The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

by Milton Rokeach

  Clyde, overprotected from birth, had never really had the opportunity to become an autonomous and active male. Even as he approached middle age, he seemed to be overly dependent on his wife, his parents, and his father-in-law, all of whom made the important decisions for him. It is not without significance that his break with reality had its onset when all the people he depended on died within a few months of one another. He was a passive, infantile man who needed others to take care of him, and we saw this pattern repeated in the role he played daily in the drama of the three delusional Christs. He was content to sit back and let things happen to him; he never took the initiative in trying to alter the social situation, as did Joseph and Leon. He made virtually no demands on his social or physical environment.

  Our data suggest that Joseph, too, had grounds to suffer confusion about his sexual identity. He had been christened Josephine[20] by a harsh, sadistic father who, proud of his French heritage, did not permit English to be spoken in the home. Joseph rejected the name Josephine but at the same time was unable to form a masculine identification with his Francophile father. He thus became a weak God working for the cause of the English—a cause directly opposed to his father’s. Joseph’s sexual confusion expressed itself in other ways as well. It came out in his sexual relations with his wife, and in his desire that she go to work so that he could stay home and “write.” We see it break out occasionally, despite Joseph’s denial of interest in sex, in his delusional references not only to women but to men—both were apparently able to arouse his sexual passions.

  The confusion about sexual identity is most clearly seen in Leon, who was raised from infancy by a psychotic woman in a home permanently vacated by the father. She had to serve double duty as a model for father and mother, and obviously played both roles badly, with disastrous results for her son. Leon’s confusion about his sexual identity expressed itself in many ways on many levels. He identified himself with Christ, the gentlest and tenderest of men; Jesus Christ represented the vine and the rock, and these represented both male and female sexual symbols. When Leon drew a picture of a penis, it also contained within it a vagina. Terrified of his confused sexual feelings, he was often observed to be fearful of men because they were men, and of women because they were women. To his name, Dr. R. I. Dung, Sir, he added the appellations God Morphodite, Potential Madame, the meaning of which is self-evident. And eventually Leon gave up all his successive wives to marry himself, his “maleity” being married, guiltlessly, to his “femaleity”. And as Leon’s delusions changed we learned more and more about what was really bothering him and why he had discarded his identity in the first place.

  All this suggests that the three Christs discarded their original identities and suffered from paranoid delusions of grandeur, not as a defense against homosexuality but as a defense against confusion about sexual identity. It a person is confused about his sexual identity, he will indeed in certain instances manifest homosexuality. But, in these instances, homosexuality is actually part of a broader picture of confusion about sexual identity.

  What does it mean to say that a person is confused about his sexual identity? And why should such a confusion play an important role in the extreme psychotic states seen here? Is it sex per se or is it something else which is troubling these men? And how does becoming God or Christ alleviate whatever it is that is gnawing away at them?

  As we look at our three Christs, we notice a basic difference in the grandiose delusions of Clyde and Joseph on the one hand and Leon on the other.[21] In Clyde and Joseph the dominant theme of sexual confusion seems to be tinged with a sense of shame over feelings of incompetence as a male. These are not guilt-ridden Christs, they are more preoccupied with being great than with being good. And the religious element is not especially prominent. Clyde is Christ because he needs to be “the biggest one.” He is preoccupied with the carloads of money, land, and women he owns. And Joseph is God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost because these are the biggest personages one can be. If there were a super-God, Joseph would have been super-God.

  In Leon, however, the dominant theme is not shame about incompetence but guilt about forbidden sexual and aggressive impulses. He is obsessed with the issue: Am I a man or am I not? He is forever tormented with inadmissible longings for persons of both sexes, with his need to prove to himself that he is a potent male, with feelings of wrongdoing about his masturbatory efforts to test and prove his potency, and with feelings of projected hostility toward others. There is an overriding religious coloration in his Christ delusion. Leon is a guilt-ridden Christ who strives more to be good than great; he is suffering not so much from a delusion of greatness as from a delusion of goodness.

