Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 285 



Comment 



Tentative diagnosis. — Borderline psychotic behavior. 



Psychiatrically, the most striking aspect of the preceding case history is the 

 masculine role which this young girl assumed in her relations with younger 

 girls. Conservatively speaking, it suggests a total absence of the latency period, 

 and may conceivably even imply a direct transition from oedipal attitudes to a 

 premature (psychological) puberty. In this context it should be noted that when 

 a female chimpanzee in oestrus is caged with another female who is not in 

 oestrus, the rutting female will play a male role in her sexual and social behavior 

 toward the non-rutting female (Yerkes, 1939). As I'egards Nyoltc Hukthar's 

 aggressive and destructive sex play with boys, it must be viewed as an expression 

 of rivalry with, and hostility toward, the male, and of a wish to perform phallic- 

 urethral "feats." 



The conduct of the old man can, to a considerable extent, be interpreted not 

 so much as a senile person's debauching of the young, as a response to the 

 deliberate seductiveness of an abnormal girl child. Indeed, in many occi- 

 dental cases that are legally defined as "contributing to the delinquency of a 

 minor," the actual and tenaciously active seducer is the girl child, who is acting 

 out her oedipal impulses with a near-psychotic intensity. 



The preceding case history adequately supports the view that the 

 budding shaman has, at the lo\Yest estimate, a borderline psychosis, 

 possibly of the "hysterical psychosis" type, characterized by certain 

 homosexual tendencies. The same impression is created also by all 

 general accounts of the misconduct of the budding male shaman 

 (Devereux, 1937 c), cuius in maxime indignis artificiis hoc est, ut 

 inter mulieres mutonem sibi quoque deesse fingat mingatque "sicut 

 equa." These quasi -homosexual acts of budding shamans of both 

 sexes may be responsible for the Mohave belief that female shamans 

 are stronger than male ones, and transvestite shamans stronger than 

 either male or female ones (Devereux, 1937 b). The detailed case 

 history of a lesbian shaman, who earned her living as a prostitute 

 (Case 105), also fits this interpretation of the data. The proneness 

 of future shamans to engage in zoophilia — often in a form that in- 

 volves extraordinary and wholly un-Mohave brutality toward the mis- 

 used animal (Devereux, 1948 g) — the tendency of witches to engage 

 in incest (Devereux, 1939 a) and, finally, the notorious suicidal im- 

 pulses of older witches (Kroeber, 1925 a) , fully prove the thesis that — 

 always in his youth, sometimes also in adulthood, and quite frequently 

 in his old age — the Mohave shaman of either sex is to be diagnosed 

 either as a borderline case, or else as an outright psychotic, and is, in 

 fact, so diagnosed by the Mohave themselves. The same is true of so 

 many other tribes as well, that Ackerknecht's (1943) attempt to give 

 the shaman a clean bill of psychological health is both culturally and 

 psychiatrically fallacious. 



