A third factor of importance is a study of their myths. These are the savage's day dreams. The relation between myths and dreams is well known, both having their roots in the unconscious thinking of the race. In the individual this unconscious mental process produces dreams, in the race and society, myths. Only one instance will be cited, the legend of the Yahgan Indians concerning the creation of the first man and woman. When one of the tribe was asked how the first human being came into the world, he replied that a long time ago the first man came down from the sky on a rope and later, the woman followed. Here is a striking instance of how an adult Indian had applied his knowledge of individual births literally to a cosmic process, a genuine creation myth as a form of symbolic thinking. There seems little doubt in this case, that the sky, which to all savages appears like a bowl, represented the uterus and the rope, the umbilical cord. The resemblance of this myth to certain birth and parturition dreams, as encountered in the psychoanalytic investigations of civilized adults, is certainly striking.
How is this mass of material to be interpreted? The mental traits of these people, as shown by an analysis of their taboos, myths and dreams, are very primitive in organization, in fact, according to Mr. Furlong, they represent the most primitive types of culture in the world and are today actually living in the Stone Age. Individuals of such primitive mental traits have not learned to successfully repress their emotions and hence are liable to sudden emotional outbursts. Substitution and repression in civilized races are utilized to cover our complex and multifarious ways of expressing our social wishes and wants. In the savage there is little or no repression and substitution, because his desires are simple and easily satisfied.
These primitive people therefore resemble children, without inhibitions or repressions and hence their attacks of violence and furor as above described are sudden emotional reactions, perhaps hysterical, but without any phenomena of conversion. The relation of the attacks to an unsatisfied sexual craving is shown by the fact that the attacks occur only in young men whose libido remains unsatisfied, because according to tribal custom they are compelled to marry old women, or, in the words of the explorer who lived among these people, "old derelicts." This factor, combined with the observation that the victims of the attacks are free from loss of consciousness and amnesia and the absence of an absolute evidence pointing to foaming at the mouth or biting of the tongue, would seem to indicate that the outburst was hysterical rather than epileptic in nature. It would thus correspond to the Piblokto of the Eskimos as described by Brill. This resemblance was also noted by the explorer in his comparative description of the two disorders.
It seems that the attacks themselves are motivated, not so much by the actual gross sexual as by an ungratified or only partially gratified love which would occur in a man who is compelled by social and tribal custom to marry an old woman. Among the Eskimos this factor is at work in the women, among the Fuegians in the men. Conversion phenomena were absent, because their mental organization is very simple, in the same way that childhood hysteria is free from conversion symptoms or at the most is monosymptomatic.
REFERENCES
A. Brill—Piblokto or Hysteria among Peary's Eskimos. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 40 No. 8—1913.
S. Freud—Totem und Tabu—1913.
E. Kraepelin—Vergleichende Psychiatrie. Centralblatt f. Nervenheilk. U.
Psychiatrie. Bd. XV. July, 1904.