492 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



A recent summary of studies on the relationship between personality 

 structure and perception (Blake and Ramsey, 1951) shows that a 

 segment of objective reality which is, in principle, accessible to direct 

 observation by means of the senses, is often partially distorted and 

 sometimes even actually negated (repressed) by the percipient. The 

 history of science in general, and the history of psychiatry in particu- 

 lar, are likewise replete with instances in which supposedly trained 

 observers simply did not "register" something which was fully acces- 

 sible to their senses. 



The classical culture-historical instance was the absolute refusal of 

 occidental adults — including even scientists — to acknowledge in any 

 manner whatsoever the existence of infantile sexuality, and this de- 

 spite the fact that anyone who ever tended babies must have seen that 

 male infants had so-called "tension erections." Moreover, the edu- 

 cated person's absolute "ignorance" of infantile sexuality existed side 

 by side with his conscious awareness that peasant nursemaids mas- 

 turbate fretful babies, in order to quiet them — a practice also obtain- 

 ing, e.g., among the Navaho (Leighton and Kluckhohn, 1947; Bailey, 

 1950). The attitude that something which should not exist, should 

 be ignored, was adhered to even by psychiatrists. It was, I believe, 

 Ferenczi who reported that when an inmate of the principal Hun- 

 garian mental hospital tried to discuss his masturbation problems with 

 the chief psychiatrist, the latter severely reprimanded him for men- 

 tioning such obscenities. 



It is hardly necessary to argue that such a psychic scotoma — i. e., 

 the tendency to notice only that which one can tolerate psychologi- 

 cally — is due to repression and to other defense mechanisms. In fact, 

 the ultimate purpose of the training analyses of future psychoanalysts 

 is precisely to render them capable of tolerating — and of being ob- 

 jective about — the "shocking" material which their future patients 

 will inevitably produce in the course of their therapeutic analyses 

 (Devereux, 1956 a). 



Tlie real problem which confronts us in this connection is, there- 

 fore, the ]\Iohave "psychiatrist's" startling ability to notice what is 

 before his eyes, and to remember it correctly. This ability is not a 

 monopoly of the Mohave Indian. Indeed, Eoheim (1933) rightly 

 stressed that the primitive's superego is, in many ways, less pervasive 

 than ours. Hence, where the manifestations of the instincts and the 

 "logic of the emotions and of the unconscious" ("primaiy process") 

 are concerned, he is bound to have fewer "blind spots" than the pre- 

 Freudian psychiatrist. In fact, a fear of the "primary process" and 

 of dereism is, itself, a cause of some distortions of perception, and, 



