The Three Christs of Ypsilanti
Page 36
[22] Cameron: op. cit., pp. 511–12.
[23] Lynd: op. cit., p. 52.
EPILOGUE
THE STORY of the three Christs of Ypsilanti cannot, of course, be finally told as long as they remain living men. Still, a few things can be said that go beyond the account related here.
After Clyde and Joseph and Leon were left to themselves again in August of 1961, they continued to be seen together in their sitting room in combinations of two or three. But they no longer held daily meetings, and Leon soon reverted to eating alone. Nevertheless, a strange sort of cohesiveness continued to persist among them, not unlike the cohesiveness of a conflict-ridden family in which the individual members, while withdrawing into themselves, carefully avoid breaking the final strands of human interdependency.
A look into the future must always be disciplined by the guidelines of the past. Clyde and Joseph and Leon had been living in the overcrowded back wards of custodial mental hospitals for a long time before we brought them together. Due to the inadequate staffing of these hospitals, they rarely saw a doctor—as Joseph put it, maybe once a year. Whatever hopes we may have had of somehow being able to bring them back to reality were quickly dissipated. For one thing, too many years had passed. Clyde was close to seventy, Joseph was nearing sixty, and each had been in mental hospitals for almost two decades. Leon, while not yet forty, had spent five years in custodial confinement. If the three men were unfit to cope with the real world when they were first committed, they had become, if anything, less fit as the years passed. Their loneliness and isolation, the loss of their ego boundaries and its resultant depersonalization, could only become accentuated through years of neglect by a society which up to now has been more ready to disburse funds for incarceration than for regeneration.
It may well be significant that Clyde, the oldest, changed the least as a result of our experimental procedures and that Leon, who was the youngest, changed the most. Our evidence, while inconclusive, gives weight to the common-sense conclusion that with increasing age the chances decrease that a patient will respond to social stimulation. As he becomes older, there is less ego to work with; the need to appear rational and consistent, both to one’s self and to others, is weaker; denial as a mechanism of defense against unpleasant reality is stronger; ties with the outside world become progressively weaker. The cave, the last stronghold, becomes more and more inaccessible to light.
Clyde and Joseph give every appearance of remaining essentially unchanged. But Leon continues to show evidence of change or at least further elaborations in his delusional system of belief. I still visit him every few months and at each visit I find Leon’s story a bit different from the one he told before. He is still groping for new answers to the riddle of his identity to replace earlier and less satisfying answers.
The prognosis for schizophrenia, paranoid type, is poor, perhaps poorer than for any other diagnostic category of functional psychosis. In the extreme, it is a condition which some textbooks describe as incurable or irreversible.
But to say that a particular psychiatric condition is incurable or irreversible is to say more about the state of our ignorance than about the state of the patient. This study closes with the hope that at least a small portion of ignorance has here been dispelled, and with the faith that as knowledge gradually advances, the incurable conditions of yesterday and today become the curable conditions of tomorrow.
AFTERWORD
Some Second Thoughts About the Three Christs:
Twenty Years Later
TWENTY years have elapsed since I said goodbye to the three Christs. Leon Gabor, the youngest of the three, is alive and well but still a patient at Ypsilanti State Hospital; Clyde Benson, the oldest, was discharged into the custody of his family in January, 1970; Joseph Cassel died in August, 1976.
As I reread my account of the three Christs, I must confess that I now almost regret having written and published it when I did because with the passage of all these years I have been able to see, increasingly clearly, that it is flawed by some major omissions. In my eagerness to be objective and scientific and to focus the story on the effects of my experimentally arranged confrontation on the three Christs’ beliefs and behavior, I was unable to see that it was really a story about a confrontation among four people rather than three. Moreover, I had overlooked the effects of such a confrontation on my as well as their delusional beliefs and behavior. Had I been able to see all this when I originally wrote The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, the ending, the interpretations, and the conclusions would have been somewhat different from the published account. I, therefore, welcome this second chance to provide a fuller account.
A more complete report of the confrontation between myself and the three Christs would surely have begun with an account of a lecture I presented to a large group of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in Palo Alto a few months after I had terminated the research project. I was explaining to this sophisticated audience how I had managed to bring the three Christs together at Ypsilanti State Hospital: “We surveyed 25,000 patients in the mental hospitals of the state of Michigan, found one Christ at Kalamazoo State Hospital, and two more at Ypsilanti State Hospital. I then arranged to have the Kalamazoo Christ transferred to Ypsilanti, and then there were four.” Needless to say, the significance of this slip of the tongue was immediately and poignantly apparent to both myself and my audience. But it took me a long time before I was able to appreciate fully what it had revealed about my own unconscious strivings and motivations. I now feel that I may have written the book somewhat prematurely, that I had focused my attention only on the effects of the daily confrontations about self-identity on three rather than all four of the central characters in the drama. And I would now also see the book as ending somewhat differently: 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, even in the name of science, to play God and interfere around-the-clock with their daily lives. Also, I became increasingly uncomfortable about the ethics of such a confrontation. I was cured when I was able to leave them in peace, and it was mainly Leon who somehow persuaded me that I should leave them in peace.
