Devereui] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 295 



amorous disappointments than was formerly the case, clearly reflects 

 her implicit belief that the modern Mohave is emotionally more deeply 

 involved with his girl friend or spouse than was the case in aboriginal 

 times, and that this greater concentration of the modern Mohave's 

 emotional allegiances took place at the expense of a broader, though 

 less intense, aifective commitment to, and emotional dependence upon, 

 the kin group and the tribe as a whole.*^ 



Statistical tlwory — as distinct from the statistical dooumentation 

 of sociological or psychological theories — does not provide any real 

 understanding of suicide, which is an occurrence best discussed, at 

 least to start with, in idiographic, rather than in nomothetic, terms. 

 Attempts to formulate a purely statistical theory of suicide are doomed 

 to failure in advance, since such a theory simply seeks to turn a 

 disorderly confusion into a regimented chaos, without dimmishing 

 in the least the inlierent scientific worthlessness of the junk pile of 

 facts which have not yet heen given a meaning in terms of some 

 sociological or psychological theory. For this reason, and also because 

 our data are neither numerous enough nor perfectly reliable in regard 

 to readily quantifiable factors, such as age, dates, etc., no attempt 

 v^dll be made to "decorate" this work with pseudo-statistics. 



Psychoanalytic theory interprets suicide in two ways. The more 

 recent trend is to view suicide as the ultimate implementation of a 

 primary instinctual self-aggression, which can, in theory, exist even 

 in the absence of any frustration whatsoever (Freud, 1922; Men- 

 ninger, 1938). True or false as this theory may be — and there are 

 reasons to assume it to be false (Fenichel, 1953) — it is simply not 

 usable in anthropological discourse, since it places the ultimate 

 motivation of suicide wholly outside the scope of culture. The anthro- 

 pologist who accepts tliis theory could, at most, discuss only the socio- 

 psychological factors responsible for the disinhihition of this alleged 

 "instinct." By contrast, the earlier psychoanalytic theory of suicide 

 (Freud, 1930*^), which postulates the sequence; libidinal needs — 

 frustration — aggression directed at an external object — frustration or 

 inhibition of this aggression — aggression directed toward oneself, does 

 give a wide scope to anthropological interpretations of the real moti- 

 vation of suicide. While this fact does not necessarily prove the false- 

 ness of the anthropologically unexploitable "primary death instinct" 

 theory, the anthropologist can defend his preference for the earlier 

 theory on satisfactory heuristic grounds. Moreover, true or false 

 though it may be, the primary death instinct theory has no Imown use 

 even in clinical psychoanalysis, since it stops a priori all attempts to 

 interpret the patient's "basic" self -aggression (Devereux, 1953 a). 



^ For additional comments see "Suicide and Cultural Change" below (pp. 314-326). 

 *» Originally published in 1905. 



