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Dr. Devereux seeks to demonstrate that primary parental cannibalistic impulses arise de nouveau in adult life and that psychoanalysts by and large have a major resistance to accepting this concept.
He pursues his thesis with intensity and has corralled evidence from anthropology, animal psychology, and even from Charlie Chaplin movies to establish his premise. In doing so he cuts a wide swath through the psychoanalytic community, leaving Melanie Klein among others, lying in its wake while he assures us that analysts have been guilty of protesting too much in denying what is so obvious to Dr. Devereux.
One is tempted to feel Dr. Devereux is guilty of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning in his conclusion from such salient facts as the greater incidence of parent-child cannibalism as compared to child-parent cannibalism. This seemingly becomes one of the critical proofs for his formulation.
Expressions such as, “I could eat you up,” are focused upon as revealing the true core of primary adult aggressive cannibalistic impulses. Devereux resorts to calling upon the final authority of Sigmund Freud to substantiate the, “avoidance of painful conflict with facts.” He points out, for example, that, “piglets moreover do not in fact eat their mother nor do they apparently try to do so.” One could counter with the observation by Boehm that animal crackers, loved by children, are significant remnants of early cannibalistic fantasies.
Devereux seems to attribute primarily malignant motives to adults as he describes the, “nightmarish and revengeful quality they impute to the genuine oral cravings of children.” The latter are apparently viewed as benign innocent angels devoid of any cannibalistic urges though possessing oral sadistic impulses.
Analysis of patients with depression and addiction have shown that the sadistic incorporative fantasies of eating persons or parts of persons were not of a later development but were operative during the oral phase.
In essence, Dr. Devereux strugg