Devereux] AIOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 305 



psyche. The "you will be sorry-' attitucle,^^ that is markedly character- 

 istic of several types of Mohave suicide, also shows the extent to which 

 the psychic attitude of the suicide approximates certain typically re- 

 gressive and infantile patterns. 



Thus, it suffices to stress that several types of suicide known to 

 the Mohave are committed by genuinely or supposedly hyperhostile 

 and schizoid (or autistically infantile) persons, who need almost no 

 reasonable provocation to become suicidal. In this context the term 

 "reasonable" denotes types of provocation or injury — such as neglect, 

 nagging, unjust accusations of witchcraft, bereavement, etc. — which 

 the Mohave themselves define as bona fide traumata. While the Mo- 

 have do not approve of suicide even for "good" reasons, they consider a 

 person who does kill himself as a result of such traumata as weak, but 

 not as a violator of the code of Mohave ethics. By contrast, the child 

 who refuses to be born and wishes to kill its mother during parturi- 

 tion, the weaned child who begrudges another Mohave the chance of 

 being bom, the shaman who caps a career of destructiveness with vi- 

 carious self-destruction, etc., do violate the basic Mohave code. The 

 basic difference between suicides who are inherently suicidal, and those 

 who become suicidal as a result of some truly traumatic occurrence 

 thus seems to correspond to a difference between abnormally destruc- 

 tive and hostile persons on the one hand, and more or less normally 

 self-assertive and aggressive individuals on the other hand. In psy- 

 chiatric terminology, the former group's psychic makeup includes a 

 basic, inherent self -destructive element, while the latter group's 

 suicidalness is reactive, i.e., due to situational factors. Needless to 

 say, in making this statement — which seems to reflect the implicit 

 ideas of the Mohave fairly well — we ignore the fact that it is the 

 adult Mohave who imputes to the stillborn child, the weaned infant, 

 and the very young twin a culturally objectionable hatefulness and 

 meanness. Whether or not this imputation has a basis in reality will 

 be answered in the negative by the classical psychoanalyst and in the 

 affirmative by followers of Melanie Klein, who view the child's psyche 

 as a kind of self-perpetuating nightmare. What does matter is that, 



62 The "you will be sorry" type of masochistic self -destructiveness Is well known in 

 psychiatry and psychoanalysis. A characteristic childish reaction is : "It serves my parents 

 right If I freeze my hands playing with snow! Why didn't they buy me mittens?" The 

 deliberate attempt to make oneself appear "pitiable," in order to induce the supernatural 

 beings to show compassion was, Interestingly enough, extremelj' pronounced among certain 

 very warlike Plains Indians. The youth setting out to obtain a vision dressed himself in 

 rags and was ostentatiously rejected by his family, so as to appear pitiable. A Crow orator, 

 inciting his tribe to make war upon the foe, spoke of the fierce and often victorious Crow 

 nation as a pitiable people, imposed upon by a ruthless enemy, mourning the sad lot of 

 Crows taken prisoners by the enemy and therefore deserving compassion (Lewie, 1935). 

 Psychologically such self-pity is closely related to the "you'll be sorry" or "you must be 

 sorry" attitude, which has markedly aggressive components (Devereux, 1951 a, Kuble and 

 Israel, 1955). 



