The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (43 page)

This is I, God, Joseph Cassel, who continually go to the library to copy from books to make all of the reports.

The last book,
Alone
, was written by me, God. The exploration which comes after this book is by Byrd on account of his decamping me. At that time, the exploration was just about starting when Byrd and his cohorts showed up. I was authorized by President Eisenhower to go on with the exploration to the South or rather North Pole.

We, the workers for the world, will keep on going, and, one beautiful day, there will not be an
enemy
left.

This beautiful day will never come soon enough.

I'll see you in the next report.

So long, I feel much better, thank you.

W
E SAID GOODBYE
to Clyde and Joseph and Leon on August 15, 1961—two years, one and a half months after I first brought them together. During this time we accumulated a vast amount of information—about their earlier histories, their characters, their daily lives in a mental hospital, their attitudes toward themselves and toward others with whom they had dealings. The data thus obtained are relevant to many issues: to the problems of schizophrenia and paranoia; to the problem of identity; to the nature of authority or reference groups in the mentally disturbed; to the psychoanalytic theory of symbolism; to psychotherapy; and to the role of religion in mental health and illness.

But most important from the standpoint of the present research is the knowledge we gained from observing the reactions of each of the three Christs to confrontations with others who claimed the same identity and the reactions of Joseph and Leon to communications purporting to come from people who were part of their delusional systems. We must now assess the extent to which this material lends support to the hypotheses that guided the study and the theoretical concepts underlying it.

The Ubiquitous Identity Problem

Consider first the problem of identity. Aside from whatever intrinsic interest the story of the three Christs has, what generalizations about normal people can emerge from the study of these three psychotic men? What can be learned that has relevance to an understanding of systems of belief and the primitive belief in identity, beyond what is exemplified in the paranoid schizophrenics studied here?

In my readings of current psychiatric literature, I have been struck by the variety of contexts in which the question of the sense of identity, and disturbances of that sense, arise. Present-day psychiatry seems to be coming more and more to regard the many forms of mental illness as different manifestations of the same disturbance: disturbance of the sense of identity. One does not have to renounce one's name and assume a more grandiose one in order to manifest such a disturbance. To put the present investigation in proper perspective it is necessary to link the delusions of the three Christs not only with other psychopathological disturbances in the sense of identity but also with more normal strivings to maintain a secure set of beliefs about one's own identity and one's group identifications—which Erik Erikson has more succinctly called ego and group identity.

Of the various psychopathological disturbances in the sense of identity, I should first mention amnesias and multiple personalities, which have been studied by many psychiatrists.[
1
] These have been described by R. W. White in the following terms:

Whether we are dealing with a brief amnesia, a more extended fugue, or a fully developed double or multiple personality, the central feature of the disorder is a loss of personal identity. The patient forgets who he is and where he is. He loses the symbols of identity and also the memories of his previous life that support a continuing sense of selfhood.[
2
]

Perhaps even more important is the fact that modern psychiatry is coming increasingly to recognize that the whole complex problem of schizophrenia in
all
its manifestations fundamentally represents a disturbance in beliefs and feelings about personal identity[
3
] and that such disturbances arise from what Paul Federn, in his book
Ego Psychology and the Psychoses
,[
4
] has called a dissolution of ego boundaries and a loss of ego feeling. In his book,
The Divided Self
, R. D. Laing describes this identity disturbance in schizophrenia as follows:

It is the ultimate and most paradoxically absurd possible defence, beyond which magic defences can go no further. And it, in one or other of its forms, is the basic defence, so far as I have been able to see, in every form of psychosis. It can be stated in its most general form as:
the denial of being, as a means of preserving being
. The schizophrenic feels he has killed his “self,” and this appears to be in order to avoid being killed. He is dead, in order to remain alive.[
5
]

But, as has been pointed out, the concern with beliefs involving a sense of identity is of even wider scope, having application to normal persons no less than to schizophrenics and to other persons suffering from pathological states. Erik H. Erikson[
6
] has contributed more than anyone else to our general theoretical understanding of
the development of a sense of identity, in his careful and detailed descriptions of the various stages in the formation of identity and in the crises of identity which face each person as he proceeds from life to death. In so doing, Erikson has enriched immeasurably the psychoanalytic theory of personality development, a theory meant to apply to all human beings, which describes the unfolding of each human personality in terms of passage from a first phase of identity and crisis of identity in “infancy” through a series of seven additional phases culminating in “adulthood” and “mature age.”[
7
]

The theme of identity will also be found in many other writings. Mention may be made here of the works of Helen Merrell Lynd, Edith Weigert, Paul Federn, Carl Rogers, the existentialists, Erich Fromm, Abraham H. Maslow, and Gordon Allport, all of whom are concerned with the problem of identity, even though they employ other concepts, such as estrangement, depersonalization, loneliness and isolation, self-alienation, anomie, becoming, existence, self-actualization, and self-realization.[
8
]

A number of these writers have pointed eloquently to the pervasiveness of the problem of identity in modern society.

