Education and Early Career
La Barre was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a banker. After matriculating from Princeton University in 1933 he began field work with the Yale Institute of Human Relations. During this period, La Barre worked with one of his lifelong academic associates, Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University. Travelling and sleeping in Schultes' old car, the they traveled extensively throughout Oklahoma on their quest to study the peyote cult of the Plains Indians. La Barre received his doctorate from Yale in 1937 with a thesis on peyote religion. In a 1961 article, La Barre wrote that "It was Edward Sapir, more than any other person, who first effectively imported psychoanalysis into the body of American anthropology...At a time when the official anthropological journals were systematically ignoring psychoanalysis and the prevailing climate of opinion was chilly if not hostile, Sapir was giving his students as required reading the works of Abraham, Jones, Ferenczi and other classic writers." In the 1970s, La Barre taught those same classic psychoanalytic works to Duke medical students.
In 1937 La Barre was made a Sterling Fellow at Yale, and conducted field work in South America with the Aymara of Lake Titicaca region and the Uros of the Rio Desaguadero.
In 1938 his first book, The Peyote Cult, was published, and was immediately hailed as a classic, on the cutting edge of psychological anthropology. He was enabled by a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship to go to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas in order to be trained in psychoanalysis, and from 1938 to 1939 he continued his research into the psychological depths of indigenous cultures at the clinic.
La Barre married Maurine Boie in 1939; she was a social worker and the editor of the social-work journal Family. She went on to teach at the Duke University Medical Center. The couple had three children together.
From 1939 until 1943 La Barre taught anthropology at Rutgers University. World War II intervened, and he served as a Community Analyst for the War Relocation Authority based in Topaz, Utah. Through his military connections, he was able to conduct field research in China and India during the closing years of the war. He served on the staff of Field Marshal Montgomery, which he described in later years as "glorious". During the war years, he was able to travel on official business, and he made the first of three crossings of Africa.
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