Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 501 



medicine was prepared to tolerate, let alone encourage, the metho- 

 dologically scientific but substantively psychological study and inter- 

 pretation of mental disease. 



In the end, this long see-sawing led to an irrevocable cleavage 

 between the grotesquely unpsychological exponents of the doctrine of 

 "man the machine," and the grotesquely supernaturalistic advocates of 

 theological theories of mental illness, with a few eccentrics like Mes- 

 mer walking the tightrope above the chasm gaping between the two. 



As is so often the case when things come to this pass, the struggle 

 between these two seemingly irreconcilable points of view finally 

 brought about a unification of the two philosophies on a level of 

 abstraction higher than that of either of the two competing theories. 



The supernaturalists preserved, in the teeth of the trend toward 

 rationalism and naturalism, a more or less psychological point of 

 view, and an awareness that there was some meaning and pattern 

 even in seemingly chaotic irrational behavior. The rationalists, 

 despite their grotesquely unpsychological organicism, contributed for 

 their part the conviction that mental disease had to be studied natural- 

 istically. Only after both points of view became crystallized could 

 Charcot and then Freud take the decisive step of dealing rationally 

 with the irrational. Substantively these two pioneers reached back 

 to the shaman, and methodologically to Hippocrates, discarding the 

 supernaturalistic commitments of the first and the organicistic ones 

 of the second school of thought. 



This was a considerable intellectual feat, since it cannot even be said 

 that the shaman and his spiritual descendants actually "discovered" 

 the unconscious, except in the sense in which some Ionian philosophers 

 "invented" the atom. Indeed, neither the unconscious nor the atom 

 were put to any scientific use for many centuries. Until recently 

 they simply accumulated dust in the musty cubicles of the kind of 

 philosophers whom Kabelais calls "abstractors of quintessence." 



In brief, the "psychiatric revolution" followed in every respect the 

 pattern of other scientific revolutions. The innovator took the factu- 

 ally sound data and partial insights of a "temple science," stripped 

 them of their mystical husk and dealt with them in a relatively culture- 

 free "naturalistic" manner (Devereux, 1957 a).^^ 



Summing up, Mohave psychiatry is characterized by : 



(1) An ability to tolerate and therefore to register observed clinical facts. 



(2) A readiness to empathize with the psychotic and therefore to impute a 

 (psychological) meaning to his behavior. 



(3) A formulation of this meaning in essentially supernaturalistic terms, in 

 accordance with the basic axioms of the Mohave culture pattern. 



" The preceding position implies that even though the acceptance or rejection of natural- 

 ism and logic may be a cultural phenomenon, logic and naturalism per se are, in the last 

 resort, culture-free, or at least culturally neutral phenomena, simply because two and two 

 are conceded by all groups to add up to four. 



