It was the late 1980s when a group of my friends gathered in front of a TV set with a couple six packs, a bottle of vodka, and a bag of joints. It was a special occasion. The Sally Jessy Raphael Show was on. It’s not that we had any particular fascination for that kind of trash talk show. It’s just that her guests were a special sort of people and we tenuously knew one of them. He was the cousin of someone we knew from high school and he, along with the other two guests on the show, believed that he was Jesus Christ. What ensued was a shouting match between the three kooks, no doubt encouraged by the shows producers for its entertainment value. We were rolling on the floor with laughter. This was real John Waters kind of stuff. And that friend of ours, with his cousin the nutjob messiah, may never have recovered from this incident. Anytime we ran into him after that episode of of The Sally Jessy Raphel Show, he looked kind of sheepish as we teased him about it. He went on to become a college professor and then died about a decade ago. I guess that means he’s over it by now.
On a slightly more serious note, in the 1950s a psychologist named Milton Rokeach gathered together three inmates at a psychiatric hospital in Michigan. All three believed themselves to be God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost or some sort of combination of the trinity. He wanted to see what would happen when three people who all claimed to be approximately the same incarnation got together in a room to talk shop from a deity’s perspective. He wrote about his experiment in The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.
Rokeach starts by introducing the three subjects. Clyde is an elderly Midwesterner who doesn’t have much to say aside from interjections meant to correct the false beliefs of the others. When someone says they are God, he gets angry and shouts at them because he is the one who is really God. Other than that, he mostly keeps to himself. Joseph is a bit smarter. A highly educated French Canadian and devotee of classic literature, he also believes he is God. Furthermore, he also believes the psych ward is a castle and an outpost of the retreating British Empire. He vows to fight in its honor, but often makes requests to be repatriated to the U.K. Aside from his delusions, he is functional on a day to day basis and can read Tolstoy and Flaubert, able to describe them, analyze them, and interpret them with clarity, accuracy, and freedom from delusional perceptual distortions. I actually took a liking to this guy. Then there is Leon, the youngest of the three. He was raised by his mother, a religious fanatic who was probably mentally ill herself. Leon is highly articulate, believes he is married to a yeti, and lives a life saturated in the muck of psychotic delusions. He is confused about his sexuality too and keeps insisting that people call him by names other than his own. Those names change according to what is happening in his life.
Rokeach’s expectation from the start is that, when the three Christs encounter each other, they will break free from their delusions of grandeur and realize they are not Jesus. His intention is to see what happens when the cornerstone of an individual’s identity dissolves and how that affects their beliefs and behavior. This, however, never goes as planned and the three patients persist in believing themselves to be God. In fact, instead of discussing their false identities with each other, they tend to avoid the subject altogether.
Rokeach’s brand of experimental psychology has two major components, one of which is more controversial than the other. The less controversial one involves daily soirees. The three paranoid schizophrenics gather around a table to chain smoke and talk. The more controversial one involves Dr. Rokeach impersonating different people in attempts to influence the patients’ behavior and beliefs. With Leon being the most articulate of the three Christs, the most interesting results come from him. The doctor writes letters to him claiming to be Leon’s wife named Madame Yeti Woman. By impersonating and manipulating Leon’s delusions, the complex, and sometimes confusing, nature of his belief system is revealed, involving an alternate race of yetis, hermaphroditism, first name changing, and ritual masturbation. Leon also begins constructing masks out of colored cellophane, cardboard, and rubber bands which he wears to avoid eye contact when in the presence of a female doctor he is sexually attracted to. Dr. Rokeach gets less spectacular, but significantly revealing results, when he writes letters to Joseph, pretending to be the director of the psychiatric hospital. The intention is to convince Joseph to embark on a writing project. This, along with another experiment in the use of placebo medications, ultimately leads nowhere.
