Devereuxl MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 529 



tion), is the marriage of cousins, between whom sexual relations are 

 ordinarily taboo (pt. 7, pp. 356-371). It should also be stressed 

 that, in at least one pathogenic dream (Case 47), the food provided 

 by the deceased relative was the dead mother's own body — and this 

 detail was actually a part of the manifest content of the pathogenic 

 dream itself. Since clinical evidence concerning fantasies of devour- 

 ing the mother indicates that the cannibalized maternal body is 

 but an extension of tlie maternal breast, which is, in turn, simply an 

 expanded symbol of maternal milk, ingested by the infant, one must 

 conclude that the seductive food offered by the ghosts of deceased 

 relatives is actually the mother's milk. Since it was previously 

 pointed out that the Mohave equate milk (and semen as well, which 

 is the food of the fetus, Devereux, 1949 c) with alcohol, the psycho- 

 analyst at least will feel that alcohol (symbolically syncretized with 

 milk and explicitly correlated with incest) does seem to be a part 

 of the latent content of certain important and culturally emphasized 

 types of Mohave dreams. 



Further, psychoanalytically convincing, evidence bearing on this 

 point is the marked proneness of the Mohave to "pass out" after 

 drinking too much, since some psychoanalysts have cogently compared 

 this type of "passing out" to the satiated suckling's sleep. 



Other relevant cultural traits bearing on this problem are the 

 Mohave taboo on playing erotically with a woman's breast, because 

 such an act is reminiscent of incest, and the Mohave woman's tend- 

 ency to ridicule a man by showing him her breasts, thereby explicitly 

 reducing him to the status of an immature suckling (Devereux, 

 1947 a). 



Despite these findings, it must be admitted that there is at least 

 one relevant area of Mohave culture which is relatively non-integrated 

 with alcohol. This segment of culture includes Mohave beliefs con- 

 cerning magic substances and narcotics (pt. 4, pp. 202-212). As is 

 well known, in many cultures alcohol is explicitly defined as a magic 

 substance and alcoholic intoxication is viewed as more or less similar 

 to a ritual trance state. Yet, even though the Mohave did occasion- 

 ally exploit the narcotic properties of a decoction of datura for 

 quasi-oracular purposes, they make no such use of alcoholic intoxica- 

 tion, probably because, by the time alcohol began to gain a real foot- 

 hold in Mohave society, the ritual ingestion of datura was already 

 largely obsolete. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the one shaman 

 who actually committed suicide (Case 106) did so by first drinking 

 datura and then drowning himself (suicide by means of a combination 

 of two ingested fluids), while at least one non-shaman killed himself 

 while more or less intoxicated (Case 120). 



Actually, it seems desirable to indicate, though in the most tenta- 

 tive manner, that there appears to be at least one, ever so faint, con- 



