Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 139 



If all this is done and tlie bad dreams cease, the patient may be all right. 

 After all this has been done and the patient has put on different clothing, he Is 

 able to think straight again. Then he seems to forget his dead relatives and his 

 bad dreams and gets well. (This suggests that this treatment psychologically 

 duplicates and reinforces the basic function of the funeral ritual, which seeks 

 to sever the bonds between the dead and the mourners. ) 



A woman who lost her husband may also have such bad dreams. She may 

 dream that she is still living with her husband, and is doing all the things 

 which they did during his life on earth. This sickness of widows is much the 

 same as the illness of persons who dream of the dead blood kin. This illness, 

 too, is called ahwe : nyevedhi :. If the sick widow performs those actions 

 which are also prescribed for the cure of the previously mentioned ailment, the 

 results are the same. [What if one dreams of one's dead spouse during the first 

 4 days after the death of that spouse?] ^' It is all right to have such 

 dreams during that period ; one does not get sick from them. It is not a sign of 

 sickness if one dreams of one's dead six)use during the 4 days which follow 

 cremation. Once in a great while one may even dream of one's dead spouse at a 

 later date. Peoiile say that one has such dreams when the dead spouse thinks 

 of the surviving spouse. When the widowed spouse has such bad dreams about 

 the dead spouse, it is a sign of the coming of sickness. In the case of a woman, 

 there seems to be some hard substance, or some "muscles," in her vagina. 

 Then, in her dreams, she has sexual intercourse with her dead husband. This 

 particular condition is known as ahwe: tci:. (Note that dead husband=enemy, 

 i.e., ahwe: !) This hard thing, is roughly speaking, like a real object inserted 

 into the vagina (i.e., an imaginary foreign body). It is not just that a part of 

 the vagina is getting hard. (Phantom phallus.)** 



Comment 



The preceding account strikingly illustrates the connection between 

 aliens, the ghosts of relatives, and the ghosts of dead spouses. 



The "internal phantom phallus" has also been mentioned by Euro- 

 American psychoneurotics. It must be specified that the "experience" 

 of an "internal phantom phallus" in a waking state is very different 

 from dreams of having intercourse, and represents an almost schizo- 

 phrenic impairment of the body image." 



The pathogenic dreams related by Hilyera Anyay appear to differ 

 from those which cause hiwey lak nyevedhi : only in that the latter 

 type may involve also dream-incest, dreams "causing" pseudo-preg- 

 nancy (pseudocyesis) and dreams about one's childhood."*^ 



8» During this period the dead soul, which Is not yet a true ghost, revisits its old haunts. 



<" At this point Hilyera Anyay was aslted about the globus hystericus. His answer 

 is reported in part 5, pages 216-218. 



*i An experienced psychoanalyst stated that when a psychoneurotic woman was speaking 

 of her dead father, she began to experience the sensation of liaving some object In her 

 vagina. The analyst promptly told her to get up from the couch and sit in a chair, since 

 he rightly feared that if the woman remained in the prone position-^whose purpose It is 

 to facilitate the (gradual) emergence of unconscious thoughts and feelings — there might 

 occur an uncontrolled and massive "return of the repressed," whicli may lead to a 

 sudden schizophrenic break. The woman spent the rest of that hour sitting in a chair. 



*2 This last type of dream is, of necessity, related to dreams about the dead, since one 

 would see In dream a house which was burned down (Kroeber, 1925 a) at the death of a 

 member of the household. 



492655—61 10 



