The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

by Milton Rokeach

  It should be clear from the preceding account that the research with the three delusional Christs evolved as a result of a theoretical concern, not with psychopathology as such, but with the general nature of systems of belief and the conditions under which they can be modified. Because it is not feasible to study such phenomena with normal people, it seemed reasonable to focus on delusional systems of belief in the hope that, in subjecting them to strain, there would be little to lose and, hopefully, a great deal to gain. At the same time, it should not be overlooked that we do not as yet have much understanding of the nature of psychotic systems of belief, or the conditions leading to their formation, organization, development, or modification; nor, for that matter, of normal systems of belief. The problem has thus far been largely ignored by experimentally-minded social psychologists, undoubtedly because of its tremendous complexity. Instead, present theory and research has typically focused on the problem of single beliefs and attitudes and the conditions under which they change; these beliefs and attitudes, moreover, have by and large been of the kind we have here called peripheral or inconsequential and typically involve short-range changes.[14]

  Because theory and knowledge in this field are so limited, all that could reasonably be stated in advance was that bringing together several persons who claimed the same identity would provide as untenable a human situation as is conceivable, and that in a controlled environment wherein escape was not possible, something would have to give. If delusional primitive beliefs are violated, will this lead to other changes in beliefs? to a return to reality? to even greater retreats from reality? If the original reasons for the psychotic state continue to exist, could the pressures lead to the adoption of other false, rather than true, identities? The study of what would have to give, and in what sequence, should at the least prove of scientific interest and possibly lead to advances in the treatment of the mentally ill.

  Two Earlier Reports on Confrontation

  Two brief accounts have been found of what happens when two people who claim the same identity meet. The first is told by Voltaire in his Commentary to Cesare Beccaria’s Essay on Crimes and Punishment. The story concerns Simon Morin, who was 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; and having made known his penitence to the magistrates of the town, obtained, unfortunately for himself, a release from confinement.

  Some time afterwards he relapsed into his former state of derangement, and began to dogmatize.[15]

  The second is told by the psychoanalyst Robert Lindner in his well-known case history, The Jet-Propelled Couch. This story concerns a psychotic physicist named Kirk who goes off on imaginary trips to outer space and visits other planets. Lindner decides to play along with Kirk’s delusional system of belief and justifies this in the following passage:

  ...It is impossible for two objects to occupy the same place at the same time. It is as if a delusion such as Kirk’s has room in it only for one person at one time, as if a psychotic structure, too, is rigidly circumscribed as to “living space.” When, as in this case, another person invades the delusion, the original occupant finds himself literally forced to give way.

  This fantastic situation can also be represented by imagining an encounter between two victims of, let us say, the Napoleonic delusion. The conviction of each that he is the real Napoleon must be called into question by the presence of the other, and it is not unusual for one to surrender, in whole or in part, when such a confrontation occurs. Some years ago I observed exactly this while on the staff of a psychiatric sanitarium in Maryland. At that time we had a middleaged paranoid woman who clung to the delusion that she was Mary, Mother of God. It happened that we admitted another patient with the same delusion some months after the first had been received. Both were rather mild-mannered people, both Catholics, both from a similar socio-economic level. On the lawn one day, happily in the presence of another staff member and myself, the two deluded women met and began to exchange confidences. Before long each revealed to the other her “secret” identity. What followed was most instructive. The first, our “oldest” patient, received the information with visible perturbation and an immediate reaction of startle. “Why you can’t be, my dear,” she said, “you must be crazy. I am the Mother of God.” The new patient regarded her companion sorrowfully and, in a voice resonant with pity, said, “I’m afraid it’s you who are mixed up; I am Mary.” There followed a brief but polite argument which I was restrained from interfering with by my older and more experienced colleague, who bade me merely to listen and observe. After a while the argument ceased, and there followed a long silence during which the antagonists inspected each other warily. Finally, the “older” patient beckoned to the doctor standing with me.

