528 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuU. 175 



2. A rigorous proof of the thesis that alcohol and drinking are 

 fully integrated with the psychic life of the Mohave Indian must 

 satisfy several criteria. Specifically, it must be shown: 



(a) That alcohol and drinking occur in the dreams of drinkers 

 and nondrinkers alike, as part of the manifest content of dreams. 



(b) That alcohol and drinking are susceptible of being utilized 

 as "thought tokens" both by the primary and by the secondary psychic 

 process. In particular, they must be susceptible of being utilized 

 as symbols on a par with, and as fully equivalent substitutes for, 

 standard aboriginal symbols. 



(c) That alcohol and drinking are coordinated with existing sym- 

 bolic equations; i.e., that they are susceptible of being added, as new 

 terms, to existing symbolic equations. 



(d) That alcohol and drinking are, in turn, susceptible of being 

 represented by aboriginal symbols — i.e., they must sometimes be part 

 of the latent content of dreams, and, conversely, 



(e) That alcohol and drinking serve as symbols in dreams express- 

 ing both aboriginal types of conflicts and conflicts resulting from 

 acculturation. 



Only one configuration pertaining to items h,c,d, and e can be cited, 

 and this configuration is, unfortunately, a rather elusive one, which 

 ■u^ll seem convincing to psychoanalysts, but may not satisfy a very 

 conservative anthropologist. The Mohave believe that the ghosts of 

 the deceased resort to one of two devices for luring their surviving 

 relatives to the land of the dead. The first device is (incestuous) 

 cohabitation with the surviving relatives in dream. The second is the 

 feeding of the survivors in dream, i.e., the providing of oral gratifi- 

 cations. This belief, which explicitly equates the lure of incestuous 

 relations with the lure of oral gratifications provided by relatives, 

 is psychologically identical with Tcatc's and Harav He : ya's tendency 

 to postulate an implicit nexus between incest and alcoholism. (See 

 further below.) Now as stated in the preceding pages, hetero- 

 sexual drinking is, in Mohave society, a common prelude to coitus, 

 and the role of coital connections in cementing emotional bonds is 

 explicitly recognized in the Mohave adage: "Do not interfere with 

 quarrelling spouses. If you take sides, they will sneak out at night 

 and cohabit with each other ; then you will have two enemies instead 

 of one" (Devereux, 1950 a). The same type of reasoning applies 

 even more strongly to incest, which the Mohave themselves link 

 with alcoholism. Indeed, incest is not only the acting out of an 

 atypically intense attachment to another member of one's family 

 (Devereux, 1939 a), but, in Mohave society, it so happens that the 

 only type of marriage which actually involves an authentic "wedding" 

 ritual, one defined as indissoluble and explicitly correlated with ideas 

 of death by (symbolic) suicide (motivated by an incestuous attrac- 



