Abstract

Embracing Niels Bohr's suggestion (as found in some of his writings on biology and psychology) to extend the epistemological lesson learnt in the context of quantum physics to other fields of knowledge, Georges Devereux reads the principle of complementarity as a turning point to set a new dialogue between anthropology and psychoanalysis which, avoiding a synthesis of cause and effect between psychism and culture, rids itself of any psychological or socio-cultural determinism. Devereux founds ethno-psychiatry upon this dialogue, binding it enduringly to complementarity: there is no ethno-psychiatry, in fact, without complementarism, and complementarism is what makes ethno-psychiatry a new epistemology, as well as a new anti-reductionist approach to knowledge around the human being.