  “Dr. S.,” she asked, “what was the name of our Blessed Mary’s Mother?”

  “I think it was Anne,” he replied.

  At once, this patient turned to the other, her face glowing and her eyes shining. “If you’re Mary,” she declared, “I must be Anne, your mother.” And the two women embraced.

  As a postscript to this story, it should be recorded that the woman who surrendered her Mother of God delusion thereafter responded rapidly to treatment and was soon discharged.[16]

  Both accounts suggest a confrontation leading to recovery. In Simon Morin’s case, the recovery was short-lived. In that of the Mother of God, we are not told what happened to her subsequently, whether she too “relapsed into a former state of derangement.” Both cases are quoted above in their entirety, and in neither are there any details about the process, sequence, or scope of change either in the delusional system of belief or in behavior.

  Through the good offices of Dr. Vernon Stehman, Deputy Director of the Department of Mental Health in Michigan, inquiries were sent in the fall of 1958 to five hospitals for the mentally ill within the state. The objective was to locate two or more patients who believed delusively that they were the same person. The replies revealed that of the 25,000 or so mental patients in the state hospitals of Michigan there were only a handful with delusional identities. There were no Napoleons or Caesars, no Khrushchevs or Eisenhowers. Two people claimed to be members of the Ford family, but not the same person. We located one Tom Mix, one Cinderella, a member of the Morgan family, a Mrs. God, and an assortment of lesser known personages.

  About half a dozen or so patients were reported to believe that they were Christ, but closer investigation revealed that some of them did not consistently evince this delusion, and that some were suffering from obvious organic damage. From the records it appeared that only three who were free of organic damage did consistently believe they were Christ. Two of them were at Ypsilanti State Hospital, the third at another. The latter was transferred to Ypsilanti, and all three were shortly thereafter assigned to the same ward. All this, of course, was the result of the cordial cooperation of the psychiatric staff at Ypsilanti State Hospital, all of whose members shared my hope that the research we were about to engage in might lead to results of considerable scientific importance and, furthermore, to significant improvements in the mental state of the three patients.

  Ypsilanti State Hospital is located nine miles southeast of Ann Arbor and about seventy-five miles southeast of East Lansing. It was opened in 1931 with a bed capacity of 1,000; its present capacity is 4,100. Its personnel number 975; of them, five are staff psychiatrists and about twenty are resident psychiatrists. Despite such an unfavorable ratio of staff psychiatrists to pati
ents, the staff at Ypsilanti State Hospital is typically engaged in a large variety of therapeutic programs and research projects designed to advance the theory and practice of psychotherapy with the mentally ill.

  [1]For a discussion of earlier research on the theory and measurement of systems of belief, see Milton Rokeach: The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Basic Books; 1960).

  [2]Erik H. Erikson: “Identity and the Life Cycle,” Psychological Issues, Vol. I, Monograph 1 (1959), p. 23.

  [3]I am suggesting that ego identity in Erikson’s sense depends not only on trust in parents but also on trust in the dependability of the physical world.

  [4]Helen Merrell Lynd: On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace; 1958), pp. 45–7.

  [5]I employ the concept of authority in the same way social psychologists employ the concept of reference persons or reference groups—any source outside the self to whom the person looks for information about facts or norms to guide his actions. The concepts of reference person and reference group have received increasing attention in recent years, and the research presented in Part Two of this work is intended as a contribution to the literature on this subject. See: H. H. Hyman: “The Psychology of Status,” Archives of Psychology, Vol. XV (1942); R. K. Merton and Alice S. Kitt: “Reference Groups,” in L. A. Coser and B. Rosenberg (Eds.): Sociological Theory (New York: Macmillan; 1957), pp. 264–72; T. M. Newcomb: Social Psychology (New York: Dryden; 1950); M. Sherif: “Reference Groups in Human Relations,” in L. A. Coser and B. Rosenberg (Eds.): Sociological Theory (New York: Macmillan; 1957), pp. 258–63; T. Shibutani: “Reference Groups as Perspectives,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 60 (1955), pp. 562–9; R. H. Turner: “Role-Taking, Role Standpoint, and Reference-Group Behavior,” in L. A. Coser and B. Rosenberg (Eds.): Sociological Theory (New York: Macmillan; 1957), pp. 272–90.