  To understand better these differences in the functions served by the identity delusions of the three men, let us look once more to their earlier lives. In his work as a farmer, Clyde had at best the responsibilities and skills of an overprotected hired hand rather than those of an independent entrepreneur. After he had acquired his several farms, through inheritance and remarriage, he was unable to manage them properly. Within a few years he had squandered his fortune away through drink and neglect of his enterprises, and in the process lost as well the wife he needed. It would seem that Clyde became the grandiose Christ and God he now was, not so much through a sense of guilt, as through a sense of shame about his incompetence as an effective male, and about his passive dependence on others. Clyde was incapable of disciplined work, of earning a living, and of supporting a family—roles required of all competent males in Western society. In his delusions Clyde recaptured the lost properties, money, and women he was not able to hold on to in real life.

  As for Joseph, the data we have about him suggest that he felt deeply his shame at having to be a lowly clerk when he aspired to be a great writer. Recall how anxiously he behaved when Dr. Yoder tried to encourage him to write. Recall how apprehensive he became of failure, and of the consequent exposure as incompetent, when he prepared for Carnival Day. And recall how he claimed for himself all the great ideas and writings in literature, history, and science, accusing as enemies and “gunshots” such persons as Aristotle, Freud, E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, and Flaubert. He, not they, was the author of the works attributed to them. In his reports, addressed to nobody, Joseph wrote:

  Psycho-analysis has reference to what one is ashamed of even thinking. So, psycho-analysis discovers all this, after one has forgotten the “shame,” or whatever it is, and the psychoanalyst treats the patient.

  Like Golyadkin, the minor civil servant in Dostoevski’s novel The Double, Joseph approached middle age feeling himself to be an incompetent male and suffering under the enormous discrepancy between his level of achievement and his level of aspiration. As Norman Cameron says:

  Some time toward middle age, when a person turns thirty, thirty-five, or forty, comes the dawning realization that his life span actually is limited. With this recognition may also come fears that his lifelong hopes, overt or latent, will never be realized.[22]

  Joseph attemped to reduce the discrepancy between fantasy and reality in order to avoid, in Lynd’s words, the “crumpling or failure of the whole self.”[23] by becoming God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost, and other great personages as well. The only concession he was willing to make to reality was that he was a weak God who had temporarily lost his values. What he seemed to be saying was that even as God he felt himself to be an ineffective and incompetent male, afraid to venture forth into the world. “I prophesize,” Joseph once said, “that the world in the future will be on such a sound basis that the peoples of the world will be safe—no such thing as hiding themselves in the basement or attic and being scared to death.”

  Of the three, Leon was clearly the most competent. He was the only one who had a capacity for disciplined, competent work. He was a skilled worker before hospitalization, having worked as a electrician in industry and during the war in the Signal Corps. In the hospital he insisted on working to pay for his room and board; he did not
want to be obligated to anyone, not even the state. On many occasions he had demonstrated his skill with electrical gadgets, performing, for example, minor repairs on the tape recorder and on the television set in the recreation room.

  Leon’s confusion about his sexual identity involves, above everything else, a moral problem arising in the first place from the inculcation of an unbearable sense of guilt by a fanatical, psychotic woman who served as model for both father and mother. He felt worthless as dung because of forbidden sexual impulses toward himself and toward men and women, and because of his tremendous hostility toward others—a hostility he tried to deny and which therefore expressed itself in the projected feeling that others were forever trying to tempt and seduce him. In playing the Christ role, Leon was above all trying to be humble and good, and to follow the Ten Commandments, which in his interpretation forbade all manifestations of sex and aggression. Only in this way could he curb and control his sexual and aggressive impulses and thus prove that he was deserving of love.

