“Watch your language!” Leon shouted back, and Clyde said: “He’s an educated doggone fool.”
“I’m not a bastard,” Leon asserted. “I have a foster father. He’s with me.”
“Adam is a white man, the first child of God,” Clyde said.
“I’ve got news for you,” Leon answered. “He happens to be my foster brother pertaining to his reincarnation, and whether you like it or not, it’s that way.”
Clyde, now livid and standing menacingly over Leon, shouted: “No! It’s not that way!”
“Will you kindly sit down,” Leon said, in a calm tone. “I said, will you kindly sit down and behave yourself!”
“You dirty dog!” Clyde shouted, and Leon countered: “You are a first-class ignoramus. Sit down before you are knocked down—and I’m not the one who’s going to do it, either. The righteous-idealed robot governor has more power than you or I. Will you kindly sit down!”
“I’ll call you anything!” Clyde said.
“I believe in truthful bullshit but I don’t care for your bullshit,” Leon said.
Clyde’s response was to hit him hard on the right cheek. Leon sat immobile, his hands folded in his lap, making not the slightest move to defend himself or to fight back. My assistant and I pulled Clyde away from Leon, and finally the two men calmed down and the discussion about Adam continued in much the same vein as before.
Several days later, we interviewed Leon alone and he stated accurately the issue over which Clyde had struck him. But in the meantime he had had some second thoughts. He now stated that although Adam had dark skin, he was not a Negro, and that he, Leon, therefore deserved what he got from Clyde. This was the first time we witnessed a change in one of Leon’s beliefs, and it is interesting to note the context within which it occurred. It followed from an act of physical aggression which apparently aroused enormous anxieties within Leon, and against which he was totally incapable of defending himself. I asked Leon how he felt when Clyde struck him and whether he had thought of striking back. Leon admitted that he was shaken and that most men would have “floored the guy.” He didn’t, Leon continued, because he is the weakest creature on earth and also because his uncle, Dr. George Bernard Brown, is in charge of the department that metes out justifiable punishment. Leon then went on to say that he didn’t deserve violence, that he himself had never struck anyone, and, finally, that he didn’t believe in violence.
We also interviewed Clyde about the incident. He too stated the issue accurately and explained his actions forcefully: “I just hit him on the chin. I had to cool him down. Then he starts talking straight. He talks better then.”
Other violent encounters took place outside the group meetings. One morning, for example, Joseph and Leon were each pushing a cart, Joseph in the lead. As Joseph rounded a turn in the tunnel at a fairly fast clip, he let go of the cart, which slammed against the wall and careened wildly.
“Watch your cart!” Leon shouted. “You … Bless you! You with the unsound mind!”
A few moments later the foreman, a hospital employee, came up and asked Joseph what had happened. “I just stopped my cart against the wall, that’s all.”
“Sir,” said Leon, “I believe what happened was—”
“Don’t listen to him!” Joseph interrupted. “He’s crazy!”
“You’re the crazy one!”
“You’re crazy,” Joseph yelled. “You’re a shit-ass! That’s what you are, a shit-ass!” Then he grabbed Leon by the coat lapels with both hands and slammed him hard against the laundry cart.
The men were immediately separated. Leon, his left hand drawn back in a loose fist, glared angrily at Joseph. Joseph was quickly removed by an aide, Leon shouting after him: “Begone, sir, or you’ll be dropped!” Joseph shouted back: “You’ve got the unsound mind!”
When interviewed later concerning the incident, Leon once again described it accurately. I asked him if he had felt like hitting back, and he replied, as he did before, that hitting back is not his department but his uncle’s. When I asked him why Joseph had hit him, he was able to explain that too. “It was two-thirds imposition and one-third bullheadedness,” Leon replied.
Joseph was interviewed next and he gave his version: “Rex started raising hell with me that I had no business to leave the truck there, so I jumped on him. I didn’t hit him. I just shook him. That man is sick. No joke! He says everything contrary. Nobody can talk to him.”