  [6]Erikson, however, uses the term ideology to refer to unconscious tendencies that underlie religious, political, and scientific thought. His conception of ideology seems to be closer to our conception of primitive beliefs and beliefs about authority. See Erik H. Erikson: Young Man Luther (New York: Norton; 1958), p. 22.

  [7]It may be suggested that what Erikson calls group identity develops through beliefs about authority and peripheral beliefs; ego identity develops through primitive beliefs.

  [8]Lynd: op. cit., pp. 14–15.

  [9]O. S. S. Assessment Staff: Assessment of Men (New York: Rinehart; 1948).

  [10]Solomon E. Asch: Social Psychology (New York: Prentice-Hall; 1952).

  [11] Robert J. Lifton: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (New York: Norton; 1961); Edgar H. Shein: “The Chinese Indoctrination Program for Prisoners of War,” Psychiatry, Vol. II (1956), pp. 149–72; Nathan Leites and Elsa Bernant: Ritual of Liquidation (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press; 1954); Arthur Koestler: Darkness At Noon (New York: Macmillan; 1941).

  [12]Lifton: op. cit., p. 68.

  [13]Lifton: op. cit., p. 467.

  [14] The literature on attitude change is too voluminous to cite here. Recent theory and research on attitude organization and change can be found in Leon Festinger: A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, Illinois: Row, Peterson: 1957); Fritz Heider: The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (New York: Wiley; 1958); Daniel Katz and Ezra Stotland: “A Preliminary Statement to a Theory of Attitude Structure and Change,” in S. Koch (Ed.): Psychology: A Study of Science, Vol. III (New York: McGraw-Hill; 1959); C. E. Osgood, G. J. Suci, and P. H. Tannenbaum: The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press; 1957); Helen Peak, Barbara Muney, and Margaret Clay: “Opposites Structures, Defenses, and Attitudes,” in Psychological Monographs, Whole No. 495, (1960); Milton J. Rosenberg, et al.: Attitude Organization and Change (New Haven: Yale University Press; 1960); M. B. Smith, J. S. Bruner, and R. W. White: Opinions and Personality (New York: Wiley; 1956).

  [15]Cesare Beccaria-Bonesana: An Essay on Crimes and Punishment. With Commentary by M. D. Voltaire (Stanford, California: Academic Reprints; 1953), pp. 187–8. (A facsimile reprint of the American edition of 1819, translated from the French by Edward D. Ingraham. Philadelphia: P. H. Nicklin; 1819.)

  [16]R. Lindner: The Fifty-Minute Hour (New York: Bantam; 1958), pp. 193–4.

  CHAPTER II

  WHO THEY WERE

  Clyde Benson

  CLYDE’S FATHER, a farmer and carpenter by trade, was a hardworking, successful, respected member of a rural community in western Michigan. His family and acquaintances described him as a man of good disposition, who was, however, “severe” and given to losing his temper. Clyde’s mother, according to reports, was fretful, worrisome, ambitious, and hard-working, too. She was deeply religious and read the Bible every day. Both she and her husband belonged to a small Protestant Fundamentalist church and both were teetotalers. Mrs. Benson had been in poor health for a long time. Clyde was born after she had been married for six years and had suffered several miscarriages. It is, therefore, not surprising that Clyde was overprotected from the day of his birth, nor that throughout his life he maintained a childlike dependence on his parents. He was, however, closer to his mother than to his father and he complained bitterly that his sister, two years younger than he, was his father’s pet.