  But this account of Leon’s confused sexual identity is still incomplete. Our data suggest that he was obsessed not only with whether he was man or woman but also, like the hero in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, with whether he was man or beast. Leon was confused about being man or Yeti man, or dove, or jerboa rat, or fly, or bull. In view of his single model of a mother and a father, and the fact that he felt as sinful, guilt-ridden, worthless, and isolated as he did, it is almost inevitable that Leon, in giving up his identity as a man, would also give up his identity as a human being. Beyond the question: Am I a man or a woman? is the question: Am I human or inhuman? We are inclined to pay serious attention to Leon’s frequent references to human persons. He would say: “I would accept them as a human person.” And again: “You relieve pressure by trimming it. Then when I go out the girls don’t mean anything to me except as a human person.” Leon denied having any human relatives, asserted that he was hollowed-out and conceived through the seed of sub-human foster fathers, and insisted that he could form no attachments to human persons.

  In identifying himself with the immaculately conceived Christ of Nazareth, Leon was trying to find a way not only to regain his self-identity as a good man but also to rejoin the human race.

  Limitations In the Data

  The study reported here is, as far as I know, the first in which several persons claiming the same identity have been brought together for experimental purposes. It is hardly necessary to point out that at best the study is exploratory, and that the results regarding fixity and change of systems of belief and behavior must therefore be interpreted with caution. The size of the sample is small; it is moreover a biased one; and we know relatively little about the early history of this small, biased sample. We are not able to assess the relative effects of heredity and environment, of age and length of hospitalization. And we do not know to what extent our very presence, behavior, and questions may have influenced the results obtained.

  And, finally, we do not know to what extent the responses observed can be attributed to the vast amount of attention we showered on the three Christs, rather than to the experimental procedures employed. Never in the history of Ypsilanti State Hospital had three patients received so much sustained attention —the nearest being the attention given three women patients with the same diagnosis who served as a control group. We had studied them during the first six months in an effort to control for the variable of attention. One of the women believed she was Cinderella; a second believed she was a member of the Morgan family; and the third believed she was bewitched. These three were treated in about the same way as the men, except that their identity was never made an issue, and they received no messages from their referents. They too held daily meetings, ate together, worked together in the laundry room, and slept in adjacent beds on the ward. The results can be succinctly summarized: they engaged in no quarrels with each other or with us; there were no significant changes in behavior or delusions during the six months we observed them; their dealings with one another and with us had an even, monotonous quality from beginning to end. We disbanded this control group after six months, for several reasons: chiefly, boredom and fatigue on our part, and to conserve funds. It must be frankly admitted, however, that although we spent about the same amount of time during the first six months with these three women, our interests were directed elsewhere, and thus, from a technical point of view, the attention we paid them did not have the same quality or intensity as that we paid the three men.

  Concluding Remarks

  The present study represents, in Helen Merrell Lynd’s words, “a search for ways to transcend loneliness” and a refusal to accept the “finality of individual estrangement.” In the course of our study we learned many things. In addition to those already discussed we have also learned: that if we are patient long enough, the apparent incoherence of psychotic utterance and behavior becomes increasingly more understandable; that psychosis is a far cry from the happy state some make it out to be; that it may sometimes represent the best terms a person can come to with life; that psychotics, having good reason to flee human companionship, nevertheless crave it.

  We have also learned, or rather relearned, some of the things Freud taught us a long time ago about the human psyche, except that this time our teachers were Clyde, Joseph, and Leon. Among other things, they were often able to explain to us, without benefit of psychoanalytic middlemen, the meaning of much of their symbolic utterances. Also, we have rediscovered the utility of Freud’s concepts of repression and the unconscious by just listening, especially to Leon as he would grind up his passions, his apprehensions, and his cognitions inside that remarkable contrivance—the squelch chamber.

  And, finally, we have learned that even when a summit of three is composed of paranoid men, deadlocked over the ultimate in human contradiction, they prefer to seek ways to live with one another in peace rather than destroy one another.

