376 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



(Lewin, 1950).^^ This interpretation is indispensable for an under- 

 standing of the process whereby the person who wishes to become a 

 victim manipulates others into destroying him. 



The wish to be killed is implemented on two levels : the psychologi- 

 cal level and the cultural one. 



The urge to live is a very basic and universal impulse. Hence, any 

 intrapsychic urge or motive powerful enough to overcome it must be 

 potent indeed and must, moreover, bring about an affective state or 

 mood which is quite abnormal. In fact, the wish to die is, of neces- 

 sity, so ego-alien, that it is often first projected upon the outer world, 

 so as to enable the depressed person to experience it as external to liis 

 self. This, in turn, implies that in every real suicide there occurs a 

 so-called "splitting of the ego," one part of the ego becoming the killer 

 and the other part the victim. The depressed person who seeks to 

 become the victim of a killer manages to avoid this destructively anx- 

 iety-arousing splitting of the ego by maintaining his psychic unity 

 (as a victim) and by maneuvering another person into the role of the 

 killer. This process is exceptionally obvious in the case of 

 Sahaykwisa : (Case 105) . 



So extreme a form of behavior cannot occur without a correspond- 

 ingly atypical psychic state, which enables the prospective victim to 

 drift to his doom with an almost somnambulistically assured goal- 

 directedness. This psychic state appears to have been sufficiently com- 

 mon in early, semitribal Anglo-Saxon — and perhaps also other Indo- 

 European — societies to have brought into being the concept of being 

 "fey," which Webster's "New Collegiate Dictionary" defines as 

 "having the air of one under a doom or spell" ; a definition which fails 

 to stress, however, that the "fey" person is usually aware of his doom 

 and more or less accepts it.^^ Now, this term is perfectly applicable 

 to the behavior of the two deer (Kroeber, 1948) who go to meet Moun- 

 tain Lion, their "maker," and slayer. The two deer seem to live only 

 from one moment to the next, without a shadow of a purpose other 

 than to meet their slayer at the appointed place and time. Their be- 

 havior is so nearly somnambulistic ("under a spell") that the entire 

 atmosphere of this mythical episode borders on the uncanny, because 



"The arousing of pleasurable (and often markedly eroticized) anxiety Is an Important 

 form of "entertainment." It Is present in dangerous sports, big game hunting, listening 

 to ghost stories, gambling for disastrously high stakes — like the mythical Mohave per- 

 sonage whose gambling stake was his own body (Kroeber, 1048) — etc. Likewise, In 

 seeking to "clean up" the shocking story of Pelops, who was killed and cooked by his 

 father and was partly eaten by the mother-goddess Demeter, Pindar (First Olympian Ode) 

 simply transposed the story from the oral-cannibalistic to the oedipal-homosexual level. 

 He asserted that Pelops was not eaten by a mother-goddess, but was abducted by a 

 father-god Poseidon, who had fallen in love with the handsome boy. In "cleaning up" 

 this story — at least by Greek standards — Pindar simply succeeded in stressing even more 

 clearly the erotic thrill which the child derives from Its passive submission to parental 

 "aggression" (Devereux, 1953 c). 



** The manic counterpart of feyness is the conviction that one Is a man of destiny, who 

 cannot fail. 



