS. He is currently working on a book about the medicalisation of sexuality in which he tries to articulate historical, societal, and individual
[Giami Alain (2001) Counter-transference in social research: beyond George Devereux, Papers in Social Research Methods - Qualitative Series, no 7, [ed MW Bauer].London School of Economics, Methodology Institute]
Correspondance : giami@vjf.inserm.fr
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