Deveroux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 495 



Mohave and who, furthermore, experienced extreme psychic tur- 

 moil — bordering on a temporary psychosis — in his youth, he is, by 

 definition, unusually well qualified to observe, to describe, and to 

 understand the behavior of mentally deranged individuals.^^ 



Tlius, both the perceptiveness and the insight fulness of the Mohave 

 are directly related to the dream orientation of his culture and its 

 broadmindedness about sexual matters. The culturally determined 

 excessive preoccupation of shamans with dreams and their — also cul- 

 turally determined — transitory mental derangement in youth are, 

 in turn, responsible for the shaman's unusually great ability to ob- 

 serve and to understand neurotics and psychotics. In brief, instead 

 of having to suggest that there is something unusual — and, possibly 

 not culturally determined — about the Mohave Indian's "clinical" 

 acumen and capacity for empathy, it is actually clear that his "psy- 

 chiatric" awareness is a direct, and practically inevitable, consequence 

 of some of the most fundamental characteristics of Mohave culture. 

 This, in turn, furtlier supports the position taken elsewhere (Dev- 

 ereux, 1956 b) that psychiatric anthropology is not only "real" 

 anthropology, even in Kroeber's sense (1952), but is actually con- 

 cerned primarily with the concept of "Culture," and with some of the 

 major "bedrock" problems and aspects of every particular culture. 



Another, psychologically closely related but logically distinct, factor 

 in the Mohave Indian's willingness to impute a meaning to psychosis 

 is understandable in terms of Kroeber's (1952) suggestion that the 

 trend of culture is in the direction of greater realism, including, pre- 

 sumably, also rationality. Brief reference was already made to the 

 distinctive "logic of the unconscious" (primary process) by means 

 of which repressed urges and fantasies strive to express themselves. 

 Precisely because the emergence of such material is threatening to 

 the ego, the trend in the direction of greater rationality signifies, 

 in psychological terms, a progressive intensification of man's struggle 

 against his "primary processes," by means of an increasingly greater 

 overvaluation of, and allegiance to, the logical "secondary process." 

 This, in turn, deeply affects both his ability to perceive, and his 

 capacity to discover the meaning of psychotic behavior, which is 

 governed by the primary process. On the perceptual level the overly 

 or exclusively rationalistic observer can actually end up by noticing 

 only that which seems logical, because that is all he expects to see. 

 As a result, instead of becoming increasingly reality oriented, he 

 sometimes ends up by becoming incapable of observing that part of 



IE A psychoanalytic findiug may help clarify this last point. It Is well known that a 

 seemingly normal psychoanalytic candidate will, In the course of his training analysis, 

 develop at least a "transference neurosis." It Is suggested that this experience of being 

 personally neurotic may, Itself, appreciably help him later on to understand his neurotic 

 patients, again lu terms of the feeling : "There, but for the grace of God, go I." 



