Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 493 



a fortiori, an obstacle to insight into the patient's — and one's own — 

 unconscious. This matter will be discussed further in connection with 

 difficulties experienced by rationalistic psychiatrists in assigning an 

 internal meaning to the utterances and behavior of their patients. 



The imputation of "a" meaning. — The next problem confronting us 

 is the Mohave psychiatrist's startling ability not only to register what 

 he sees, but to grasp these data insightfully, i. e., empathically. This 

 implies, first and foremost, a willingness to assume that the seemingly 

 chaotic and meaningless symptoms, actions, and utterances of the 

 psychotic have — quite as much as the (supposedly) more intelligible 

 reactions of normals ^^ — an implicit or latent pattern, and are not 

 simply a chaotic jumble of reflexes, etc., in the sense, e. g., in which 

 some older students of dreams mentioned by Freud (1953) believed 

 anxiety dreams to be caused by indigestible foods. 



Now, it seems quite certain that the willingness to search for the 

 pattern and meaning of psychotic behavior presupposes an affirmation 

 of the normal man's kinship with the deviant, somewhat in the sense 

 of the classical exclamation : "There, but for the grace of God, go I." 

 It was an absolute refusal to recognize any kinship between man and 

 animal which led a well-known 18th-century French savant to say that 

 it was perfectly humane to kick an animal, since beasts did not "really" 

 experience pain, but simply behaved "as if" they did. As for the un- 

 willingness of normal man to admit his psychological kinship with the 

 psychotic, it is at least partly responsible for some of the more extreme 

 attempts to explain mental disorder exclusively in terms of such or- 

 ganic factors as defective genes, submicroscopic brain damage, or 

 radically altered bodily biochemistry. 



The first thing to be noted is that not only the Mohave "psychiatrist" 

 but even the Mohave layman is able to observe psychotic behavior ac- 

 curately, to sense its meaning and to empathize with it. This suggests 

 that Mohave culture itself helps the normal individual to understand 

 that — in a rather extreme way — his psychology is not altogether dif- 

 ferent from that of the psychotic. By contrast, few occidental laymen 

 are willing to realize that every person, no matter how normal he may 

 be, has a kind of "psychotic core," which finds expression, inter alia, 

 in his dreams, in which he thinks, experiences, and behaves exactly as 

 though he were a schizophrenic. In cat, making allowances for the 

 inevitable oversimplification inherent in all "pithy" axioms, one may 



" since the psychotic Is actually a "simplified" or "dedifferentiated" person, his behavior 

 Is actually more predictable than that of the normal, provided only that one uses the proper 

 frame of reference for understanding it (Devereux, 1951 h, 1952 b). 



