242 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY fBull. 175 



poverishment and flattening of the patient's personality. Otherwise stated, 

 whenever the disappearance of a schizophrenic patient's symptoms is actually 

 due to this type of intervention, the patient's post-treatment personality is in- 

 variably impoverished, colorless, nuanceless, and relatively sluggish, both in the 

 sphere of the emotions and of imagination.'* Hence, had the disappearance of 

 John's symptoms been due to the type of treatment he received, his postinorbid 

 personality would have been little more than a flattened and discolored version 

 of his premorbid personality. Since this did not happen, one is obliged to con- 

 clude that John had — fortunately for him — not received enough such treatments 

 to cure his alleged "schizophrenia" in the only way in which such treatments 

 "cure" the schizophrenic : by impoverishing his personality, in order to flatten out 

 and to deactivate his symptoms. His recovery was therefoi-e presumably due to 

 something else than the treatment he had received, i.e., presumably to the fact 

 that, during this emotional crisis, he was able to abreact and to ventilate the 

 conflicts of a lifetime and the anxieties aroused by the precipitating trauma 

 in one massive act of catharsis — an inference which is strongly supported by 

 the fact that John's last remaining symptoms disappeared shortly after his near- 

 fatal accident. If this interpretation of John's recovery is correct, it almost 

 automatically excludes the diagnosis of schizophrenia, and strengthens the 

 proposed diagnosis of "hysterical psychosis," since such a massive temporary 

 decompensation and catharsis sometimes suffices to alleviate the symptoms of a 

 hysterical tj'pe of disorder, but not those of a genuine schizophrenia, and espe- 

 cially not to the point where one is entitled to speak of a genuine recovery, as 

 distinct from a mere remission. 



In view of the preceding considerations, the diagnosis of an "acute schizo- 

 phrenic state (catatonic type)" seems untenable. On the other hand, these 

 considerations are fully compatible with the diagnosis of a transitory con- 

 fusional state (hysterical psychosis), of a type which is known to be extremely 

 common in tribal societies. 



Conclusions : 



The present case illustrates the etiological significance of culturally atypical 

 traumata and techniques of education, whose impact, because of their atypi- 

 cality, cannot be counteracted by culturally provided readymade defenses 

 (Devereux, 1956 b). The patient's mother is a very progressive Mohave, whose 

 personality is, in some respects, different from that of the run-of-the-mill 

 Mohave. Her cultural atypicality was further underscored by the fact that 

 the principal father figure was an almost ideal Mohave personality. This 

 combination made John's education confusing in the extreme. Hence, even 

 though older people expected John to become a shaman, the atypicality of his 

 conflicts — like those of other young Mohave Indians — made this type solution 

 wholly unattractive for him (Devereux, 1956 a, 1957 b), quite apart from the 

 fact that, due to his acculturation, he did not sincerely believe in shamanism, so 

 that he could not even have been effectively treated by a shaman. By contrast, 

 despite his acculturation, John was psychologically still sufficiently a Mohave — 

 rather than a white man "gone native" — to develop the typically archaic psy- 

 chiatric condition : "transitory confusional state" followed by a complete remis- 

 sion, instead of developing a true chronic schizophrenia, such as a similarly 

 traumatized member of our own cultui*e might have developed. 



^*At a time when the now obsolete metrazol convulsion treatment was still In use, 

 some flynnniic psychiatrists spoke of patients subjected to a lull course of metrazol 

 convulslonB as "the zombies." 



