374 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



(7) The heart of a bewitched person, unless seized and drowned in 

 time by the witch, turns into a kind of owl which calls the witch 

 "father" (pt. 7, pp. 387-426) .^'^ 



These data, and especially the fact that the victim of witchcraft 

 calls his killer "father," suggests that Mountain Lion is called the 

 "maker" of the two deer whom he kills, precisely because he hills them. 

 This interpretation is strongly supported by the Mohave belief that 

 a shaman can cure because he can kill, and vice versa of course. Thus, 

 it seems legitimate to conclude that the person who commits vicarious 

 suicide unconsciously equates his slayer with his parent (s). 



The 'psychological roots of the par ent= enemy equation. — It is 

 hardly necessary to stress that no emotionally mature and balanced 

 person equates his kind parents with his enemies, at least on the 

 conscious level. This psychic equation must therefore be rooted in 

 early childhood fantasies, which disturbed persons, such as suicidal 

 individuals, never quite give up and from which they derive their 

 own symptomatic fantasies and imageries. 



The chief point to be stressed is that the infant is neither neurally 

 nor mtellectually developed to the point of being fully reality-oriented, 

 and is therefore unable to classify the various components of reality 

 in terms of their objective and inherent characteristics. Instead, it 

 classifies the various parts of reality in terms of its reactions to 

 reality, i.e., in terms of its own passing, uninhibited, and vehement 

 subjective moods. Hence, the child does not and cannot realize that 

 the mother who nurses him one minute and the next minute frustrates 

 him is actually one and the same person all the time. He cannot 

 realize this because he intensely loves the gratifying mother and sees 

 her as a kind of all-bountiful Earth-Mother, but bitterly hates the 

 frustrating mother, whom in his hatred and despair he visualizes 

 as a kind of monster. In brief, the small child sees the mother alter- 

 natingly as Dr. Jekyll and as Mr. Hyde, though — being both vaguely 

 aware of and very much confused by the fact that these two, emotion- 

 ally incompatible, persons form a single continuum in time — he craves 

 the love, or least the presence and the attentions, of the "evil" mother 

 quite as much as he craves that of the "good" mother 



A great deal of further neural and intellectual development must 

 take place before the child is capable of perceiving that the different 

 modes of behavior exhibited by the mother do not impair or destroy 

 her continuity and self-identity in the time dimension, even though 

 he, himself, alternatingly experiences her as gratifying and worthy 

 of love, or else as frustrating and loathsome. In brief, a certain degree 

 of organic maturation must occur before the child can cease to classify 

 outer reality solely in terms of its own reactions to it ; before it learns 



" Needless to say, there are also beliefs concerning the murderous Impulses of children 

 toward their parents. Thus, Matavllye was bewitched by his own daughter, etc. 



