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The silence that all too frequently greets original and genuine advancements of psychoanalytic thought is as mystifying as the din accompanying hollow, pars pro toto pseudoinnovations. No less puzzling is the seeming lack of connection between a supposedly innovative theory's popularity among psychoanalysts and its allegiance to fundamental Freudian principles and discoveries. To take an obvious example, Kohut's self psychology, however one adjudges its originality, value, and correctness, has received enormous attention and publicity in spite of—or because of—its counter-Freudian treatment of the unconscious, repression, psychosexual development, and the oedipal transformation of the self. At the same time, many original clinical contributions that elaborate, expand, deepen, and at times correct classical theories, without uprooting them wholesale, are temporarily consigned to oblivion.
It is within this framework that the work of George Devereux must be situated, with the hopeful addendum that reports of its consignment to oblivion may be premature. Over the past fortyfive years Devereux's output in the fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology, and classical literature and civilization has been prolific, provocative, and startlingly original. In his mastery of these three separate disciplines and in his original, interdisciplinary contributions to them, Devereux is in a class by himself. Yet while individual