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Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 497 



nature of this meaning — i.e., whether it is psychological, organic, 

 supernatural, etc. — and to select a methodological frame of reference 

 for its systematization, e.g., either in supernaturalistic or in natural- 

 istic terms. It is proposed to discuss first the substantive meaning 

 imputed by the Mohave to psychotic behavior. 



So far we have only shown that, in the very act of empathizing 

 with the psychiatric patient, the Mohave automatically assume that 

 his behavior has an implicit meaning. We now propose to show that 

 this meaning is, broadly speaking, felt to be psychological in nature, 

 even where the "pathogenic agent" is believed to be an exogenous one. 

 Indeed, it is implicit in Mohave belief that even though aliens, ghosts, 

 witches, etc., can trigger off mental disease, the actual psychosis is not 

 created or "injected" by these external forces, but is a product of the 

 reverberations and adjustments which the impact of these forces mo- 

 bilizes in the patient's psyche. There are countless references to this 

 process in the descriptive passages of this work. Health struggles 

 against sickness, good dreams cancel bad ones, victims of witchcraft 

 force themselves to reveal the name of the one who bewitched them, 

 dreamers visited by ghosts seek to resist the blandishments of their 

 deceased relatives, etc. Thus, in a very genuine sense, the Mohave 

 view mental disease as an essentially intrapsychic happening, even 

 though it is often set in motion by supposedly external forces or by 

 traumatic events. 



The next objective is to show that the Mohave Indians' theories of 

 psychopathology are greatly influenced by their experience of, 

 and culturally determined preoccupation with, dreams (Kroeber, 

 1925 a; Wallace, 1947; Devereux, 1956 c). We hasten to add, how- 

 ever, that even though dream theory is a good basis on which to build 

 a theory of psychopathology, we are not, for the moment, concerned 

 with the validity of the substantive meaning which the Mohave profess 

 to find in abnormal behavior. It suffices to stress that they do impute 

 "a" meaning to such behavior, and that this meaning is related to their 

 preoccupation with dreams. This can be done without specifying for 

 the moment whether their insights are valid or not. 



The Mohave — like aesculapian priestly healers and medieval theo- 

 logical experts on mental disease — took as their point of departure 

 certain objective observations and the assumption that these data had 

 "an" (unspecified) implicit meaning, and then proceeded to formu- 

 late this meaning in terms of traditional Mohave ''Hhought modeW'' 

 of a supernaturalistic type (Devereux, 1958 b). What saved 

 them from evolving a psychiatric system as unrealistic as that 

 of the Middle Ages was the fact that dreams were practically the basis 

 of their generalized "thought model." This specific interest obliged 

 them to derive their "theory of the universe" from the psychodynam- 

 ics of dreams, instead of deriving a theory of dreams from a "theory 



