NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
CLASSICS
THE THREE CHRISTS OF YPSILANTI
MILTON ROKEACH (1918–1988) was born in Hrubieszów, Poland, and at the age of seven moved with his family to Brooklyn. He received his BA from Brooklyn College in 1941. In the same year he began in the fledgling social psychology program at the University of California at Berkeley, but his studies were interrupted by a stint in the U.S. Army Air Forces Aviation Psychology Program. He returned to Berkeley in 1946 and received his PhD in 1947. Rokeach became a professor of psychology at Michigan State University and subsequently taught at the University of Western Ontario, Washington State University, and the University of Southern California. His famous psychological study The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964) has been made into a screenplay, a stage play, and two operas. His other major books are The Open and Closed Mind (1960), Beliefs, Attitudes, and Values (1968), and The Nature of Human Values (1973). Rokeach received the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in 1984 and the Harold Lasswell Award from the International Society of Political Psychology in 1988.
RICK MOODY was born in New York City in 1961. He is the author of five novels, three collections of stories, and a memoir, The Black Veil. His work has been widely anthologized. He has taught at Bennington College, SUNY Purchase, New York University, and the New School for Social Research. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
THE THREE CHRISTS OF YPSILANTI
A Psychological Study
MILTON ROKEACH
Introduction by
RICK MOODY
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Contents
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
THE THREE CHRISTS OF YPSILANTI
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE The Encounter
PART ONE
CHAPTER I The Problem of Identity
CHAPTER II Who They Were
CHAPTER III “That’s Your Belief, Sir”
CHAPTER IV Through the Looking Glass
CHAPTER V Days and Nights at Ypsilanti
CHAPTER VI The Rotating Chairmanship
CHAPTER VII Exit Dr. Rex
CHAPTER VIII R.I.D.
CHAPTER IX Protecting the Stronghold
CHAPTER X The Flora and Fauna Commission
PART TWO
CHAPTER XI The Problem of Authority
CHAPTER XII Enter Madame Dung
CHAPTER XIII Madame God Makes a Few Suggestions
CHAPTER XIV A Research Assistant Becomes God
CHAPTER XV The Lonely Duel
CHAPTER XVI Dad Makes a Few Suggestions
CHAPTER XVII The Loyalty Test
CHAPTER XVIII Reports to Nobody
PART THREE
CHAPTER XIX The Striving for Goodness and for Greatness
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
INDEX
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
THIS INTRODUCTION takes as its presupposition the idea that the treatment of chronic mental health problems in the United States of America is disgraceful. Insofar as there is a policy here, the policy dates back to 1955, give or take, the year in which the removal of mentally ill persons from state-run psychiatric facilities first commenced: a policy known as deinstitutionalization.
Deinstitutionalization wore a humane face, in theory. The majority of the publicly funded psychiatric hospitals had had their budgets crimped over the years by budget balancers and psychiatric nonbelievers. Deinstitutionalization was born in the belief (incorrect, as it turned out) that community-based mental health care would serve as an alternative. It would be cheaper, not to mention less stigmatized and incompetent, than institutional care. The government, it was imagined, didn’t belong in this business.
And yet, after half a century of deinstitutionalization, a process much expanded over the years and particularly favored under the administration of Ronald Reagan, the government now finds itself back in the mental health business, whether the public is aware of it or not, in that the jails and prisons of the nation, beloved of the tough-on-crime set, now house a significant and growing number of troubled persons who, in these state-sponsored settings, receive little or no treatment. Many other sufferers live on the streets of our cities. The police, agents of local government, regularly interact with these mentally ill persons, trying to get them into shelters and community-based mental health programs from which they are rapidly discharged, with the specifics of medication and treatment left to the ill themselves.
I could address this topic at great length, but if I did so, I would fail to introduce the book we have before us, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach, a powerful, strange, and paradoxical story from another time, the time before deinstitutionalization. The time when it was reasonable to house the mentally ill somewhere where they could be shielded, to a limited extent, from the more florid tendencies associated with their disabilities. The time when housing them, even if imperfectly, was considered a just use of the resources of the people because it made life easier for many of the ill, for their relatives, and for all of us, especially those in urban settings, who have since, however, become used to stepping over bodies.
Rokeach’s very simple proposal was to see what would happen if you assembled three men, each of whom believed that he and he alone was Christ himself, and had them keep company with one another. These men were long-term inpatients, and Rokeach wanted to see if this procedure would free them from a shared but perhaps incompatible illusion. At the time of Rokeach’s experiment, there was support for such an effort to formulate a new treatment option. Novel approaches to the treatment of the mentally ill appeared throughout much of the twentieth century, in the work of Freud, Jung, Laing, Reich, Lacan, Bateson, and others. Who is to say that these ideas were wrong, simply because they did not effect a full-scale remission of symptoms? The ideas were more radical than those of the psychiatric mainstream of the time, and so were the sources of the ideas.
