The Three Christs Of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study (1981) - Plot & Excerpts
In 1959, Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist working at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, brought together three patients who each firmly believed he was Jesus Christ. Rokeach says, “Initially, my main purpose in bringing them together was to explore the processes by which their delusional systems of belief and their behavior might change if they were confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”His study was inspired in part on an account set out by Voltaire in which a man, Simon Morin, believing he was Christ ran into another man proclaiming to be Christ. Simon exclaimed that the other must be crazy and, realizing what this meant, was cured of his delusion for a time (though he was eventually burned at the stake). As he introduces the study, Rokeach says, “This is the only study on which I have ever worked that has aroused the interest of children.” I must say, it’s easy to see why. This is a fascinating look into the minds of three disturbed men.The three patients are not referred to by their real names, though the book is so well written that these names, as simple as they are, are permanently part of my literary consciousness.Clyde Benson was the oldest. At 70, he had been hospitalized for 17 years after suffering from a series of tragedies in a short period of time that took from him his parents and his wife (in a botched abortion). Rokeach makes the case that Mr. Benson was never really his own man, that since childhood he had allowed others to make decisions for him, and the strain of losing these authorities in his life was too much. In this book, Mr. Benson is easily forgotten. He’s always sitting there during the meetings, but he rarely speaks, or if he does it is mostly gibberish. Perhaps because of this, Rokeach rarely has the book focus on him, though he does have some good lines, like this one:Late at night. All fifteen patients in the dorm are in their beds, but there is a great deal of restlessness because one of the patients is snoring loudly. Finally one of the patients, exasperated, yells: “Jesus Christ! Quit that snoring.” Whereupon Clyde, rearing up in his bed, replies: “That wasn’t me who was snoring. It was him!”Joseph Cassel was 58 and had been hospitalized for nearly 20 years. A timid man, he grew up with a strict father (who called him Josephine) in a french-speaking household in Canada. Perhaps as a response to the fact that he was not allowed to bring anything “English” into the home, Joseph, besides considering himself Jesus Christ, also considers himself a patriot of England, who protects him and whom he protects. One of the strangest accounts in the study is one when, in peril of losing his beloved placebos, Joseph still will not say that the hospital is not an English stronghold. He doesn’t even have to believe this to keep his placebos; he need only pretend — to lie. He won’t do it. Interestingly, Rokeach notes that had he lied, it would have been a sign of improvement.The youngest was Leon Gabor, at 38, who had been hospitalized for five years already. Leon was raised by a super-religious mother who, by all evidence, was severely psychotic herself. She instilled in Leon a profound sense of sexual guilt that he struggles with through the entire book, particularly since he is probably gay. Leon receives a great deal of attention throughout the book. He’s vocal and causes the most conflicts. It also seems he is the smartest, or, at least, he is the only one of the men who doesn’t simply deny the others’ claims but tries to reconcile everything. Rokeach seems particularly hopeful that Leon can be helped.So Clyde, Joseph, and Leon are brought together. They sleep in adjacent beds, eat in the same room, have the same work duties, and hold meetings each day. The meetings take up a large part of the book as we watch these men interact with each other, sometimes with a great deal of tension and sometimes with what can almost be brotherly love — I say “almost” because even though the relationship gives them some contact they desperately desire, they also desperately want to hold on to their beliefs and fret each time they are challenged.Remarkably, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is not clinical in tone. Indeed, Rokeach has a great sense of tone, understatement, and timing, that one would think he was also a great novelist. These men are brought to life before our eyes, and we feel their pain and feel compassion towards them. Some parts are funny (like the “squelch eye” incident), and many are incredibly sad.Yes, it’s very sad, and we can credit Rokeach for helping us feel these emotions through his highly skilled presentation. However, we can also blame him for being the source of some of the more terrible passage. This is a deeply troubling book. In his afterword, written twenty years later, Rokeach doesn’t apologize for his experiment, but he admits that, in a way, there were four men who thought they were god — the three patients and himself, the psychologist who, albeit in the pursuit of knowledge and in the hopes of helping the men, played with their lives.In the introduction, Rokeach explains that while the initial plan was to see what happened when these men were brought together, “[s]ubsequently, a second purpose emerged: an exploration of the processes by which systems of belief and behavior might be changed through messages purporting to come from significant authorities who existed only in the imaginations of the delusional Christs.” Fully hoping to help these men out, constantly scrutinizing ethical concerns, Rokeach assumes writes letters to Joseph and Leon pretending to be authority figures from their delusions. For example, Joseph rejects his real father (to an extent — he calls him Josephine after all) and has taken to calling the head of Ypsilanti “dad.” With permission from “dad,” Rokeach begins writing to Joseph, asking him to do certain things, hoping that because of his trust in this authority figure, Joseph will begin to changes some of his delusions. This failed, as shown above when Joseph simply would not disclaim that the hospital was an English stronghold.But even more heart-breaking and cruel were Rokeach’s letters