44 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



is also the matter of scalps taken in victory. They are bathed and 

 fixed up with white clay/^ as though they were living. The person 

 who took a scalp dreamed of it. He dreams that he is taking the 

 scalp and it will prey on his mind. The insanity of scalpers is not 

 unlike that of witch-ldlling braves. (See pt. 2, p. 45.) 



Comment 



Tentative diagnosis. — ^War neurosis. Acute anxiety reaction actu- 

 ated by guilt. Tcatc's description of ahwe : ma : n resembles her ac- 

 count of pi-ipa: tcevarram (see above), which is also preceded by 

 dreams of killing or being killed. Moreover, Tcatc spontaneously 

 compared the symptoms of the scalper's psychosis (?) to the symp- 

 toms of the foreign ghost psychosis (pt. 4, pp. 128-150), but without 

 specifically identifying ahwe : ma : n with ahwe : hahnok and ahwe : 

 nyevedhi :, as Pulyi : k did. As for pi-ipa : tceva : ram, it differs from 

 ahwe : ma : n in that in the former illness actual aggression follows 

 dreams of killing, thus representing the "acting out" of dreams (Dev- 

 ereux, 1953 a) , whereas in ahwe : ma : n the killing precedes the dreams 

 of killing. Of course, from the Mohave point of view, this distinction 

 is only a technicality, since, to the Mohave, dream is a genuine part of 

 reality (Kroeber, 1925 a; Wallace, 1947; Devereux, 1956 c). It is 

 tentatively suggested that actual aggression is a symptom of pi-ipa : 

 tceva : ram, because a dream killing is less cathartic than is actual 

 battle. 



K. M. Stewart's (1947 c) statement that scalpers are hollering in 

 the night and Tcatc's and other informants' specification that the 

 scalper's dreams repeat the (anxiety arousing) aggressive act, sug- 

 gest that scalping was an experience which the scalper's ego was 

 unable to master at once. This inference is greatly strengthened by 

 Tcatc's remark that it takes time to recover from this illness. In 

 addition, her comment and the statements of other informants, such 

 as Anya Hama: ra (day earn, earned daily) and Thinyea : k Hu : say 

 (women to serve them, to show respect to women) of the Yi : mak gens, 

 that such dreams are recurrent ones, suggest that their function is to 

 master the war trauma in dream. This interpretation is strongly sup- 

 ported by the fact that during World War II one standard method of 

 treating guilt-ridden psychiatric casualties was to induce an artificially 

 prolonged sleep, which enabled the patient to dream of the trauma 

 again and again, until he mastered it in dream by means of distortions 

 (happy ending) amounting to a radical reinterpretation of the facts 

 (Kubie, 1943)." 



"The Yuma ahwe: ma : n specialist's name is "white mud." 



*» Needless to say, this therapy does not effect a Ronuine cure. It is purely palliative 

 and effects a social and military recovery, by mobilizing somewhat less incapacitating 

 neurotic defense mechanisms : denial, and others. 