Rokeach’s experiment was prompted in part by a text from Voltaire, on the subject of one Simon Morin, burned at the stake in 1663:
He was a deranged man, who believed that he saw visions; and even carried his folly so far as to imagine, that he was sent from God, and gave out that he was incorporated with Jesus Christ.
The parliament, very judiciously, condemned him to imprisonment in a mad-house. What is exceeding singular, there was, at that time, confined in the same mad-house, another crazy man who called himself the eternal father. Simon Morin was so struck with the folly of his companion, that his eyes were opened to the truth of his own condition. He appeared, for a time, to have recovered his right senses.
One of the splendid things about The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is that, drawing inspiration from literature, it takes on literary qualities itself, in that literature, first and last, aims for the meaningful description of consciousness, of personhood. Rokeach, a social psychologist rather than an MD, is above all interested in the forms personhood can take, and it is with considerable flair that he limns the dramatic and very moving narrative of his experiment.
The dialogue with literature conducted within The Three Christs of Ypsilanti lofts it into the company of such great psychological and medical case histories as Freud’s Dora: Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, A. R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World, Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.
These case histories introduce us to unmistakable human beings with genuin
ely human difficulties, and so does Rokeach’s. The three Christs are three great characters. Clyde Benson,[1] the eldest (and, it seems to me, the most ill of the three), is a small-scale farmer who ran into a great number of personal tragedies (including losing a wife to an abortion), and who succumbed to the pressure of his losses. His is the least engaged and most bluntly reactive of the voices here: “You’re a bullheaded fool,” or “I am God!,” or “I own the hospital.”[2] Then there is Joseph Cassel, from francophone Quebec, a would-be writer and (in all likelihood) repressed gay man in his fifties, who has endured a childhood of abuse and physical violence at the hands of his father, and whose speech, full of psychotic rambling, is also rather ornate and lovely in style:
Dear Dr. Yoder: I do so want to thank you for the nice letter, which you have forwarded to me. I do so wish to thank you, withal, for the .50 you have also sent to me! Thank you for praising me on my choicy perusal of literature.
Finally, there is Leon Gabor, the youngest, highest functioning, and most heartbreaking of the three, who has suffered greatly from the compulsive religiosity and social estrangement of a mother who was also probably psychotic. At the time of Rokeach’s study, Leon has been hospitalized just five years, the others much longer. Leon’s expostulations are prickly, engaged, morose, manipulative, hilarious, sad, and very, very human:
I have no use for money…. I don’t want a thing that don’t belong to me. I don’t deserve it…. Where thy treasure is, there is thy heart. If you are absorbed with engrams of thought that deal with money, you’re a stumbling block unto yourself in most instances—anxiety, worry comes with it after you obtain money, and your desire to have more money, and then your desire to have it protected—all these bring about something which is not helpful to the physical, mental, and spiritual.
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti unfolds over twenty-five months. Rokeach assembles his protagonists daily, at first with the intention of bringing about a collision of their “primitive beliefs,” in the hopes of shocking them into some kind of recognition of the truth, as in Voltaire’s story. This approach is central to Rokeach’s work as a scholar and psychologist, the notion that changes in belief can effect wholesale changes in self and in community (see his later work, The Nature of Human Values). In this case, however, Rokeach’s belief that he could somehow lastingly ameliorate chronic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia is nearly as unlikely as what Clyde, Joseph, and Leon believe themselves. And yet the sheer doggedness of his experiment, as documented and recorded here in painstaking and moving detail, does result in more subtle transformations, and these transformations are what make reading The Three Christs of Ypsilanti so compelling.
Rokeach brings forth from the shuttered interiors of institutionalized psychiatric care these three men and gives them an opportunity to talk to one another and to shine a little light on their circumstances. Talk they do, at length, and a sense of community grows among them, little disposed to it though they are and unlikely though it may be. The men begin to sing at their daily meetings (usually “America the Beautiful”), they begin to engage with one another, they even cooperate on a couple of creative projects, despite their erratic and tempestuous moods—as in this beautiful passage in which Rokeach, after describing the frictions between his charges, also describes some of the good that came about:
I would often walk into the recreation room to call the men together for their daily meeting. I rarely had to search for them among the hundred men—there they would be, physically close, Joseph at the end of the table, then Leon, and then Clyde, as if they needed one another’s companionship, as if they needed to cling to someone familiar.
