422 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



the father for the mother's love and becomes masculine in her interests and 

 deportment. 



Sahaykwisa :'s life history illustrates this defensive maneuver to perfection. 

 In order to allay her anxieties, she became an almost ideal "husband," and was 

 therefore able to compete with men and to win at least three wives. Yet, even 

 though the Mohave institutionalize transvestitism (Devereux, 1937 b), she was 

 not rewarded either for being a good provider or for being "one of the boys." " 

 This, of course, is the characteristic self-defeatingness of neurotic defenses, which 

 also makes it extremely unlikely that she would have been able to maintain 

 indefinitely her precarious p.sychic balance, even if Haq'au had not assaulted 

 her. 



Given her unrewarded attempts to be a real man, it is easy to see why she 

 should have wished to bewitch a woman she had not been able to hold in the 

 first place, so as to reaflirm her maleness by capturing her for life in the other 

 world. There is, thus, a certain tragic but inescapable grotesqueness in the 

 fact that it was at this precise moment that Haq'au proved to her, once and for 

 all, that she was a woman and not a man. It is, moreover, reasonably certain 

 that she, herself, made it — "accidentally on purpose" — possible for Haq'au to at- 

 tack her at the precise moment when she tried to take away his wife a second time. 

 Indeed, since she knew that Haq'au had openly threatened to assault her, it is 

 hard to escape the conclusion that she chose to hang around his camp, not only 

 for the purpose of bewitching her ex-wife, but also in order to expose herself to 

 the very type of assault which she both craved and dreaded all her life. More- 

 over, she competed with a man for that man's wife for a second time — just as 

 the little girl, after having successfully monopolized the mother during her 

 nursing period, may, as her lesbian tendencies develop, once more — this time 

 fruitlessly — enter into competition with her father. Otherwise stated, for a 

 neurotic like Sahaykwisa : the whole assault episode was an almost perfect 

 gratification of her infantile oedipal wishes and fears, which she had 

 warded off all her life by being a female transvestite. The fact that she man- 

 aged to have her oedipal wishes gratified by means of an act of violence, rather 

 than through seduction is, likewise, a necessary psychological component of the 

 total occurrence, since it enabled her to pretend to herself that she was not 

 "really" responsible for the occurrence." The legitimacy of this last inference 

 will be demonstrated further below, by means of an analysis of Sahaykwisa :'s 

 subsequent alcoholism. The last point to be made at this juncture is that it 

 was psychologically necessary for Sahaykwisa : to subject herself to violence, 

 since that is precisely the small girl's conception of the oedipal act. 



Having once experienced that which she desired and dreaded all her life, 

 without being destroyed by it, Sahaykwisa :'s earlier defense (lesbianism) be- 

 came automatically obsolete.'^ Her first experience of heterosexuality — even 

 though she managed to make it appear as an "unprovoked" assault — permanently 

 undermined her transvestite defense against her femininity and its oedipal 

 components — something which her earlier prostitution to whites was unable 



" Compare the ridiculing of her sexual adequacy, the humbling of her "masculine" 

 pride precisely when women fought for her, her futile attempts to boast In a masculine 

 way, which resulted In her being called a kamalo :y (= promiscuous woman), etc. 



1* Similarly, one reason why one can "do" in dream deeds one dares not do In a waking 

 state is that one feels much less responsible for one's dreams than for one's actions 

 (Freud, 1943; Devereux, 1951 a). 



IS A discussion of the way In which defenses become ol>solete will be found in part 2, 

 pages 54-56. It should also be noted that some neurotics can change over to entirely new 

 sets of symptoms either as a result of some important traumatic occurrence, or else in the 

 course of psychotherapy. 