—You’re not getting along too well with Rex?—
“Negativism exasperates you. Clyde is better than Leon; he has stopped claiming he’s God so much. And you, Dr. Rokeach, give me a hand too. After Clyde talks, you ask me to say something and it gives me a chance for correction.”
—Are you getting stronger or weaker?—
“Stronger. That Rex, you gotta be careful with him. He says he’s God. I take it away from him. Why, a mind like this could turn the world upside down in no time!”
—Are you still laughing it off, or not?—
“I do something else. I stood up there and told him I was God.”
—Changing your tactics?—
“In a way, yeah.”
The final physical altercation occurred on August 17; this time the participants were Joseph and Clyde. It was initiated by a verbal exchange, concerning “false Jesus Christs and false gods,” which consisted mainly of childish threats, name-calling, and obscenities, such as: “You’re the biggest liar,” “You’re not going to burn me, you keep talking like that and I’m going to knock the shit out of you,” “I’m the boss,” “You never were,” etc. At one point Clyde lunged at Joseph and the two went into a clinch until they were separated. Leon took the scuffle in, sitting in his usual chair, not moving a muscle, his face and body immobile and passive, as if he were watching something from far away. Before long the quarrel flared up again.
“You’re just a lot of shit to me, that’s all!” Joseph shouted.
“You can’t say that word to me!” Clyde answered.
“I have my rights,” Joseph insisted.
“I own the hospital,” Clyde said.
“Just because you don’t want to work for the English cause.”
“Doggone right I don’t want to work for England,” Clyde asserted. “That would be foolish. You’re a bullheaded fool!”
“I’m speaking the truth!” Joseph shouted, and Clyde shouted back: “You’re the biggest liar!”
Now, for the first time, Leon spoke very quietly: “Duping can cause phenomena that are actually real to the person. I’ve had experience with it in this place.”
Strategies of Attack and Defense
During all the time we observed the three Christs, the only outbreaks of violence among them were those just described: the first between Clyde and Leon; the next between Joseph and Leon; and the last between Clyde and Joseph. The impression we gained was that all three men were extremely eager, following these outbreaks, to avoid further ones. This is not to say that there were not other quarrels, often bitter in tone. But they emerged despite the efforts of the three men to avoid them and they subsided quickly, without interference from us, once a certain level of intensity had been reached.
Of the three Christs, Clyde was the least in touch with social reality, the most primitive and childlike. His typical defense was what psychoanalysts would call denial; he repeatedly and consistently denied that the other two were alive. He lacked finesse and, when he felt himself menaced, could only resort to vague blustering threats, childish braggadocio, and authoritarian assertions of his power. “You’re going to listen to the truth. I’m the Jesus and you’re going to follow. I am the boss, and you better believe it. You serve me first!” At the meetings he participated least in the discussions. He reminded us of a slumbering bear who preferred to revel in his fantasies but who, when enraged, would try to scare off his attackers with loud, ominous-sounding growls so that he could hurry back to his own familiar world. On occasion he would try to cope with the others by
borrowing one of their concepts to use as a weapon against them. He borrowed Leon’s term “habeas corpus,” which for Leon was an effective weapon of attack and defense, but in Clyde’s lexicon remained childlike and ineffectual. He could only use it to say: “There’s a habeas corpus and that represents the resurrection. I’m not assigned to the hospital like they are. I’ve got good guns too, Mister!”
Although Joseph seemed more aware than Clyde of what was going on, his typical response also involved denial. In the initial encounter, for example, he had responded by “laughing it off.” Denial was, in fact, Joseph’s main defense against everything, including recognition of his own illness. Once, when I asked him whether Clyde’s and Leon’s claims to be Christ or God bothered him, he replied: “It doesn’t bother me a bit. I’m too smart to say it bothers me.” Or, on another occasion: “There is nothing wrong. Yesterday I know I was what I am. Today I am what I am. I’m not worried about losing my identity.” Still another time: “If anything bothers me, I soon can get rid of it. Before I have a headache or any thought I don’t want to have, I just snap it.”
