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The author is an anthropologist with understanding of psychoanalysis. He discusses the culture of the Yurok Indians of northwestern California. He notes a similarity between the dentalium shells (aboriginal money of the Yurok) and the telogetl, psychosomatic pains which are the primary manifestations of illness among them. Since the Yurok value things in terms of money, virtue is expected to result in wealth, and vice in these pains. The causes of the pains, recovered by the shaman, are fingerlike in shape and covered with blood and slime, suspiciously similar in appearance to the shell money. The author concludes that the shell money and the pains are respectively the positive and negative aspects of the introjected breast or penis. The symbolism is overdetermined by accretion of meaning from the other levels of psychosexual development. The culture seems to develop an anxious, compulsive, and highly ritualized society with a variable mixture of 'conversion hysteria', which is most pronounced among the shamans. The author finds the anal phase surprisingly unimportant in child rearing and in the adult character of the Yurok.