  Clyde married at twenty-four. His wife, Shirley, was the daughter of a prosperous farmer. For the first ten years of their marriage, the couple lived with Clyde’s parents; for the next five they lived on a rented farm three miles away. Thereafter, with his father-in-law’s help, Clyde bought a farm of his own. Since the father-in-law was divorced, he moved in with the younger couple and Clyde worked both his own farm and Shirley’s father’s.

  Shirley died following an abortion, eighteen years after the couple were married. Clyde, then forty-two, was left with three daughters. In the next year, a whole string of misfortunes assailed him.

  Within four months, his father died, of a liver condition, at the age of seventy. Shortly thereafter, Shirley’s father died. Next, Clyde’s oldest daughter married and moved away. Then his mother, also in her seventies, died—case records state that she had become a morphine addict. By this time, Clyde had begun to drink heavily.

  When Shirley died, Clyde tried to persuade his oldest daughter to put off her marriage and keep house for him and the two younger girls. She refused, and for a year and a half he had to depend on his two younger daughters to keep house for him.

  Then, in 1934, Clyde married again. The two girls went to live with their maternal grandmother, and Clyde moved to the farm of his new wife, Alma. At the time of their marriage, Alma had two teen-age children of her own and was pregnant with Clyde’s child. The couple had known each other from childhood, and it was Alma who had courted Clyde. She came to visit him often after Shirley died and, as she too was a heavy drinker, the two of them frequently went out drinking together.

  By the time Clyde remarried he had acquired quite a bit of property. In addition to his own and Alma’s farms, he had inherited a half share in his father’s and all of his father-in-law’s. He was angry that his father had left his younger sister the other half share, and he saw this as further proof that his father always did more for her than for him.

  According to Clyde’s second daughter, he was a devoted father, who often played with the children. She feels that he never really grew up. He seemed unable to make decisions on his own, and always sought the advice of his parents, wife, and father-in-law. She remembers from childhood that Clyde once left home with two other men to ride the freights westward, where he had heard that there was a great deal of money to be made in little time. This would not have been surprising if Clyde had been very young, she commented, but he was then thirty-three years old. After having been gone for six weeks, he came home broke.

  The daughter further says that Clyde was moody and had an uncontrollable temper, but that, fortunately, both his mother and his first wife had been able to handle him. Shirley, according to her daughter, was stronger than Clyde. “My mother ba
bied him and treated him as his own mother did. But she loved him and the marriage was happy.”

  After his marriage to Alma, Clyde continued to drink heavily. “I have to drink to drown my sorrows,” he said. Within seven years there were two more girls and a boy, but money and land had been literally squandered away. Alma says that he drank so heavily he had to sell his stock and even his furniture to get money for liquor. Once he had raised the necessary cash he would go off for three or four days at a time, leaving the stock untended. When the money finally ran out, Clyde left Alma and the three children, and took a cheap room in town.

  Because of his excessive drinking, Alma was separated from Clyde in 1940 and divorced him in 1941. She took a job as a farm laborer to support herself and the three children. In 1942, Clyde was sent to jail for drunkenness. There he became violent. He tore up the bedding, ripped off his clothes, and, standing at the jail window in the nude, tried to break it. Then he began to rant, praying one minute and cursing the next. He claimed to be God and Christ and said he heard Shirley’s voice from an airplane. Moreover, he said he was King of Heaven, reborn through Shirley, the Queen of Heaven. The religious character of his delusions was surprising to his family, since Clyde had never been a particularly religious man. It was after this episode that he was committed to a mental hospital.

  The only previous sign of instability that Clyde showed was ten years earlier, shortly after Shirley died. At that time, he is reported to have walked into a grocery store, where an acquaintance of his, Charlie, was standing at the counter. When the clerk asked Clyde what he wanted, he said he would take everything Charlie was taking. Just to see if Clyde meant what he said, Charlie ordered a superfluous amount. Clyde did take all the groceries and left.