Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 351 



(2) Tho culturally important phrasing of the :Mohave Indians' 

 awareness of the prevalence of twin mortality in aboriginal times is 

 their belief that twins are abnormally susceptible to both real and 

 imagined slights, and are therefore prone to "make themselves sick 

 and die." It is this belief which is to be analyzed in the present 

 chapter. 



The pivot of Mohave beliefs concerning the "suicide" of twms is 

 that all twins who plan to visit the earth know in advance that, until 

 they contract a marriage on earth, they are not fully committed to 

 human existence and can return to heaven any time they wish to do 

 so, simply by making themselves fatally ill, i.e., by committing psy- 

 chosomatic suicide. 



The suicidal impulses of twins may be aroused by a large variety 

 of events : 



(1) Twins in utero may suddenly reach the conclusion that a visit 

 to earth does not appeal to them, after all, and may therefore decide 

 to be stillborn (Case 86) . 



(2) After being born alive, the twins may simply decide that they 

 do not like the earth, or their family. This decision need not have a 

 rational basis, since the Mohave themselves say that twins sometimes 

 take an unreasonable dislike to an inoffensive person and avert their 

 faces whenever that person approaches them.^° 



(3) Twins who feel that they are not treated absolutely equally be- 

 come resentful, sicken and die. Their insistence on equal treatment 

 is so great that they must not only receive identical gifts and be dressed 

 alike (Devereux, 1941) , but must even paint their faces alike. If this 

 does not happen, at least one of the twins will sicken and die (Taylor 

 and Wallace, 1947). 



(4) The twins may feel that the treatment accorded to them is not 

 preferential and favorable enough. 



(5) Twins die if each person visiting them does not give both of 

 them equal presents, or, what is worse, gives them no present at all. 



(;6) Should the mother of twins become pregnant once more before 

 she had a chance to wean them, and should her twins happen to have a 

 "jealous disposition," they make themselves develop an unusually 

 virulent case of the "suicidal" tavaknyirk illness (pt. 7, pp. 340-348) 

 which, needless to say, is actually due to the fact that the milk of a 

 pregnant woman deteriorates quite rapidly and does not even suffice 

 to feed one child adequately. 



(7) Twins, one of whom is a boy and the other a girl, were spouses 

 in heaven and therefore sometimes quarrel, the way married couples 



10 Actually, it is psychologically quite possible that such "irrational dislikes" may be due 

 to the infants' extraordinary ability to sense a seemingly benevolent person's basic hostility 

 or ambivalence. This sensitivity is, of necessity, very great, since hypersensitivity and 

 hyper-reactivity are among the infant's most important homoostatic mechanisms (Devereux, 

 1951 e). 