to Leon in which Rokeach assumed the guise of Leon’s non-existent wife. Though never married, Leon often buttressed his claims to godliness by giving details about fictional women in his life, many of whom were gods in their own right and who became his wife. But does Leon actually believe in these women? And what if he received a letter from one? Here is his response to the first:Leon’s initial response is disbelief. Without divulging the contents of the letter, he tells the aide that although he has never seen his wife’s handwriting he knows that she didn’t write or sign this letter. He says further that he doesn’t like the idea of people imposing on his beliefs and that he is going to look into this.A couple of hours later, during the daily meeting, we notice Leon is extremely depressed and we ask him why. He evasively replies that he is meditating, but he does not mention the letter. This is the first time, as far as we know, that he has ever kept information from us.August 4. This is the day Leon’s wife is supposed to visit him. He goes outdoors shortly before the appointed hour and does not return until it is well past.So, yes, both Leon and Joseph believe in the delusions they have constructed, and in assuming these authorities’ voices, Rokeach, in a way, assumes the role of a god in the lives of these troubled men.As I said above, the book is hardly clinical in its tone. It does not read like a study at all but rather like a deeply felt narrative of the troubles of these three men who came together for a time in Ypsilanti State Hospital. I highly recommend it.
Milton Rokeach was a psychologist whose main interest was that of identity - he wondered how we develop one, and what makes us who we are. Something as basic as an identity is hard to study in an ethical fashion, as it is indeed one of the baselines of what makes all of us human.In order to try and get to the root of what is and isn't important in the formation of identity, Rokeach hit upon the idea of confronting people with what should be the most disturbing thing they could imagine - someone else claiming the same identity. He did this in the early 60s in Michigan, where, in the course of an experiment, he brought together three inmates of mental institutions who all claimed that they were Jesus Christ, and, by extension, God.The three Christs of Ypsilanti (Ypsilanti is the name of the institution where the three inmates were housed), is the result of just over two years of studying these three men. The premise of the experiment was relatively simple - house the three men in the same ward, have them work together, and bring them together in daily meetings - initially guided by Rokeach and his assistants, but later to be run entirely by the inmates themselves.The book takes the form of an extended research report, with reports of what is done to the patients, and their reactions. Initially, as one might expect, there is quite a bit of conflict between the three. This develops in some unexpected ways (from Rokeach's point of view). It seemed that, even in their delusional state, each of the three patients, to a greater or lesser extent, wishes to avoid conflict and "get along". They each had different tactics to get to a happier state - "Clyde" (each patient is referred to exclusively by nom-de-plumes throughout the work) simply denies the existence of the other two, referring to them as re-animated corpses. "Joseph" points out that the other two patients are in a mental hospital, so obviously they are sick - and then justifies his own stay there. "Leon", the most interesting of the three inmates in the book, changes in much bigger ways. He actually does change his identity - not, as Rokeach hoped might happen by recovering his "true" identity, but by humiliating himself with the name "Righteous Idealed Dung", and by trading his current "wife", the Virgin Mary, to a "wife" who is a Yeti.As Rokeach points out and the reader can glean, Leon has reacted to being confronted by other Christs by changing his delusional world system to fit - he continues to do this as the books progresses. As Rokeach realises the initial confrontation is not going to help the men in any way, he then tries a different tack - of using positive role models for the men in an attempt to get them to change their behaviour. He does this by the method of writing the inmates letters, purporting to be from these positive role models. In Leon's case, the letters come from his "Yeti wife". Initially Leon does react to the letters in a positive way, doing the things that his "wife" asks of him. However, as these requests become harder for him to perform (i.e. they ask him to do things more and more against his belief system), he separates himself from his "Yeti-wife", finally discarding her altogether in another change to his delusional world-system.Joseph is written to by the head of Ypsilanti hospital, whom he sees as his father. While he too changes some of his behaviours at the suggestion of the letters, he also baulks at anything that would make him confront his situation too nearly. So, this experiment also ended in a failure to improve the state of the patients.The truth of the matter is that Rokeach's work was always probably going to be unlikely to help any of the patients, and it was done really for his benefit, rather than theirs. The further into the book one reads, the more uncomfortable one gets with the ethics of the whole enterprise, particularly when the experiment ends after two years, and the patients are essentially dropped. In this edition of the work there is a postscript written by Rokeach in the 1980s in which he calls himself the "fourth Christ", and comes to a (belated) understanding that what he did was wrong in many ways.None of that makes the book any less fascinating to read - the long verbatim quotes from the patients do give a real insight into what it might mean to be "mad" - their occasional forays into the "real" world all the more poignant for what they say when deep in their delusions.While the experiments themselves may have ended in failure, the book that came out of them is much more that what it might be.Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
What do You think about The Three Christs Of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study (1981)?
