Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 375 



that whereas the "good" breast, the tasty baby bottle, and the warming 

 sun are three different things, the nursing and gratifying mother and 

 the scolding and frustrating mother are one and the same person. 

 In brief, time must elapse and maturation must take place before the 

 segments of reality are classified in terms of their objective charac- 

 teristics, instead of solely in terms of the child's emotional reactions 

 ("good and gratifying" vs. "bad and frustrating") to them. 



There is perfectly conclusive psychiatric evidence that severely 

 disturbed children — and also many psychotic adults — can only love 

 their parents by clinging, on the one hand, to the illusion that they 

 are absolutely perfect, and, on the other hand, by projecting their 

 infantile image of the monstrous "bad" parent (s) upon some external 

 foe. This mechanism is often present in an almost undisguised form 

 in suicidal depressions and also in certain other severe psychic 

 derangements. 



In brief, formal Mohave beliefs which implicitly equate the 

 parent (s) with the enemy are, thus, nothing more than cultural phras- 

 ings of the psychologically archaic-infantile tendency to view one's 

 frustrating parents as threatening enemy monsters. 



Traditional cultural phrasings of these archaic-infantile attitudes 

 appear to possess considerable motivating force for depressed and sui- 

 cidal Mohave Indians, who seem to regress to an infantile psychic state 

 and to revive certain early infantile ways of experiencing or fantasy- 

 ing their parents as murderous monsters. 



The desire to he killed is, according to modern psychoanalytic find- 

 ings, closely related to the small child's efforts to blend into a unified 

 whole the image of the bad, monstrous, frustrating parent (s) and the 

 image of the inexhaustibly bountiful, loving, and gratifying parent (s) . 

 In seeking to develop a unified image of the parent (s) and a coherent 

 attitude toward this unified image, the small child — who deals with 

 problems by means of fantasies, rather than by means of logic — may 

 develop the idea that it will be devoured by its parent (s). This idea 

 is both thrilling and anxiety-arousing, since it reflects both the wish 

 to be cannibalized and the fear of being cannibalized. 



The fantasy of becoming the victim of one's parents is first formu- 

 lated in terms of cannibalism, since the voracious child appears to feel 

 that it is attaching its mother's beloved breast with its teeth, seeking 

 to cannibalize her and therefore expects her to retaliate in kind, ani- 

 mated by the same love-hate which he, himself, feels. There is incon- 

 trovertible evidence that this fantasy occurs among the Mohave, 

 who believe that future shamans are prone to bite the nipple 

 (Devereux, 1947 a), and who refuse to nurse snake-headed monsters, 

 because their bite is thought to be poisonous (pt. 6, pp. 257-259). 

 Gradually the idea of being eaten by the parent (s) becomes highly 

 pleasurable, without ever ceasing to arouse also a great deal of anxiety 



