Deveieux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 235 



John's subsequent temporary psychic decompensation. On the other hand the 

 dreams in question seem quite incompatible with the diagnosis "schizophrenia, 

 catatonic type" made by at least one psychiatrist when John suffered a tempo- 

 rary breakdown. They are, however, fully compatible with the diagnosis : 

 "transitory confusional state," i.e., with a type of psychotic episode which is 

 commonly found among "primitives." 

 The latent content of John's three nightmares is fairly obvious : 

 (a) The first dream differs somewhat from the other two in being a typical 

 pubertal anxiety dream, reflecting the adolescent's dread of his increasingly 

 intense sexual impulses, which — once they are aroiised through "playing" with 

 a girl — become stormy and uncontrollable to the point where both he and his 

 girl friend are carried away by a torrent. The real climax of the dream is the 

 fact that, on waking up, he nearly fell out of bed (= detumescence). 

 (6) The mother is seen as a potentially destructive ogress. 



(c) The dreamer identifies himself with a threatening mother figure (temper 

 tantrums), and betrays this identification by means of a slip of the pen; he 

 writes: "/ was a lady named D. S." instead of "It was a lady named D. S." 



(d) He wishes his mother were dead, since D. S., a mother surrogate, appears 

 in dream as being dead. 



(e) John's death wishes are partly neutralized by his fear of desertion, 

 although in dream he is deserted by a kindly father figure (= "good mother") 

 rather than by the ("bad, violent") mother, who, however, also deserts him in 

 the end. The experience of being deserted is characterized in dream chiefly in 

 terms of oral deprivation : hunger, thirst, and lack of air. 



(/) The fantasied gratification of the death wishes is immediately followed 

 by punishment : The dead mother surrogate turns into a kind of masked ghostly 

 monster and this ghost chases John and his young friend. 



(g) At the same time, the dreamer knows that the "monstrous" mother is 

 also a loving mother, since it is she who awakens him from the dream in which 

 she herself behaved like an ogress gone beserk. 



(h) The presence of suffocation (or at least of drowning) in all three dreams 

 clearly indicates that the dreams in question are nightmares, whose oedipal na- 

 ture was conclusively demonstrated by Jones (1931). This finding leads directly 

 to the next topic. 



(0) The mother as oedipal love object. — A detailed discussion of this aspect 

 of John's relationship with his mother will be found in the section on mate 

 choice, in which the interplay between John's identification with his mother in 

 her "masculine" role and his oedipal attachment to her in her feminine role is 

 analyzed in some detail. 



PSYCIIOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT : 



Outwardly John's psychosexual development was relatively uneventful and 

 conformed to what is known about the development of sexuality in Mohave 

 society (Devereux 1950 a, 1951 d). He functioned like a normal Mohave male 

 and showed no tendency to become dissolute, or to become involved in scandals, 

 though, like many other Mohave boys, he had performed coitus before he was 10 

 years old. 



However, on a less obvious and deeper level, John's development into a man 

 and his behavior as a man were largely determined by the atypicality of his 

 oedipus complex. Unlike most Mohave children, he was brought up in a home 

 whose dominant adult member was his strong and temperamental mother. The 

 fact that he was nonetheless able to achieve genuine functional masculinity was 

 largely due to his effective identification with a beloved father figure who, de- 



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