266 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BnlL 175 



elsewhere (Devereux, 1956 b), and not a true, idiosyncratic neurosis. 

 The tolerance accorded the Mohave transvestite resembles that ac- 

 corded the budding shaman. Like the latter, the budding transvestite 

 exhibits a socially defined and expected "pattern of misconduct." 

 Also, as in the case of budding shaman, no real pressure is put on the 

 budding transvestite, although when certain young girls begin to show 

 lesbian tendencies, there are occasional half-hearted and not very 

 hopeful attempts to discourage them from becoming inverts. When 

 these efforts fail, they are subjected to a ritual, wliich is half "test" of 

 their true proclivities and half "transition rite" and which authorizes 

 them to assume the clothing and to engage in the occupations and 

 sexual activities characteristic of their self-chosen sex (Devereux, 

 1937 b). Plere too, the high predictability °^ of the future and actual 

 transvestite's behavior in terms of a socially formulated "pattern of 

 misconduct" suggests — as indicated elsewhere (Devereux, 1956 b) — 

 that we are dealing simply with unusually strongly developed in- 

 stances of a type of conflict which is, at least statistically, highly 

 prevalent in a given culture, i. e., with an "etlinic neurosis," whose 

 symptoms are provided by society itself, in the form of a preestablished 

 "pattern of misconduct." 



The preceding considerations explain, at least in part, the dif- 

 ficulties experienced by psychiatrists who seek to interpret the essen- 

 tially socio-cultural problem of delinquency in psychiatric terms. 

 These difficulties are made especially obvious by the purely heuristic 

 attempt to deal with this problem by means of the relatively new diag- 

 nostic category, "sociopathy," which is, logically, "neither fish, nor 

 flesh, nor good red herring," and which, strictly speaking, leaps from 

 psychic determinism to social repercussions, without ever facing 

 squarely the crucial intermediate problem of symptom formation.®* 

 The same is also partly true of the more authentically psychiatric 

 concept "psychopathy" (pt. 5, pp. 245-247) . The notorious reluctance 

 of many judges, lawyers, and law enforcement officers to accept psychi- 

 atric testimony in criminal cases may well be due, in part at least, to 

 a dim awareness of the inadequacies of present-day psychiatric 

 attempts to bridge the gap between the social concept of de- 

 linquency and the psychiatric concept of neurotic aggressivity and 

 predatoriness. (Cf. also U.S. Senate 1955, for recent data.) 



•• It was shown elsewhere that the alleged unpredictability of neurotics, etc., is not real, 

 but simply a consequenco of misguided attempts to predict their behavior by means of a 

 frame of reference which is not the proper one for the understanding, control, and predic- 

 tion of their behavior (Devereux, 1951 h, 1952 a, 1952 b). 



•* But compare some of my papers, which seek to grapple with this triple problem 

 (Devereux, 1939 c, 1940 a, 1942 b, 1944 a, 1951 g, 1954 a, 1955 a ; Devereux and Moos, 

 1942 ; Devereux and Loeb, 1943 a, 1943 b). 



