Devereuxl MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 499 



as a whole and the broad theoretical formulations of modern psychi- 

 atry are both due, first and foremost, to the fact that, even though 

 they did impute a psychological meaning to dreams and psychoses, 

 their basic orientation was, nonetheless, not a naturalistic-scientific 

 one. Thus, even though they did "psychologize the universe," thereby 

 causing many of their specificaUy 'psychiatric theories to seem highly 

 realistic, their fundamental methodological position was, nonetheless, 

 supernaturalistic. By contrast, the often grotesquely unpsychological 

 "psychiatric" theories of the Age of Enlightenment were, despite 

 their substantively erroneous content, scientific rather than super- 

 naturalistic. 



Now, it stands to reason that a sound dynamic psychiatry must, 

 on the substantive level, assign an implicit psychological meaning 

 to dreams and to abnormal behavior, and, on the methodological level, 

 must formulate this substantive meaning in scientific-naturalistic, 

 rather than in supernaturalistic, terms. The entire history of psy- 

 chiatry can, in fact, be viewed as a blind groping toward this objec- 

 tive. This developmental process is so interesting, and so important 

 for the proper understanding of the relationship between Mohave and 

 modem psychiatry, that it deserves at least a summary discussion. 



The development of modern psychiatry. — One need not be dedicated 

 to the shibboleth of unilinear evolution to view the history of psy- 

 chiatry as a gradual approximation of the objective of viewing the 

 (substantively) irrational in (methodologically) rational ways. This 

 problem is, in a limited sense, related to the mathematician's attempt 

 to evolve the calculus of probabilities, so as to cope with problems 

 where sheer technical difficulties make it necessary to deal with a 

 complex whole, rather than with all the individual components of 

 that whole. Now, even though, in this latter instance, the behavior 

 of the individual components is not irrational, but simply technically 

 hard to define, not until the 19th century did mathematicians suc- 

 ceed in evolving an effective calculus of probabilities and the science 

 of statistical mechanics. Little wonder, then, that the psychiatrist, 

 whose data are not simply too numerous to be managed comfortably, 

 but definitely pertain to the irrational, should have needed so much 

 time even to begin to master the problem of handling the irrational 

 rationally. 



Man's first attempt to understand the abnormal and irrational ap- 

 pears to have been both substantively and methodologically super- 

 naturalistic. In fact, it is permissible to suppose that, precisely 

 because supernaturalism can be both a substantive and a methodologi- 

 cal position, myth-making is still a fashionable psychiatric pursuit.^^ 

 Actually, little or nothing more can be said about the general charac- 



" Pew people are a8 conscious of this trend as was Freud, who openly referred to some 

 of his bpeciflcally metapayohological concepts as "our mythology." 



