Devereus] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 261 



child of the mother's new husband (Devereux, 1949 c). This facili- 

 tates such a child's acceptance by its mother's new husband. 



(2) Many Mohave children are genuinely devoted to their step- 

 fathers (Devereux, 1950 f). 



On the other hand, the Mohave child is not trained to be devoted 

 only to its nearest kin and to expect no real love from others. The 

 libido of the Mohave child is diffused early in life over a substantial 

 segment of the tribe, so that, later in life, the adult Mohave will be 

 truly fond of many persons, but seldom if ever deeply in love with, 

 or tied hand and foot to, one person. In brief, the Mohave's "pri- 

 mary affect hunger" (Levy, 1937) is gi-atified throughout life by a 

 large number of persons, which may account for the great emotional 

 security of the average child. Indeed, Levy (1937), Spitz (1945, 

 1946), Spitz and Wolf (1946), Brody (1956), and most other an- 

 alysts believe the need for love to be a fundamental and primary 

 need, and hold that a frustration of this need is responsible for much 

 negativism, depression, and other anomalies of behavior in children 

 deprived of love. On a broader level, "affect hunger" may be simply 

 an aspect of the even more fundamental (and probably biological) 

 "need for response" stressed by Linton ( 1945) , that involves ultimately 

 both favorable and unfavorable responses, i.e., a controlled exchange 

 of stimuli between the individual and the organic, and even the in- 

 organic, environment. Thus, students of animal ecology found that 

 two goldfish in a bowl containing a certain noxious solution will 

 survive, while one goldfish in a bowl half that size, containing the 

 same noxious solution, will die (x\llee and Bowen, 1932). 



On a broader level, it was suggested (Devereux, 1951 e) that the 

 infant's capacity to perceive, and to over-react to, minimal 

 tokens of love is one of the infant's chief homeostatic survival mecha- 

 nisms. Its capacity to sense slights, and to exaggerate their impor- 

 tance and intensity is, in terms of the present hypothesis, an accidental 

 byproduct of, and epiphenomenal to, its more basic capacity to per- 

 ceive and to "amplify" such tokens of love as it may receive, e.g., 

 in the form of biologically seemingly "meaningless" caresses, body 

 contact (Montagu, 1953), etc.®" 



In brief, the fact that the Mohave child is seldom alone and par- 

 ticipates actively both in juvenile and adult group life provides it 

 with a degree of security that, despite many material deprivations, 

 usually suffices to keep the child emotionally on an even keel. 



The Mohave child's emotional position may, thus, be characterized 

 as follows ; 



The Mohave are intensely fond of children. The child receives 

 much love but, in keeping with the somewhat noncompulsive character 



** Compare In this context the goldfish example cited above. 