Having said this—that there is an admirable compassion about Rokeach’s approach, and that this approach could only have been undertaken before deinstitutionalization had done its worst—it’s also true that Rokeach, in his wish to produce results, is very free in his intervention in the men’s lives, moving them forcibly from one ward to another, changing their circumstances, appointing them to periodic chairmanships over one another, even writing letters to them from characters selected from among their particular delusions, a level of psychic intrusion nearly as deliberate, and manipulative, as Lacan’s celebrated “short sessions” (in which an analyst would abruptly walk out on a patient after a very short interval, leaving him to wonder and to fret at his abandonment).
One of these interventions, described in one of the most arresting passages in the book, features the unmarried Leon, who comes to believe in a fictitious wife that Rokeach has invented for him and in whose name Rokeach has regularly been writing him letters.
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 that Leon is extremely depressed and we ask him why. He evasively replies that he is meditating, but he does not mention the letter [from his wife]. This is the first time, as far as we know, that he has ever kept information from us.
He’s depressed about the letters! And about the diminished opportunities for love in his long-term incarceration! What a surprise! And yet this passage is followed by one even more poignant: “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.” That is, Leon waits for his wife, a wife who doesn’t exist and who doesn’t materialize when she says she’s going to, and when no good comes of Leon’s desire for reunion with this wife, he withdraws further. A strange thing does occur in the process, however: Leon, under the siege of his imaginary wife,[3] stops responding to the divine sobriquets he has affected (the most frequent is Rex), and demands that he be called by the more earthy name of R.I. Dung. The reader acquainted with schizophrenia will likely construe this development as an expression of mitigated self-regard, played out in the symbolic realm, or perhaps a response to a “double bind” of the sort that Gregory Bateson imputes to schizophrenics. But there can be no doubt that, at least for a time, Leon no longer asserts himself as the son of God, or at least is willing to modify or suppress his belief for short-term gain: matrimonial society.
A 1981 afterword to a paperback edition of Three Christs finds Rokeach seriously reconsidering his intrusions into the men’s lives: “I now almost regret having written and published [the study] when I did.” Rokeach further casts himself as a fourth delusional Christ in the project, noting his “God-like” control of the lives of the men. This is a point well taken. While “almost regret” feels slightly withholding as regards the moral of the story here, Rokeach’s willingness to recast his views from a later vantage point is uncommonly graceful for a man of science:
… while I had failed to cure the three Christs of their delusions, they had succeeded in curing me of mine—of my God-like delusion that I could change them by omnipotently and omnisciently arranging and rearranging their daily lives within the framework of a “total institution.” I had terminated the project some two years after the initial confrontation when I came to realize—dimly at the time but increasingly more clearly as the years passed—that I really had no right … to play God and interfere around-the-clock with their daily lives. Also, I became increasingly uncomfortable about the ethics of such a confrontation.
This “almost regret” is keen enough that the author gives scant details of the later lives of the men—as if to allow them some much needed privacy. At last. The silence is respectful. And, it seems to me, penitential.
There’s an earnestness in Rokeach, both during and after the experiment—no matter his theoretical naïveté and ethical lapses. There’s an earnestness in any attempt to reach a schizophrenic on her or his own terms. Looking back from our moment in history, it’s hard not to feel that
Rokeach’s study validates the notion that schizophrenics are in distinct ways beyond help. But this is to miss the art of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, its nuances, its descriptive elegance. If literature were a treatment model, which it is after a fashion, another name for its modality would be: compassion. In this regard, we have to say that Rokeach’s endeavor, both in its original guise and when supplemented by his later reservations, is a success.
After two years and a month Rokeach’s experiment drew to a close—as it happens, just as deinstitutionalization began to accelerate throughout the nation. In the epoch that followed, our epoch, an experiment like Rokeach’s, featuring close experimental contact in a controlled hospital setting over the course of years, seems next to unthinkable. And yet it’s the new environment we live in that makes an enlightened perspective on Three Christs possible. And what would be the features of that enlightenment? Perhaps a regret about the “total institution,” as Rokeach has it, alongside an approval of compassionate, personal interaction with the ill. Because: refusal to reconceive of the institution in a humane form and refusal to care for the sick continues to leave schizophrenics at large, or in the shelters and jails of the nation. We have achieved liberty for schizophrenics and liberty does not always look so great.
In the original conclusion to Three Christs, in some of the most pas-sionate writing in the book, Rokeach describes the ultimate goal of his experiment: to help the men depicted therein to “transcend loneliness.” And maybe, after all, he did achieve this end for a time. And maybe this book, as a literary act, will help us along these lines, too, in its generosity and its quixotic ambition. That said, the last words of the introduction plausibly ought to belong to Joseph Cassel, the most exacting writer among the three Christs, who did on occasion describe carefully what he felt, and whose yearning for self-improvement in the experiments is palpable, even when mixed up with a lot of mumbo jumbo about espionage and life in merry old England. Here’s the envoi he wrote to Rokeach after the men’s meetings had come to an end:
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