Derereux] MOHAVE KTHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 61 



impulses, and anxieties going back to early childhood. Now, it stands 

 to reason that the return of the repressed is not, and, by definition, 

 cannot be, a pleasant experience, since otherwise the reemerging ma- 

 terial would not have had to be repressed in the first place. Hence, 

 while the budding JMohave shaman apparently does not midergo 

 periods of almost unendurable psychic pain and confusion, such as 

 are reported for Siberian shamans (Czaplicka, 1914 ; Eliade, 1951) , he, 

 too, appears to be sufficiently disturbed during this period of psychic 

 gestation to manifest highly obnoxious behavior. Thus, even prac- 

 ticing shamans concede that budding shamans exhibit objectionable 

 behavior. For example, when "Jolin Smith" (pseudonym) had, as an 

 8-year-old boy, a temper tantrum in our presence, Hivsu : Tupo : ma 

 said that he would eventually become a shaman (Case 64). Interest- 

 ingly enough, this boy did, eventually, become successively an alcoholic 

 (Devereux, 1948 i), a self -destructively reckless person, who had 

 several almost fatal accidents, and, for a short time, even an actual 

 psychotic requiring hospitalization. It seems permissible to suggest 

 that had this young man been less fully acculturated, he would have 

 been able to find relief by becoming a culturally nondeviant shaman. 

 However, since his acculturation made the shamanistic defense uncon- 

 genial and inadequate for him, he was obliged to improvise a series 

 of idiosyncratic symptomatic defenses all on his own, which not only 

 made him both abnormal and deviant, but also repeatedly caused him 

 to endanger his life (pt. 5, pp. 222-243). If this inference is cor- 

 rect, it means that, despite many tangible social and psychological 

 drawbacks, being a shaman is, temporarily at least, a less risky and 

 painful intrapsychic defense against one's conflicts, than are impro- 

 vised, idiosyncratic defenses, which make the conflict-ridden individual 

 both a symptom-ridden neurotic or psychotic and a social deviant, 

 whose very deviancy automatically involves him in a whole new series 

 of difficulties of a type that he could have avoided had he been suf- 

 ficiently unacculturated to become a shaman. This hypothesis helps 

 one to understand why some ardent exponents of one type of irrational 

 ideology often become vehement converts to another, equally irra- 

 tional ideology. Specifically, it explains why certain conflict-ridden 

 individuals, who first sought refuge from their inner turmoil in violent 

 Naziism, became, after the collapse of the Nazi system, convinced 

 henchmen of Communism ; the inference being that they had to do so 

 in order to escape the necessity of having to improvise atypical de- 

 fenses of their own, which would have caused them to become socially 

 deviant psychotics. 



It is hardly necessary to stress that only an intense intrapsychic 

 turmoil could cause a child or adolescent to engage ostentatiously in 



