304 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



stitute for a healthy amount of assertiveness. The French nobility of 

 1789 mounted the steps of the guillotine without showing fear, but 

 lacked the basic self-assertiveness to fight for its survival sword in 

 hand— perhaps because it had lost faith in the legitimateness of the 

 system that had created it and supported it. This phenomenon may, 

 conceivably, be responsible also for the sudden and puzzling decline of 

 Greece, and especially of Athens, after the Peloponnesian War, and 

 for the revival of mysticism — i.e., for the whole complex phenomenon 

 which Murray (1955) called "the loss of nerve" of Greek society and 

 which he was unable to explain even to his own satisfaction.^^ 



The Mohave were a strongly self-assertive group in aboriginal times, 

 though they were neither habitual predators nor sportive fighters view- 

 ing war as a highly ritualized and exceptionally risky game. In this 

 respect their aggressivity was normal and had genuine survival value 

 (Stewart, 1947 c; Dobyns, 1957). 



On the other hand the tribe also included certain hyperaggressive 

 individuals, animated by hostility rather than by anger ; by the simple 

 urge to destroy rather than by the wish to assert themselves. All of 

 their exceptionally aggressive witches and great braves (kwanami:- 

 hye) appear to have shown marked depressive features. Thus, accord- 

 ing to Kroeber (1925 a), shamans said that they did not wish to live 

 long, while braves declared that they would not live long. Moreover, 

 the destructive potential of both these social types was ultimately de- 

 rived from certain power-given dreams, which were supposedly first 

 experienced in utero. Now, it is quite obvious that an aggressivity 

 that is rooted in so schizoid a fantasy is, of necessity, an ambivalent 

 a.nd complex one. This may explain why the Mohave state one minute 

 that shamans are like braves and then, in the next breath, contemptu- 

 ously describe them as "cowards at heart." Such complex forms of 

 sheer hateful destructiveness, rooted as they are in schizoid processes, 

 cannot indefinitely be directed toward the outer world. In the long 

 run they are bound to elicit guilt feeling — which healthy self-asser- 

 tiveness does not do to the same extent — and to be deflected from the 

 outer world to the self. This finding fully agrees with the observation 

 that practically all types of suicide involve either persons who still 

 have a culturally predicated awareness of prenatal existence, which 

 simply means that they have — or are alleged to have — fantasies of 

 intrauterine regression, pathognomonic of schizoid processes in the 



Ki On the historical stage one pathognomonic characteristic of this "loss of nerve" Is the 

 tendency to let someone else do one's fighting : mercenaries, professional soldiers, hired 

 allies, and bribed barbarians. 



