222 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



CASE 63 (Informant, M. A. I. Nettle, M.D.) : 



One of my Mohave patients may have been a hypochondriac. Unfortunately 

 this patient ran away from the hospital before the diagnostic workup was 

 completed. It is therefore possible that the patient was not a hypochondriac, but 

 had either a pellagra psychosis, or else a toxic psychosis due to an infection of the 

 gall bladder. 



It seems worth mentioning that hypochondria is far from rare in 

 primitive societies and may account for the success of many shaman- 

 istic cures. The victims of hypochondria are quite often magnificent 

 specimens of health. Thus, I once noticed in a psychiatric hospital a 

 Kiowa Indian, who stood well over 6 feet 2 inches, looked like the 

 archetype of a Plains Indian brave and seemed in splendid health. In 

 reply to my inquiry, his physician told me that he was a chronic 

 hypochondriac. 



THE GROUP OF SCHIZOPHRENIAS 



_A careful analysis of my data indicates (except for Case 31 ?) a near 

 absence of genuine (chronic) schizophrenia. There occur, however, 

 certain transitory reactive confusional episodes, which resemble 

 schizophrenia but differ from the latter in being of brief duration. 



All leading questions regarding schizophrenic symptoms, includ- 

 ing even the question, "Did you ever hear of someone who believed 

 himself to be someone else?", were answered in the negative by Tcatc, 

 Ililyera Anyay, and all other informants. 



If one accepts the (oversimplified) theory that early oral frustra- 

 tions play a decisive role in the etiology of schizophrenia, then the 

 prolonged "demand breast-feeding" of Mohave children would, in 

 itself, suffice to explain the absence of schizophrenias. Since, how- 

 ever, schizophrenia also appears to be absent among the orally frus- 

 trated Marquesans (Kardiner and Linton, 1939), it is probably 

 preferable to attribute the absence of schizophrenia among the Mo- 

 have to the basic structure of primitive culture, which, by its very 

 nature, seems to play a role in preventing the occurrence of genuine 

 (chronic) forms of schizophrenia (Devereux, 1939 d), at least until 

 a primitive society is subjected to massive and oppressive accultura- 

 tion, as in South Africa. It is true, of course, that the Mohave have 

 become appreciably acculturated in most external ways. However — 

 and this point was agreed upon in a personal conversation with A. L. 

 Kroeber (1954) — the "dream core" of Mohave culture is still rela- 

 tively intact, so that the essence of that culture continues to be the 

 basic orientational framcAvork of almost all Mohave Indians. 



There is, admittedly, the case of a young man of mixed ancestry 

 (Case 64), who was diagnosed by psychiatrists as a catatonic schizo- 

 phrenic. However, on the basis of an intimate acquaintance with 

 the facts of the matter, I cannot persuade myself that they warrant 



