Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 27 



expected pattern, is told what he should have dreamed, and is then 

 instructed to dream the prescribed kind of dream as soon as possible. 



Life history data are also important diagnostic facts. Thus, when 

 a Mohave, known to have repeatedly taken shampoo mud from a 

 bewitched lake, became ill, his ailment was immediately attributed to 

 the hikwi : r, which are said to live in that lake (Case 30) . 



On the other hand, unlike many other primitives (Hallowell, 1939), 

 the Mohave do not use the confession of sins either as a diagnostic or 

 as a therapeutic procedure. The nearest thing to a therapeutic use of 

 confession is the obligation of a victim of witchcraft to disclose the 

 name of the witch and to report his dreams as accurately as possible. 

 This procedure resembles the confession of sins only because the victim 

 of witchcraft is often a willing victim, and is therefore reluctant to 

 disclose the identity of his "assailant." On the other hand, no confes- 

 sion of sins, in the strict sense, is demanded either for diagnostic or for 

 therapeutic purposes, even though certain trespasses, such as inces- 

 tuous marriages, are believed to wipe out whole families (Devereux, 

 1939 a). 



In brief, the diagnostician is expected to find out everything relevant 

 about the patient's life history. His clues range from objective state- 

 ments such as : "I was kicked by a horse," "I associated with aliens," 

 or, "I was threatened by a certain shaman," to more esoteric kinds of 

 experiences or occurrences. 



In addition to determining the nature of the illness, the shaman may 

 look for data indicative of the severity of the illness, i. e., for data 

 bearing upon prognosis. Thus, a diagnostician is bound to be inter- 

 ested, e. g., in the information that an owl, a harbinger of death, re- 

 peatedly hooted near the patient's domicile. 



An important diagnostic factor of another order is the shaman's 

 own field of specialization and his wish to be consulted and paid by as 

 many patients as possible — something not unheard of even outside 

 Mohave society. This temptation is fostered by the possibility of 

 saying, if the treatment fails to effect a real recovery, that the diag- 

 nosed illness was only one component of a complex of diseases, the 

 remainder of which must be cured by other specialists. On the other 

 hand, the "ambulance chasing" proclivities of the shaman are inhibited 

 by the knowledge that, if he loses too many patients, he will, later, 

 be accused of witchcraft (Hrdlicka, 1908; Kroeber, 1925 a). 



Roughly speaking, we may visualize a Mohave diagnosis as the 

 resultant of many vectors: the patient's own preliminary diagnosis, 

 reflected in his decision to consult, e. g., a hiwey lak rather than an 

 ahwe : hahnok specialist ; the patient's dreams ; his physical symptoms ; 

 his life history; and, finally, the shaman's wish to treat him for a 

 variety of subjective reasons, which he sums up in the formula: "I 



492655—61 3 



