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Cultural reference plays an important role in every analysis, but more often than not it remains silent. It is because the analyst and the patient both speak almost the same language that a discreet anomaly in the patient's discourse lifts in the analyst a preconscious repression of previous episodes in the analysis, which can lead him to offer an interpretation; and it is because they share many of the same customs and live in the same city that the analyst may become aware that an apparently factual account of the events of the previous day is at the same time referring to him/her. Without this common cultural reference, analytic work would be impossible.
When the worlds of the patient and the analyst are extremely different, the use of cultural mediation, that is to say anthropology, can greatly facilitate the work of the psychoanalyst.
The patient that Georges Devereux (1951) named Jimmy Picard was a veteran of the Second World War, during which he had suffered a cranio-cerebral trauma. His symptoms and behaviour were so strange that the psychiatrist at the Topeka Clinic in Kansas wondered if he was not psychotic. However, as Jimmy was a Plains Indian, the psychiatrist asked Georges Devereux, who had been attached to the clinic as an anthropologist a short time earlier, if his quirks of personality and behaviour were not explicable by a culture gap? Devereux quickly realised that Jimmy's peculiarities were not symptoms of schizophrenia, but that they had a meaning deeply related to Plains Indian culture. He then took Jimmy into face-to-face psychotherapy on the basis of one session per day.
At the end of the first week of the treatment, Jimmy said he had dreamed he was going hunting with Devereux. The latter was not armed, but had advised the patient to use only one bullet at a time. He failed to shoot a bear, but killed a fox, which turned into a baby. He pointed out that Devereux was with him in the dream.
To interpret the role that Jimmy attributed to him in the