Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 421 



at least from the moment when she was raped, Sahaykwisa :'s ultimate tragedy 

 was a foregone conclusion, in that, with an almost somnambulistic assurance, 

 she unerringly gravitated toward death and destruction. Every one of her 

 attempts to extricate herself from her difficulties and to allay her anxieties 

 only involved her more and more irreversibly in the typical vicious circle, or 

 downward spiral, of psychiatric illness (Devereux, 1955 b). From the psychi- 

 atric point of view she was as truly "fey" — doomed to death — as the two deer 

 of Mohave mythology (Kroeber, 1948). 



One may be able to look beyond the grotesque features of this case history 

 if one compares Sahaykwisa :'s progress toward her doom to the manner in which 

 the heroes and heroines of Greek tragedy meet theirs. The harder these tragic 

 personages struggle against their character, which is also destiny," the deeper 

 they sink into the quicksand of their fate. Those who would challenge the 

 validity of this comparison would do well to remember that the greatest of 

 Greek tragedies deal with topics which are fundamentally quite as scabrous 

 as the incidents of Sahaykwisa :'s life. Only the greatness of the dramatic 

 poetry which these outrageous scandals inspired obscures the fact that Greek 

 tragic destinies have as their pivot such criminal or police-court matters as 

 incest and parricide (Sophocles: Oedipus trilogy), adultery, husband killing, 

 and matricide (Aeschylus: "Oresteia"), collective psychosis, orgiastic behavior, 

 murder of a kinsman, the devouring of human flesh torn from the living body 

 (Euripides: "Bacchae"), and the like. Were the heroes and heroines of these 

 great tragedies insignificant Mohave lesbian witches, instead of kings and 

 queens, and had great poetry not thrown its magical mantle over their locker- 

 room scandals, one would more readily apprehend that Sahaykwisa :'s fate is 

 the stuff of which Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides fashioned their master- 

 pieces," which, to this day, do, as Aristotle expressed it, purify men by filling 

 them with terror and pity. 



Perhaps the most extraordinary and theoretically also most enlightening fea- 

 ture of Sahaykwisa :'s destiny is the double inevitability of her doom, 

 which can be satisfactorily explained either in purely psychological terms, as 

 the inescapable consequence of her neurosis, or in purely cultural terms, as the 

 foreordained fate of a witch. What, in terms of her personality structure and 

 psychopathology, can be viewed as a neurotically self-destructive goal is, in 

 terms of the cultural frame of reference, a sociocultural mandate to commit 

 vicarious suicide. Both are inescapable, and both are equally satisfactory as 

 explanatory devices. In brief, Sahaykwisa :'s case is an almost classical illus- 

 tration of the principle (Devereux, 1945 a ; and pt. 7, pp. 378-382) that the socio- 

 cultural and the psychological explanations of a given act are perfectly comple- 

 mentary and lead to identical conclusions (Devereux, 1955 a). 



In view of the detailed discussion of the sociocultural dynamics of the vi- 

 carious suicide of Mohave witches, which is presented in the introductory sec- 

 tions of this chapter, the following comments will be limited to a scrutiny of 

 the neurotic elements which made Sahaykwisa :'s murder inevitable. 



Although neurosis — like every other psychic state or process — is overdeter- 

 mined, one of the main unconscious sources of female homosexuality is the de- 

 sire to escape an oedipal involvement with the father, which the gii-1 child de- 

 sires, but also dreads, because she imagines that its actual implementation 

 would physically destroy her. In order to escape this fate, and also in order 

 not to compete with her mothrr for her father's love, she competes instead with 



" A demonstration that the fate of Greek dramatists was a poetic allusion to character 

 structure was given elsewhere (Devereux, 1953 c). 



" The stimulus for Stendhal's immortal novel "The Red and the Black" was provided by 

 nothing more than a newspaper account of a cheap and tawdry murder, committed by an 

 Insignificant social climber. 



