Deverciix] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 171 



(c) The one who chases you is also yourself. It is your "shadow soul." 

 You are also the one who carries this burden. It is fortunate that you dreamed 

 of both of your selves. Had you dreamed only of one, it would have meant 

 death. This is a hiwey lak dream. 



At this point I asked Hivsu : Tupo :ma to treat me, but he refused to do so 

 on the grounds that he was not qualified to treat a white . . . but failed to 

 add that he was not a hiwey lak specialist either. 



Dream C: 



Dreamer. — Tcatc (N), a middle-aged woman. I dreamed on two separate oc- 

 casions that some women tried to have intercourse with me. Once I dreamed 

 about one woman and another time about another woman. Both of these 

 women were either close friends or else relatives of mine. I knew even in 

 dream that they were women, though they acted like men and tried to pull up 

 my skirt. Both managed to throw me down and then tried to get on top of 

 me. Fortunately I managed to fight them off in both instances, so that neither 

 of them actually succeeded in having intercourse with me. 



Associations. — Had these dreams culminated in intercourse, I would have 

 become very ill. [Do you desire women also in a waking state?] Definitely not. 



Cultural comment. — In principle, incestuous dreams are supposed to cause 

 hiwey lak. In this instance the dreamer did not specify that she might have 

 contracted hiwey lak, had these female relatives succeeded in having intercourse 

 with her. This omission may be fortuitous, since this is the first dream I 

 obtained, early in my first field trip. 



Tentative interpretation. — The dream reveals unconscious, homosexually in- 

 cestuous wishes. The fact that the women "acted like men" is a tentative denial 

 of the fact that women have no penes. (Small children often fantasy that the 

 powerful mother has a phallus.) The dreamer strenously resists her at- 

 tackers, partly because her homosexual wishes are not ego-syntonic but per- 

 haps also because, had she allowed them to go ahead, she would have dis- 

 covered in the end that women do not, after all. have a phallus. These ag- 

 gressively masculine female relatives may symbolize the dreamer's mother, such 

 as the small girl sometimes fantasies her mother to be. The aggressivity of 

 the women is presumably related to the child's "sadistic theory of intercourse" 

 (i.e., "father does dreadful things to mother.") Narcissistic elements are also 

 present. 



AcTTTAL Hiwey Lak Cases 



The most interesting aspect of the recorded cases of genuine hiwey 

 lak is the fact that two of the patients were brother and sister and that 

 incestuous elements, combined with witchcraft and murder, played 

 a great role in the etiology of their illnesses. It is equally interesting 

 that none of the other recorded hiwey lak cases involved obvious psy- 

 chiatric symptoms. This fact further confirms the impression that 

 the Mohave view this illness as psychosomatic rather than as strictly 

 psychiatric. 



CASE 40 (Informants : Ahma Huma : re and Hama : Utce : ) : 



A young man was once brought to my house for treatment. He was all 

 swollen up. His whole body was swollen from the dreams which he had had. 



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