But Joseph’s attempts at denial were not completely effective as a defense against confrontation. As early as the first week, he began to make use of various withdrawal mechanisms, and he used them with increasing frequency as time went on. He came to the daily meetings armed with books and magazines, and during the meetings spent much of the time apparently reading or compulsively leafing through a book from cover to cover and then starting all over again. At other times he merely sat, smoking cigarettes and staring into space for the whole hour, letting Leon carry on long soliloquies. Or, when asked if he had anything to say, he would reply: “I feel like saying nothing. I’ll lose my values, I’ll never go back to England if I say anything.” When the arguments became more heated, he would leave the meeting room more and more frequently to go to the toilet or get a drink of water. On August 31, we timed his departures—which were always preceded by the statement: “I’ll be right back, I’m going to get a drink of water”—5:47, 6:10, 6:13, 6:15, 6:17, 6:20. Still another device he used was changing the subject. “As for me,” he once said abruptly, “I know a good rain would do a lot of good right now.”
Yet, after a period of withdrawal Joseph would feel the need to assert himself again; it was as if he was afraid that the others would “win” if he kept quiet too long. He would then go over to the counter-offensive, especially against Leon. Like Clyde, Joseph adopted some of Leon’s delusions as a weapon. He was, however, able to use them against Leon far more effectively than was Clyde. Once when Leon said: “Joseph has prejudice and jealousy against me,” Joseph retorted: “Darned if I know why he talks that way. Negativism!! Negativism! Negativism! Rex’s uncle and I have agreed that I was the right God.”
As the arguments became more heated we noted, too, an increase in bizarre behavior and confusion on Joseph’s part, the full significance of which we did not presume to understand. The weather that summer was particularly hot, yet Joseph often wore three pairs of socks—yellow, then pink, then yellow. He wore a pair of women’s horn-rimmed glasses without lenses to which he managed to attach a lorgnette, thereby creating a sight not beheld since Coppelius gave Hoffmann his pair of enchanted spectacles. As Leon’s reprimand suggests, he also threw towels and loaves of bread into the toilet and tossed magazines and books out of the window. When Leon asked him why he did this, Joseph replied: “Everything’s all right—the world is saved.” But when on another occasion I asked him about it, he denied it. And when I said that I had seen him, he replied that he never threw anything out of the window.
Along with these manifestations, we also noted a sharp rise in ritualistic behavior. One of Joseph’s gestures was to extend his right index finger in an upward direction. When I asked him why he did it, he explained that he was thinking about England and that what he was thinking was right. “Finger” in French is doigt and “right” is droit, he said—“Isn’t that a good symbol?” When asked about another gesture, that of making a circle with thumb and forefinger, he replied: “That’s a zero. It means nothing wrong for England. It also means an exclamation! correct! beautiful! perfect! O.K.! unmalicious! benevolent! charming! delightful!” This behavior subsided, however, after the first month or so.
Around the tenth of August, Joseph and Leon had come to an implicit agreement, a kind of truce, that they would not attack each other, verbally or otherwise, during the meetings. Both of them said they did not want any more conflict. However, despite these avowed intentions, Joseph went over to the attack whenever I was on hand, because he believed I was his ally and he felt strengthened by my presence. Under these circumstances Leon refrained from counterattack until he could no longer stand it, and when he struck back, controversy ensued.
And what about Leon? Leon was what clinicians would call an overintellectualizer. He organized and interpreted his attacks and defenses in terms of a highly coherent delusional system. To Leon it was intolerable not to have answers for everything. Despite his apparent inability to take overt aggressive action, it was clear that, of the three, he aroused the most hostility in the others. He was the most overcontrolled, the most rigid, the most unbending, and he set the pace for Clyde and Joseph.
