60 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



udes, nearly all victims of murders were said to have been witches. 

 In fact, it is often the witch himself who incites other to kill him 

 (Kroeber, 1925 a ; Devereux, 1937 c) . 



Thus, despite his functional tribal nuclearity, the sliaman is socially 

 and culturally so dystonic (Devereux, 1956 b), and therefore faces 

 so many inconveniences and risks, that these factors alone almost 

 suffice to explain why some individuals refuse to become practicing 

 shamans. 



We might add that the conduct of at least the "bad shamans" clearly 

 reveals their awareness of the social risks which they run. They are 

 extremely furtive and reticent in their behavior, allegedly because they 

 do not wish to incite antagonism. Yet, like other neurotics, they do 

 not realize at all that their cautious, self-protective reticence only 

 serves to make them more suspect than ever. Thus, the refusal of cer- 

 tain bad shamans to act as my informants greatly angered several of 

 my Mohave friends, who viewed their refusal as proof positive of the 

 cowardice of all real witches. One may even suspect that the shaman 

 Hikye : t finally agreed to serve as a — very unsatisfactory — informant 

 (pt. 1, pp. 9-13) chiefly because he sought to prove to the Mohave that, 

 not being a witch, he was not afraid to function as an informant. 



Intrapsychic motives. — It is generally recognized that intrapsychic 

 needs, rather than specific social pressures and directives, cause an 

 individual to become a shaman.^° However, the fact that such intra- 

 psychic needs are temporarily and partly resolved by becoming a 

 shaman does not necessarily imply that either these needs themselves, 

 or the acquisition and possession of shamanistic powers must there- 

 fore be wholly ego-syntonic.*^ 



Many aspects of Mohave shamanism indicate that the acquisition 

 of shamanistic powers, i. e., the developing of a culturally sanctioned 

 system of defenses against certain atypically violent, but otherwise 

 standard, unconscious conflicts, is a far from smooth and pleasant 

 process. The Mohave assert that power-giving experiences first 

 occur in utero, and are then remembered, and dreamed all over again, 

 in adolescence (Devereux, 1937 c). This belief clearly indicates that 

 the Mohave themselves experience these adolescent power-giving 

 dreams as a return of the repressed, i. e., as a reactivation of conflicts. 



*" The shaman's dominant conflicts, like those of other members of the tribe, lie primarily 

 in the realm of the unconscious portion of his ethnic personality, but tend to be of such 

 intensity that he must cope with them not only by developing the typical basic personality 

 of his group, but also by evolving an additional, culturally provided, but optional, pattern 

 of defense against his strong anxieties and impulses: Shamanism (Devereux, 1956 b). 



" Thus, an Omaha Indian, whose vision instructed him to become a transvestite, must 

 have had tliis particular vision because he had intense, albeit unconscious, conflicts over 

 his sexual Identity. Nonetheless, the socially acceptable solution which his vision sug- 

 gested to him was so ego-dystonic that he preferred to commit suicide rather than com- 

 ply with this supernatural directive (Lowie, 1924). 



