182 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



forced herself to eat the undisguised body of her mother. Such a 

 hallucinatory disguising of the identity of a member of one's family, 

 whom one wishes to cannibalize, also occurs among Canadian In- 

 dians afflicted with windigo, who often hallucinate that their wives 

 and children are fat beavers. (Landes, 1938.) ^ Only after the can- 

 nibalistic act has already taken place is the true identity of the "fish" 

 revealed. 



Thus, this Mohave woman's depression dream has every hallmark 

 of authenticity and could not possibly have been either invented or 

 appreciably distorted in telling it. The dream in question expresses 

 and fuses the following elements : The oral mcorporation of the dead 

 mother, the infantile fantasy that the seemingly omnipotent mother is 

 not only female, but, at the same time, also male (fish), or that she 

 symoblizes maleness per se (Fenichel, 1954) and, finally, the infantile 

 notion that the sexual act is an essentially oral process.^ 



In summary, the dream in question is so classical a depression 

 dream that any psychoanalyst whose patient has such a dream would 

 envisage the imminence of an acute psychotic depression. 



CASE 47 (Informant: E.S.) : 



The following case history was volunteered by E.S., in order to illustrate 

 Almia Huma:re's account of the ghost illness, which he had just interpreted. 

 E.S. first told his story in Mohave to Ahma Huma :re, and, when the latter 

 agreed that this was indeed a case of uyevedhi : taha :na, he repeated it for 

 me in English. 



Tcatc — not your informant Tcatc, but another woman of that gens — was, 

 around 1930, about 30 years old. She had been to boarding school and had 

 just(V) returned to the reservation. She was at that time single and child- 

 less. She is still living (1938) . 



Her illness began as follows : She began to dream that she saw a fish being 

 prepared for a meal. When the fish was cooked, she sat down, meaning to eat it. 

 However, after taking two or three bites, she looked at the head of the fish 

 and saw that it was her mother, who had been dead for quite some time. After 

 she woke up, she was unable to eat . . . she simply could not keep the food 

 down in her stomach. She also cried now and then, without knowing why she 

 cried. Her "Indian relation" maternal grandfather'' Kuskinave: (or Kwis- 

 kwinay) — the one who had homosexual relations when he was in prison 

 (Devereux, 1937 b) — fortunately knew how to treat such cases. He made her 

 tell him her dream and then performed the usual cure for nyevedhi : taha :na, 

 singing all the proper songs. This treatment enabled her to recover her health." 



2 It is interesting to note that in "The Gold Rush," the starving bully first hallucinates 

 that Charlie Chaplin is a chicken and then tries to slaughter him for the pot. 



* These elements are richly represented in Jlohave culture where male transvestites drink 

 a constipating Infusion so as to be able to "give birth" to a fecal "child" (Devereux, 1937 b). 

 Compare also the belief that the first (female) witch, Bullfrog, bewitched her father, 

 the god Matavilye, by swallowing his feces, because he incestuously stimulated her by 

 touching her genitalia (Bourke, 1889). 



* I.e., her claBsiflcatory grandfather on the maternal side. 