I should mention another reason why I terminated the project when I did. Altogether apart from the question of ethics and my own need to be God-like, there was the question of the effectiveness of a confrontational technique designed to bring about lasting changes in belief systems and behavior. While I surely had learned a great deal about the delusional belief systems of the three Christs and why they behaved as they did, I had increasing doubts that bringing them together for the purpose of challenging and contradicting one another’s beliefs was a good way to bring about lasting changes. To use Leon’s term, such confrontations were “agitational” and they may have served, on the contrary, only to arouse their ego defenses and denial mechanisms and thus to freeze rather than change their beliefs and behavior in any fundamental way.
It is therefore no accident that in my later work I “renounced” the method of confrontation with others as a basic technique for bringing about change in favor of the method of self-confrontation. Readers who may be familiar with the work I have done subsequent to The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (especially The Nature of Human Values, published in 1973 by Free Press) will know that I have reported rather dramatic long-term changes in socially significant values, and in logically related attitudes and behaviors, as a result of making people aware, via the method of self-confrontation, of basic contradictions existing within them. Such long-term changes are typically brought about by a single experimental session and have been observed as long as twenty-one months afterward. Thus, the met
hod of self-confrontation that evolved from the confrontational method I employed with the three Christs is not only generally more effective for bringing about change but, equally important, it does not pose the ethical dilemmas that are inherent in the three Christ research. Thus, if I had been able to do this research all over again, I would surely have used the method of self-confrontation.
But what I learned most from the three Christ study is that goodness and greatness, that is, the striving for morality and competence, are universal human motives. While my slip of the tongue hinted at the existence of a fourth Christ, Bertrand Russell’s epigram that I quote at the beginning of the book suggests there are really millions and billions of Christs, or at least countless people trying to be God-like: “Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.” I found out from my “teachers,” the three Christs of Ypsilanti, exactly in what sense they were trying to be God-like. They were striving for goodness and greatness, and such strivings, I came to understand, are really the strivings of all human beings. The main difference between the three of them and the rest of us who are also trying to be God-like is that whereas the rest of us can bring ourselves to admit the impossibility of our ever becoming absolute or infinitely moral and competent, the three Christs found it difficult to admit such an impossibility. Nonetheless, I learned that what all of us have in common with the three Christs is that we all strive to maintain and enhance our self-conceptions and self-presentations as competent and moral. This is one of the major ways in which humans who would be Christ or Christ-like are distinctively different from other living beings.
—MILTON ROKEACH
1981
INDEX
The links below refer to the page references of the printed edition of this book. While the numbers do not correspond to the page numbers or locations on an electronic reading device, they are retained as they can convey useful information regarding the position and amount of space devoted to an indexed entry. Because the size of a page varies in reflowable documents such as this e-book, it may be necessary to scroll down to find the referenced entry after following a link.
Abeles, M., 310 n.
Adelson, J., 194 n.
aggressor, identification with, 193
alienation, 313
Allport, Gordon W., 312
ambivalence, 224, 228, 244, 247, 284, 319, 321
amnesia, 310, 311
amphojel, 285
Anderson, Sherwood, 314
Angel, E., 312 n.
anomie, 312, 313
anti-Semitism, 193
anxiety, 27, 30, 313
Arieti, Sylvano, 195 n., 197 n., 298, 299 n., 311 n., 324
Aristotle, 328
Asch, Solomon, 29, 30 authority, 192, 194, 201, 260, 262, 284, 286, 287, 299, 309, 322; beliefs about, 24, 25, 26, 190; not accepted by deluded person, 32; positive, 190, 191, 192, 194, 230, 260, 284, 298, 299, 319–24; negative, 190, 191, 192, 322; selective, 192, 195; idealized, 320
Bateson, G., 284 n.
Beccaria, Cesare, 34
becoming, and identity, 312
belief(s): systems of, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 33, 185, 189, 190, 310, 318, 324, 330; primitive, 20–32 passim, 189–93 passim, 195, 207, 310, 315; non-primitive, 24; inconsequential, 24, 25, 26, 33, 190; peripheral, 24, 25, 26, 33, 190, 193; about authority, 24, 25, 26, 190; psychotic, 32; delusional, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 194, 195, 299, 316, 324, 336; normal, 32–33; anti-Semitic, 193
belladonna, 285
Bennington College, 193
Bernant, Elsa, 31 n.
Bettelheim, Bruno, 193
Bleuler, E., 200, 208
brainwashing, 30, 194
Bruner, J. S., 33 n.
Cameron, J. L., 311 n.
Cameron, Norman, 197, 208, 209, 324, 328
Candid Camera, 29
capitalism, 313
Carlson, E. R., 110 n.
Catholic Church, 193
Cause and Evolution, 213, 214, 237, 251
China, prisons of, 194
Clay, Margaret, 33 n.
