From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. George Devereux New York:  Humanities Press, 1967.

From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences addresses itself to a central problem in the methodology of research in the social and psychological sciences. The twentieth century has seen the rapid development of new techniques for the quantification of psychological, social and political phenomena. By means of these techniques it is hoped that the behavioral sciences will be able to solve once and for all the problems associated with subjectivism in the interpretation of all aspects of human behavior. At the same time more traditional scholars have insisted that the quantification of human phenomena inevitably results in a limited perspective on them. Hence quantification of human phenomena results in a circumscribed understanding at best, and at worst it may produce either distortion or the reduction of human phenomena to the trivial. It follows from this view that quantification cannot be the sole source of objectivity in the study of human behavior. Devereux's sympathies lie with the point of view of the traditionalists in this controversy. But at the same time he takes seriously all of the logical and epistemological problems inherent in subjectivism and seeks a solution for them. In this volume he elaborates a methodology that avoids the pitfalls of subjectivism in the observation of essentially qualitative human phenomena.

Devereux's study is original, both in the thesis that it proposes and the methodology by which it is advanced. He argues that the major distorting and disturbing factor in man's observation of himself, whether it be in psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology or political science, is the phenomenon of countertransference, and he has extended this concept to the methodology of the behavioral sciences. Devereux argues that the successful observation of human phenomena, whether they be psychological, cultural, social or political, requires that the observer be aware of the distortions introduced into his perception of these phenomena by