236 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



spite his real gentleness, was a completely masculine person. On the other hand 

 the fact that, in his childhood, the dominant figure was his temperamental 

 mother, deeply affected his choice of girl friends, as well as his choice of 

 spouses. The relationship of his choice of partners to his somewhat atypical 

 Oedipus complex can be discussed under five headings. 



(1) Psetido-exogamous tendencies in the choice of partners: 



It is a psychological truism that human beings sometimes protect themselves 

 against some ego-dystonic impulse by seeking refuge in its polar opposite. For 

 example, a man sometimes masks his oedipal cravings by developing a marked 

 preference for women as different from his mother as possible. This trend 

 was markedly present in John. Thus, already in elementary school he showed 

 a preference for non-Mohave girls, in a ratio of two or three to one. Subse- 

 quently he developed a marked taste for non-Mohave partners, was known to 

 have admired the Japanese-American girls who had been sent to a nearby War 

 Relocation Camp, and contracted only tribally exogamous unions. 



John's ostentatiously nonoedipal preference for non-Mohave girls appears to 

 have masked markedly oedipal inclinations. He professed to have liked non- 

 Mohave partners because they were aggressively violent in their responsiveness, 

 whereas Mohave girls, although they admittedly do most of the courting (Nettle, 

 MS; n.d.), are trained to be quite passive during the consummation (Devereux, 

 1950 a) . This taste for aggressively violent — i.e., necessarily non-Mobave — part- 

 ners must be presumed to have strongly oedipal roots, because their violence 

 appears to represent a sexualized version of the mother's explosive temper, which 

 played so important a role in the etiology of John's childhood temper tantrums. 

 Otherwise expressed, John's preference for aggressively violent girl friends sug- 

 gests that, like many other neurotics, he too dealt with his fear of his mother's 

 explosive temper first by identifying with her and developing childhood tan- 

 trums of his own, and later on by "erotizing" his fear of physical aggression 

 and developing a marked preference for violent partners. This inference is 

 strengthened rather than weakened by the finding that he contracted his most 

 durable union with a rather gentle girl, because in that union he managed 

 to gratify his oedipal cravings through more devious means, which will be 

 discussed in the next section. 



(2) Cultural evaluation of John's quasi-permanent mate choices: 

 Confonniam: 



(a) John's real unions carefully conformed to the rule against marrying 

 a member of one's extende<l family and gens. 



(6) John's unions also conformed to the minor Mohave practice of 

 marrying an aflSnal relative of some member of one's own family. 

 Rebellion : 



(«) John complied so excessively with the letter of the aforementioned 

 mandates that, in so doing, he violated the rule against tribal exogamy, thus 

 exposing himself "self-destructively" to the ahwe: illness (pt. 4, pp. 128-150). 



(ft) "Accidentally on purpose," he contracted unions which were im- 

 peccably and even excessively "exogamous" in terms of the Mohave kinship 

 system, but were completely "endogamous" from the psychological point of 

 view. 



The last comment calls for a brief clarification. A union is socially exogamous 

 but psychologically oedipal and endogamous if, for various reasons, the original 

 relationship between the future spouses is emotionally of the familial type. 

 Common examples of such unions are mother-in-law marriages among the 

 Mohave (Devereux, 1951 f), stepdaughter marriages (Kroeber, 1940), and the 