The author, a social psychologist, brings together three schizophrenic men who believe they are Christ (Clyde, a 70 year old farmer; Joseph, a 50 year old failed writer; and Leon, a 30 year old man who had a psychotic, controlling mother). Through daily meetings and certain questionably ethical experiments, Rokeach tries to see what will happen when men are presented with the impossible idea that two people share the exact same identity, and whether they can thus move closer to a realistic view of the world. All three develop delusional reasons to explain away the discrepancy (the other two are dead; the other two are machines; the other two are patients in a psychiatric hospital). Although two of them improve socially, there is no change in their delusional states.It’s a fascinating, rather sad book: reading the nonsensical litany of paranoid ravings they spout in the transcripts of the interviews just shows how sad schizophrenia is, and how unlike identity delusion is in movies and television. There are few bizarre, too-good-to-be-true bits of amusement and amazement. For example, one man in the dorm is snoring, and another patient yells, “Jesus! Stop snoring!’ Whereupon Clyde yells, “I’m not doing it, he is!” Or the time that Joseph says he is God but also governor of Illinois, because “I have to earn my living, you know.” But overall it’s a bit numbing, to peer so deeply into minds so clouded with paranoia and delusion. There is a very clear-eyed and perspicacious epilogue written by Rokeach twenty years after the study, in which he suggests that he is the fourth deluded ‘Christ,’ trying to play God with the patients. I must agree, but his intentions were good, even if nothing much came of the experiment.
—Ensiform
Three schizophrenics—Clyde, Joseph, and Leon—are brought together in a Michigan state mental institution in 1959 (before the onset of the devastating 'deinstitutionalization' that Rick Moody laments in his introduction). Each one believes he is God, in some manifestation: either originary or reincarnated. Not a god among gods, but the one true authoritative God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, albeit with the baroque and often unintelligible embellishments of the psychotic mind. Clinical psychologist Milton Rokeach and his assistants undertake a unique speculative 'treatment'—to bring these mutually incompatible identities into conflict with one another in carefully controlled meetings and pointed discussions. The hope is that the tension yielded from these encounters will inspire some (admittedly crude and only preliminary) insight into these patients' own delusions. Of course, the project is ultimately a failure in the rigorous sense. (This is not exactly a spoiler—since over fifty years later schizophrenia is still very much with us.) But The Three Christs of Ypsilanti remains relevant and important to this day not necessarily with respect to its stated clinical purpose, but rather in the many questions and related concerns that it raises along the way. What consititutes human identity? Why does identity appear to have reached a crisis state in modern times? How does a psychologist successfully manage the problematic ethics of provoking a schizophrenic in the attempt to improve his condition? Do psychotics truly believe in their delusions to the same extent that non-psychotics believe in the world around them? How can psychological treatment ever hope to 'reach' a schizophrenic when, by definition, he is suspicious of reality and rejects all real-world authorities? The questions are numerous, the answers are few and far between, but the process is thought-provoking. Leon, the youngest of the schizophrenics, is particularly captivating; unlike the other two Christs, his psychosis hasn't advanced to a stage where he completely neglects rational considerations. He still attempts to arrange his delusions in an internally-consistent fashion and often displays remarkable insight into what Rokeach and his assistants are trying to do to the three Christs. As such, he is the only one of three who undergoes profound changes during the experiment—although these changes don't necessarily point to a perceivable improvement in his condition. Yes, the riddle of schizophrenia continues...
—David
This book was just sad. Researcher in personality disorders brings together three (mostly older) men who share the same delusion -- that they are Jesus Christ. I started my legal career working with the mentally ill, so while I'm no expert, much of the behavior and medical description was very familiar. One thing that comes shining through this text is just the intractability of mental illness. These patients cannot be "fixed". While the researcher certainly did not intend his experiments to be cruel, in fact, he was doing his best to help the patients, many of the experiments tried did just strike me as cruel. One patient had an imaginary wife. The researcher sent letters from the imaginary wife; all supportive in tone. The letters just seemed to cause the patient psychic grief, and eventually resulted in the creation of new/different imaginary friends and the elimination of the imaginary wife. The book also caused me to give some thought to what exactly are we to do with the mentally ill? There are virtually no traditional residential mental hospitals in the state of Michigan anymore. The mentally ill are expected to comply with outpatient treatment (and they can't), or they wind up in jail.
—Sarah