While Rokeach’s attempts at persuading the three Christs to shed their false beliefs ends in failure, he does provide an interesting analysis of the content of their delusions. There are definite patterns as to when and why the delusions come out as well as a logical consistency, maybe even a symbolic role, that the delusions play. These three men suffer from problems of inadequacy, fear of failure, anxiety over social conflicts, and sexual frustration. Leon himself appears to be confused because he is bisexual. Rokceach finds that their delusions are all strategies created to help these men manage the turmoil of their inner conflicts. The difference between them and non-schizophrenics is that they construct false identities and delusional beliefs to avoid facing their problems whereas other people deal with similar issues in ways that are more in line with what is considered normal by society’s standards. Furthermore, these three men have weak and fragile egos that could easily be shattered when confronted with ideas that conflict or threaten their sense of self. Their delusions act as a bulwark against such threats and protect their egos from fracturing whereas people with effectively formed egos are able to withstand the stress of social pressure. This is also why these schizophrenic men spend more time alone than people with more well-adjusted ego formations.
Although this book is dated in its theory and methodology, it is still an interesting read. Rokeach is a talented writer and is highly successful in describing the personalities of Joseph and Leon. This is one of those narratives where the characters are so distinctly drawn that you feel as if you know them from the start. It is a perfect balance without any over- or under-writing and this is mostly accomplished through the use of dialogue. Rokeach, a sharp observer of human behavior and character, could have been a good novelist if he had chosen that path. It is also a great story. Based around a scientific framework, it starts with a proposition for investigation, gathers and describes the found information and data, interprets the data, and leaves us with a deeper understanding of human nature. What I found most important in the end is that Rokeach humanizes his subjects by showing that they struggle with issues that are common to many people. It is just that they depend on alternate ways of handling their problems that are idiosyncratic to the rest of us.
Otherwise, the theory and practice of this study are undoubtedly controversial by today’s standards. Rokeach’s theory of schizophrenia being the result of improper ego formation and psychological adjustment during childhood is ancestral to Freudian thought. I don’t keep up with contemporary practices in the field of psychiatry and therapy, but I do know that psychoanalysis has largely been rejected long ago. The ethics of Rokeach’s methods are questionable too. His intention of shattering the ego of a schizophrenic just to see how it effects their behavior and beliefs could be harmful to the subject and might even lead to permanent psychological damage. Why don’t we just crack somebody’s skull open with a hammer or break a couple ribs just to see what happens? Also, the three Christs are not violent or self-destructive and are actually quite high-functioning for psychologically disordered people. It is probably unethical to even be keeping them locked up in a psychiatric facility when living under care in the wider community would be more beneficial to them. Then there is the issue of impersonating people like wives and hospital directors to manipulate their behavior. I’m not convinced that encouraging delusions is the best way to help schizophrenics manage their lives, especially because there is more emphasis on controlling them than there is on curing them. The authoritarian overtones of the doctor’s practices are a little discomforting. But then again, Rokeach was working with the available theories, ethics, and knowledge that were available to him at the time he did his research so he can’t be entirely blamed for not living up to whatever standards we have in our present day. That is the nature of science and society at large so I’d argue that postmodernists who insist that a literary text be isolated from the author, time, and place in which it was produced are entirely wrong if we are to make a fair judgment about its value and meaning as a written work.
When taken as it is, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is a fascinating story. Despite being dated, it offers a working theory and framework of interpretation and, even if it is not congruent with current ideas, the relation between that framework and the information it explains makes for a neatly packaged story and set of ideas. And even though Rokeach did not get his intended results, he does demonstrate how a lot was learned along the way. In the end, I’m left with some interesting questions though. For example, why is it that so many psychotic or schizophrenic beliefs are expressed through religious delusions and what does this say about the nature of religion? And why are there so many psychological studies of the mentally ill and so few studies of the psychology of psychologists and psychiatrists? Finally, to what extent do we all use systems of belief to protect our egos? If beliefs and truths are separate ontological categories of knowledge, does that mean all beliefs are potentially delusions? How do we sort out delusional beliefs from legitimate beliefs? I don’t have the answers to these questions and I suppose you don’t either. Stay humble. Just because you’ve read Plato or Nietzsche that doesn’t mean you know anything.
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