Cleckly, H. M., 310 n.
cognitive consistency, 317
Communist Party, 193
competence, concept of, 326 n., 327, 329
confession, voluntary, 30
consistency, cognitive, 317
Coser, L. A., 24 n., 25 n.
defense mechanisms, 315
de Gaulle, Charles, 194
delusions, 23, 32–6 passim, 194, 195, 208, 209, 284, 286, 287, 299, 309, 314–20 passim, 324, 336; of grandeur, 324, 326; of goodness, 327
denial, 63, 64, 315, 316, 317, 321, 325, 336
depersonalization, 289, 312, 336
Diefenbaker, John, 122, 262
dissolution of ego boundaries, 311
dissonance, 189, 190, 298, 299, 322
Dostoevski, F., 275, 314, 328
Double, The, 275, 328
double-bind, 284
“double-entry bookkeeping,” in schizophrenia, 200, 207–10
double personality, 311
Durkheim, Emile, 313
ego feeling (functioning), loss of, 311, 317, 335
ego identity, 26, 31
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 122, 282, 301, 306
Ellenberger, H. F., 312 n.
environment, and heredity, 330
Erikson, Erik H., 21, 22 n., 25 n., 310, 311, 312 323, 324 n., 326 n.
estrangement, 312
existence, and identity, 312
existentialism, 313
Faulkner, William, 314
Federn, Paul, 311, 312
Festinger, Leon, 33 n., 298
Fichte, J. G., 314
Flaubert, Gustave, 328
Forster, E. M., 328
Freeman, T., 311 n.
Freud, Anna, 315
Freud, Sigmund, 195 n., 313, 324, 328, 332
Fromm, Erich, 312, 313
Fromm-Reichman, Frieda, 199
fugue, 311
Geleerd, E. R., 310 n.
grandeur, paranoid delusions of, 324, 326
group identity, 23, 26, 31, 310, 313
guilt, 329; difference from shame, 326 n., 327
Hacker, F. J., 310 n.
Haley, J., 284 n.
hallucinations, 23, 209
Hayward, M. L., 323 n.
Heider, Fritz, 33 n.
heredity, and environment, 330
hermaphrodite, 213, 214, 222
homosexuality, 324, 326
hospitalization, length of, 330
Hyman, H. H., 24 n.
hyperimagination, 209
identification, with aggressor, 193
identity, 22, 26–33 passim, 189, 190, 301, 309, 324, 326, 329, 330, 326; group, 23, 26, 31, 310, 313; of “significant others,” 28; in twins, 28; mistaken, 32; problem of, 310–14; formation of, 312; crises of, 312; phases of, 312; sexual, 324, 325, 326, 329
identity confrontations, 314–19
ideology, 25, 193
incompetence, concept of, 326, 327, 328
inconsequential beliefs, 24, 25, 26, 33, 190
isolation: and identity, 312, 313, 335; social, 244
Jackson, D. D., 284 n.
Jim Crow, 193–4
Kafka, Franz, 329
Katz, Daniel, 33 n.
Kennedy, John F., 282, 283, 284, 285, 289, 320, 322
Kitt, Alice S., 24 n.
Koch, S., 33 n.
Koestler, Arthur, 31 n.
Korea, North, prisoner-of-war camps in, 194
Kremlin, 193
Laing, R. D., 311
Leites, Nathan, 31 n.
Lewin, K., 194 n.
libido, 195 n.
Lifton, Robert J., 30 n., 31, 194
Lindner, Robert, 34, 35 n., 314, 315 n.
loneliness, and identity, 312, 313, 335
Lynd, Helen Merrell, 22, 23 n., 26, 312, 313, 326 n., 331
lysergic acid diethylamide, 209, 289
Marxism, 313
Maslow, Abraham H., 312
May, R., 312 n.
McGhie, A., 311 n.
mental health, and religion, 309
Merton, R. K., 24 n., 313
Metamorphosis, The, Kafka’s, 329
Moore, Kenneth B., 198
Morin, Simon, 34, 35, 314
Moscow, and de Gaulle, 194
multiple personality, 310, 311
Muney, Barbara, 33 n.
negativism, 195, 247, 286
Negro Jim Crow, 193–4
Newcomb, Theodore M., 24 n., 69
Nixon, Richard M., 283
non-primitive beliefs, 24
not-self, and self, boundary between, 289
object constancy, 21
obsessions, 23
Osgood, C. E., 33 n.
O.S.S. Assessment Staff, 28
overintellectualizer, 66, 143
paranoid patient, 40, 44, 49, 194, 195, 286, 309, 310, 321, 336
paranoid pseudo-community, 197, 208
Peak, Helen, 33 n.
People’s Democracy, 194
peripheral beliefs, 24, 25, 26, 33, 190, 193
person constancy, 21, 22, 23
phenobarbital, 285
phobias, 23
primitive beliefs, 20–32 passim, 189–93 passim, 195, 207, 310, 315
Prince, M., 310 n.
projection, 129, 238
psychosis, 195, 316, 331; delusions of, 209; hallucinations of, 209
psychotherapy, 309
Rapaport, D., 310 n.
rationalization, 52, 55, 190