Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 41 



state or an agitated depression. The interplay between aggression 

 and guilt (punishment) is clearly shown by the fact that both dreams 

 of killing someone and dreams of being killed by someone cause the 

 same illness (see pt. 2, pp. 43^5) . 

 Cannibalistic and m.urderous fantasies : 



(1 ) Windigo psychosis of the Canadian Indians (Teicher, 1960) . 

 Tcatc never heard of such an illness. 



(2) Sharpened Leg, and Ice- or Stone-Shinned Giants. Myths and 

 beliefs about these aggressive supernaturals, which occur among Plains 

 Indians and Canadian Indians, respectively, are, according to Tcatc, 

 absent among the Mohave. 



(3) Cannibalism, except in folklore (Devereux, 1948 h; Kroeber, 

 1948), was denied by all informants. Tcatc reacted with genuine 

 horror to my account of a Yavapai case of cannibalism (Gifford, 

 1932, 1936) . (But cf . pt. 4, pp. 150-175.) 



(4) Zoanthropy. — According to Tcatc, lycanthropy does not exist 

 among the Mohave. My interpreter, E. S., added, however, that he 

 had heard of such beliefs among the Pueblo Indians. Wlien I men- 

 tioned some of the were-tiger stories current among the Naga (Hut- 

 ton, 1921 a, 1921 b) , the narrative did not jog the informants' memory 

 and merely elicited surprise. According to Tcatc : 



One may see a bull or a giant in one's dream and these beings might fight with 

 the dreamer, but the bull is the only animal that the Mohave see in their dreams. 

 In almost all cases they see in their dreams the bull turns out to be simply a 

 certain shaman. These dreams come when that shaman is thinking about the 

 dreamer, or the dreamer about the shaman. [Do you mean that the shaman thinks 

 of him in some special way?] No. [Tcatc then remarked that some of the 

 events narrated in the hukthar (coyote) stories (Kroeber, 1948; Devereux, 

 1948 h) may or may not have actually happened.] 



The information on zoanthropy, elicited by means of direct ques- 

 tions, has two significant implications : 



{a) The erroneous statement that the only animal seen in dreams is 

 the bull is revealing, since the Mohave seem to castrate all bull calves 

 and rely on Agency bulls for the servicing of their cows. They seem 

 to experience considerable guilt, especially over the castration of bull 

 calves, since they specify that newly castrated calves bellow with pain 

 much longer than do castrated horses or pigs (Devereux, 1948 g). 



{b) The transformation of the bull into a shaman in the dream itself 

 shows that the shaman is an image of the dangerous, ogrelike oedipal 

 father of the small child's fantasy world. 



On the whole, both the data about the pi-ipa : tceva : ram illness it- 

 self and about dream zoanthropy reflect a paranoid tendency to 

 ascribe aggressivity to the powerful object of one's unconscious hos- 

 tilities. Since the occurrence of true paranoid persecution complexes 



I 

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