Overview
William Halse Rivers Rivers
(1864—1922) psychologist and anthropologist
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(1864–1922)
Trained in medicine and developing an early interest in psychiatry, he became lecturer in psychology at Cambridge. He was recruited to the Torres Straits expedition in 1898, along with William Mc-Dougall and began a career in anthropology. His first important work was The Todas (1906), followed by Kinship and Social Organization (1914) and The History of Melan-esian Society (1914). His early work had drawn on evolutionism, but in 1911 Rivers converted to diffusionism. One of his early students at Cambridge was Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, to whom Rivers introduced Durkheim's ideas on social structure. During the First World War he took a post as psychiatrist in a military hospital treating ‘shell shock’ patients, one of his most famous patients being the novelist Siegfried Sassoon. This period in his life has been fictionalized in Pat Barker 's Regeneration (1995). It was at this time that he began to seriously study Freud, and he summarized his own ideas on this in Instinct and the Unconscious (1920). He died suddenly in 1922. Rivers's life is recounted in Richard Slobdin 's W. H. R. Rivers (1997).