In spite of Leon’s threat not to attend the meetings because they were “mental torture” and because “you are trying to agitate one against the other,” he always came to the daily sessions. From the very first encounter he was frequently able to control the situation. His invitation to Joseph to discuss his case and his dreams is one example. He was also quite adept at monopolizing the group meetings to discuss his own delusions at great length, or at changing the subject to a neutral one which could be safely discussed with the others. On one occasion, Joseph was talking about being God and working for England. “Mr. Cassel,” Leon broke in, “may I change the subject?” Whereupon they carried on a conversation about their favorite seafoods, which in turn led to whales and whalebones, thence to corsets, from there to cookies, crackers, and biscuits, then to favorite brands of cigarettes, tobacco, and cigars. Then all of a sudden Joseph was back on the subject of England. Leon again interrupted by turning to Clyde: “Mr. Benson, you haven’t said much. Would you like to discuss something?” Clyde mumbled something which the others did not grasp, and once again Joseph was back on England. Again Leon, in his usual polite tone, asked to change the subject to hunting trips, which they discussed for a while, until Joseph got back to England again. And once more Leon changed the subject—to Alaska.
When Joseph started to come to the meetings with books and magazines, we were almost immediately able to put this defense to a social use by suggesting that he read to the other men. He seized on this eagerly, and Leon and Clyde agreed with just as much pleasure. From that point on, reading aloud—most often by Joseph, but occasionally by Leon or Clyde—became a regular part of the daily meetings. Leon did not assume responsibility for this routine; he was quite content to let Joseph bring the reading matter for the meetings. In fact, he came to depend on Joseph for this, although immediately following the occasions when Joseph forgot to supply the reading matter Leon brought his own, which generally consisted of such material as the Reader’s Digest.
This is not to say, however, that Leon was always eager to avoid controversies with the others. He never baited Clyde, but he often baited Joseph, who was usually no match for him. Once Joseph expressed a desire to go to the patients’ store to buy some coffee.
“Sir,” Leon remarked, “that’s funny that you want coffee. I thought the English drank tea.”
“Say, you really listen, don’t you?” replied Joseph sarcastically. “The English had all the coffee at one time and they’ll have it again sometime.”
“They have instant tea as well as coffee at the store,” Leon persisted.
“Oh, yeah?” Joseph said lamely.
As the arguments became increasingly more fierce, Leon dropped his baiting tactics and assumed the role of pe
acemaker. From the time Clyde had attacked him over the Adam issue Leon made a special effort to placate him, and he tried to stop feuds from developing between Clyde and Joseph.
Nevertheless, Leon was not really in control. Far from it, as evidenced by the sharp increase in his compulsive ritualistic behavior. One of his rituals was “shaking off,” an act designed to get rid of the electronic interferences and impositions to which he believed he was continually subjected. He “shook off” by sitting rigidly in his chair, pressing his fingers firmly against his temples, and vigorously massaging his head while holding his breath until he was red in the face. When the quarrels were at their highest pitch, he had to shake off every twenty minutes. Since he had no watch he made a nuisance of himself by repeatedly asking the time. During these periods he would reply to the question: “How are you, Rex?” with: “All right, sir, except for the interferences.” Another ritual took place at meal-times, when he would drink “charged-up” salt water—made by pouring about half the salt from a full salt shaker into a glass of water. After shooting cosmic rays into the glass by making twenty grimaces he would drain the concoction down in a series of convulsive gulps. This, too, was designed to reduce the interferences and was apparently a behavior pattern which did not set in until after the study began.
Often Leon said nothing at the meetings, and once I asked him why he was so quiet.
“I’m deducting what is truthful and the rest I put into the squelch chamber, sir.”
—The squelch chamber?—
“The human has two squelch chambers. Some people have four. It depends. It’s their privilege if they want one in the subconscious region of their brain. It’s a little bit beyond the center point—about one and a half inches from the top of the skull—and it is an aid to the person. For example, if the squelch chamber is charged positively, it will counteract negative engrams—grind them up—by grinding up I mean the faculties of the squelch chamber are such wherein sound is amplified into itself and the inter-amplification of the sound or engrams as such are squelched; that is, transformed through amplification that is so great that it is transformed into light, organic light as a secondary outlet that refreshes the brain to a certain degree.”
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Page 8