Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 503 



It is certainly not suggested, e. g., that the concept "nyevedhi: 

 taha :na" is about to replace the concept of psychogenic depression, or 

 that psychoanalysts are about to interpret psychogenic convulsion 

 exactly the way the Mohave explain atcoo :r hanyienk. On the other 

 hand certain suggestive ideas, such as the Mohave notion that an in- 

 hibited ability or ego function can cause quite as much psychic damage 

 as the repression of instincts, may well deserve systematic study 

 (Devereux, 1956 a). 



The relevance of Mohave psychiatry for the theoretical 'psychia- 

 trist. — It is proposed to show that Mohave psychiatric thought not 

 only contains substantive ideas which merit attention, but may actually 

 help train the theoretician in the art of "thinking through" familiar 

 problems in unfamiliar ways. This task is far from simple and the 

 difficulty of shifting one's frame of reference may well be partly re- 

 sponsible for the abysmal naivete of much factually sound work, e. g., 

 in the field of culture and personality studies (Devereux, 1957 c). 



Major advances in science invariably presuppose changes in the 

 frame of reference. This, in turn, causes a genuine psychic wrench, 

 since men are wedded to their habitual frame of reference by almost 

 unbreakable psychic bonds. Thus, E. T. Bell (1937) pointed out that 

 even though Henri Poincare — whom his peers called the prince of 

 mathematicians — had at his fingertips all the data, tecliniques, and 

 genius needed for the formulation of the theoi-y of relativity, by the 

 time he accumulated, or personally created, that knowledge he had 

 grown old thinking in terms of a Newtonian universe. Hence, he was 

 simply too accustomed to thinking in Newtonian terms to change his 

 frame of reference overnight. By contrast, Einstein was able to 

 divorce himself from the Newtonian system and evolve his own, be- 

 cause he was still young enough to have made no permanent commit- 

 ment to any existing system. Other data also support this view. 

 Thus, a Harvard University report stated that the student working 

 in rapidly changing sciences, such as physics, gets his doctor of philos- 

 ophy degree several years earlier than does the student in more staid 

 fields. The same report, and other sources as well, also stress that, 

 unlike, e. g., humanistic or social science luminaries, physicists make 

 most of their great and truly innovating discoveries early in their 

 careers, i. e., before they become intellectually committed to any par- 

 ticular system in a science in which the replacement rate of systems is, 

 at present, quite high. 



These considerations suggest the need for practice in periodically 

 rethinking one's data in terms of unfamiliar frames of reference, if 

 only in order to preserve a useful degree of intellectual flexibility. 

 Since in the relatively slowly changing humanistic and behavioral 

 sciences truly new frames of reference are few and far between, it 

 is conceivable that a useful degree of intellectual flexibility may also 



