Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 289 



vilye's death is intentional, and therefore represents suicide, but is 

 actually brought about through witchcraft, and therefore represents 

 murder. 



It is unnecessary to repeat in this context what was said elsewhere 

 (Devereux, 1958 b) regarding the cultural thought models underlying 

 the doctrine of the death instinct, which is unacceptable to many 

 classical analysts (Fenichel, 1953). The point which concerns us 

 here is the fact that many cultures explain the origin of death in 

 terms of suicide and/or murder, rather than simply in terms of man's 

 inherent mortality. 



As far as I know, it has never been pointed out that there exists 

 a radical difference between murder and suicide on the one hand and 

 death from natural causes, such as old age, on the other hand. This 

 difference consists in the fact that it is possible to die of illness or of 

 old age without either imagining or accepting the fact of death, 

 whereas, at least in the human being, both murder and suicide pre- 

 suppose the idea of death and its acceptance. It is suggested that 

 this fact suffices to explain why intellectual explanations of the origin 

 of death — even when they are heavily tainted with fantasy, as in 

 myths concerning the origin of death — tend to favor theories, hy- 

 potheses, and mythical occurrences which include the psychic repre- 

 sentation of death and the acceptance of the idea of deatli, and tliere- 

 fore view either suicide or murder, or some intermediate model, such 

 as the Mohave myth of the death of Matavilye, which blends murder 

 and suicide into a unified whole, as the basic prototype of death. 



Actually, of course, one meets both with killing (murder) and 

 suicide also in the animal kingdom. Yet, the studies of Zuckerman 

 (1932) indicate that even primates, such as baboons, seem unable to 

 recognize the state of death. Likewise, no sound animal psychologist, 

 no matter how sympathetic he may be to the idea that primates are 

 capable of relatively complex acts of mentation, would, even for a 

 moment, entertain the idea that the self -destructive and, indeed, prac- 

 tically suicidal male Macacus rhesus monkey described by Tinkle- 

 paugh (1928), "knew" what he was doing, in the sense of having an 

 operationally definable idea of death and an operationally definable 

 idea of suicide. 



In brief, it is suggested that the real problem of interest to the psy- 

 choanalyst is not the truth or falseness of the deatli instinct theory — 

 which is a pseudo-problem, in Carnap's sense— but the motivation 

 which impels both a genius of the first magnitude, like Freud, and 

 the primitive myth maker, to explain death in terms of a theory — 

 or myth — in which the basic model of death is murder and/or suicide, 

 and which therefore presupposes from the start the idea of death and 

 the acceptance of that idea. The fact that death can be triggered 