  [1]For discussions of several cases of amnesia and their psychodynamic origins, see M. Abeles and P. Schilder: “Psychogenic Loss of Personal Identity,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, Vol. 34 (1935), pp. 587–604; E. R. Geleerd, F. J. Hacker, and D. Rapaport: “Contributions to the Study of Amnesia and Allied Conditions,” Psychoanalytical Quarterly, Vol. 14 (1945), pp. 199–220. For the two most famous cases of multiple personality, see M. Prince: The Dissociation of a Personality. (New York: Longmans, Green; 1908); and C. H. Thigpen, and H. M. Cleckly: The Three Faces of Eve (New York: McGraw-Hill; 1957).

  [2] R. W. White: The Abnormal Personality (New York: Ronald Press; 1948), p. 299.

  [3] See particularly the works of Sylvano Arieti; also: T. Freeman, J. L. Cameron, and A. McGhie: Chronic Schizophrenia (New York: International Universities Press; 1958); R. D. Laing: The Divided Self (Chicago: Quadrangle Books; 1960).

  [4] Paul Federn: Ego Psychology and the Psychoses (New York: Basic Books, 1952).

  [5] Laing: op. cit., p. 163.

  [6] Erikson: op. cit. See also his Childhood and Society (New York: Norton; 1950).

  [7] Erikson’s eight phases of identity and crises of identity are as follows: I. Infancy: trust vs. mistrust; II. Early childhood: autonomy vs. shame, doubt; III. Play age: initiative vs. guilt; IV. School age: industry vs. inferiority; V. Adolescence: identity vs. identity diffusion; VI. Young adult: intimacy vs. isolation; VII. Adulthood: generativity vs. self-absorption; VIII. Mature age: integrity vs. disgust, despair.

  Since it is beyond the scope of this work to consider these phases more fully, the reader interested in a further elaboration is referred to Erikson’s writings.

  [8] Lynd: op. cit.; Edith Weigert: “The Subjective Experience of Identity and Its Psychopathology,” Comprehensive Psychiatry, Vol. I (1960), pp. 18–25; Federn: op. cit.; C. Rogers: On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin; 1961); R. May, E. Angel, and H. F. Ellenberger (Eds.): Existence (New York: Basic Books; 1958); E. Fromm: The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart; 1955); A. H. Maslow: Motivation and Personality
(New York: Harper; 1954); G. W. Allport: Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality (New Haven: Yale University Press; 1955).

  [9] Edith Weigert: op. cit., p. 23.

  [10] A. Wheelis: The Quest for Identity (New York: Norton; 1958), p. 19.

  [11] Lynd: op. cit., p. 69.

  [12] Bertrand Russell: Power: A New Social Analysis (London: Allen and Unwin; 1938).

  [13] Lindner: op. cit., p. 193.

  [14] Anna Freud: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press; 1946), p. 85.

  [15] Rokeach: op. cit., pp. 400–1.

  [16] From a poem by a schizophrenic patient presented in M. L. Hayward and J. E. Taylor: “A Schizophrenic Patient Describes the Action of Intensive Psychotherapy,” Psychiatry Quarterly. Vol. XXX (1956), pp. 211–48; 241–2.

  [17] Erikson: Identity and the Life Cycle, p. 134.

  [18] Sigmund Freud: “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Collected Papers, Vol. III (New York: Basic Books, 1959).

  [19] Op. cit.

  [20] The reader should be reminded again that Joseph and Josephine are pseudonyms. Nevertheless, these names have been selected to convey a significant fact in the early life of the man we have here called Joseph Cassel.

  [21] The discussion which follows owes much to Helen Merrell Lynd’s and Erik Erikson’s stimulating analyses of the difference between shame and guilt (op. cit.). In brief, shame is a feeling which arises following an experience of incompetence; and guilt, following an act of wrongdoing. The discussion also leans heavily on White’s pioneering explication of the concepts of competence and incompetence. See R. W. White: “Motivation Reconsidered: The Concept of Competence,” Psychological Review, Vol. 66 (1959), pp. 297-333; and also, “Competence and the Psychosexual Stages of Development,” Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960).