Edith Weigert writes:

One could speculate why the problem of identity concerns us so much in our time. It concerns not only the psychiatric patient who is
particularly inflexible or helplessly volatile in the face of change— there is a general insecurity about identity in our time.[
9
]

Allen Wheelis:

During the past fifty years there has been a change in the experienced quality of life, with a result that identity is now harder to achieve and harder to maintain. The formally dedicated Marxist who now is unsure of everything; the Christian who loses his faith; the workman who comes to feel that his work is piecemeal and meaningless; the scientist who decides that science is futile, that the fate of the world will be determined by power politics—such persons are of our time, and they suffer the loss or impairment of identity.[
10
]

Helen Merrell Lynd:

Awareness of loneliness, of isolation, is one of the most characteristic experiences of the contemporary world. Marx's chief condemnation of capitalism is that it alienates the individual. The phenomenon of individual isolation is a cornerstone of existential philosophy, and the fact of alienation in the contemporary world is one thing that gives existentialism its contemporary appeal. Freud regards separation and fear of separation as one of the main factors in anxiety. The situation of isolation is a central theme in Fromm's
Escape from Freedom
, in Sullivan's psychology of interpersonal relations and in Durkheim's and Merton's analysis of
anomie
.[
11
]

I have offered all these examples simply to point up the fact that the present study is unique only in the sense that it deals with extremes of loneliness, social anomie, and alienation from society. In giving up their ego identities, Clyde, Joseph, and Leon gave up the rose as well as the name; they gave up their group identities, their identifications with family, religion, country, and occupation, in order to become Dead Latin and Yeti, to work for the cause of the Ka and for the cause of an Empire which no longer exists. Clyde and Joseph and Leon are really unhappy caricatures of human beings; in them we can see with terrible clarity some of the
factors that can lead any man to give up realistic beliefs and adopt instead a more grandiose identity.

And they are caricatures of all men in another sense too. I believe it was the German philosopher Fichte who pointed out years ago that to some extent all of us strive to be like God or Christ. One or another facet of this theme is to be found in a good deal of Western literature—for example, in the writings of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Dostoevsky. Bertrand Russell said it best of all: “Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.”[
12
] It is thus surprising that we found only three delusional Christs in Michigan, but perhaps not surprising that we found not a single Napoleon or Hitler. Who, better than Jesus of Nazareth, can symbolize Western man's conscious and unconscious striving to die and be doubly redeemed, in order to live a life everlastingly good and great at the same time?

Identity Confrontations

The three Christs did not recover their sanity as a result of the identity confrontations. Although Joseph and Leon responded and changed as a result of our experimental procedures, we—unlike the atomic physicists—have not as yet learned how to control reactions in order to achieve an enduring, socially desirable end. Our findings do not support those of Voltaire, who tells of the temporary recovery in Simon Morin, or those of Lindner, who implies a more enduring recovery in the older of the two Virgin Marys. Apparently, mere confrontation with others claiming the same identity is not enough to effect such a radical change in delusional systems. The three men had developed their delusions for good reasons, and these reasons, whatever their nature, did not change as a result of confrontation. Thus, our investigations do not substantiate Lindner's conclusion: “…it is impossible for two
objects to occupy the same place at the same time. When … another person invades the delusion, the original occupant finds himself literally forced to give way.”[
13
]

But the confrontations were obviously upsetting and the three men certainly did not ignore them. Clearly, all of them felt threatened. The profound contradiction posed by the others' claims had somehow penetrated deeply, to become transformed into an inner conflict between two primitive beliefs: each man's delusional belief in his own identity and his realistic belief that only one person can have any given identity. Many times Joseph said: “There is only one God”; and Clyde said: “I'm the only one”; and Leon said: “I won't deny that you gentlemen are instrumental gods—small ‘g.' But I'm the one who was created before time began.”

To defend themselves against this inner conflict, the three men had to muster up the whole battery of defense mechanisms described by psychoanalysis, including the most infantile mechanism of all—
denial
. As Anna Freud writes:

This mechanism belongs to a normal phase in the development of the infantile ego, but, if it recurs in later life, it indicates an advanced stage of psychic disease…. Under the influence of shock … it denies the facts and substitutes for the unbearable reality some agreeable delusion.[
14
]

Denial was clearly the mechanism most favored by Clyde, the oldest of the three—and also by Joseph. Recall how Clyde tried to make the whole problem of confrontation disappear by simply denying that the other two were alive; they were corpses, he said, with machines inside them that did the talking. There was now nothing left to explain or reconcile. When Clyde could not meet the threat of confrontation through this form of denial, as happened when he saw the first news article, he manifested another extreme form of denial. He fell into a stupor.

Joseph, too, defended his delusional system of belief mainly by denial. Recall how he “laughed off” the early confrontations. Recall his saying about
truth
: “If it hurts too much man is wise to turn away from it.” Recall how he reacted to the first newspaper clipping about the three delusional Christs. He found it interesting: the three men were clearly insane; they belonged in a mental hospital; they should be treated for their craziness. But he did not know the three men described in the story!

Clyde was, however, generally more “successful” than Joseph in his use of the denial mechanism. This may be because he was perhaps further along in his psychosis—that is, he was more regressed. Clyde could for the most part sit back on the sidelines and let the two “dead men” fight it out; at the same time he could and did enjoy their companionship when things were more peaceful. But Joseph's denial mechanism was a bit more faulty. With repeated confrontation it seemed to break down. Recall, for example, his saying: “I'm not laughing it off any more,” and his admission, when shown the
second
news clipping, that he, himself, was one of the “Three Men Named Jesus.”

These differences between Clyde and Joseph notwithstanding, the two men were essentially alike in their use of denial as their main defense against the identity confrontations. And herein lies a major difference between Clyde and Joseph on the one hand and Leon on the other. As I have already pointed out, Leon's defenses were more intellectualized and systematized in character. He did not typically deny the facts; rather, in order to account for them, he tried to explain them in terms of his systematized delusions. In this way he was able to preserve his self-image as a rational, logical, consistent person, something Clyde and Joseph never tried to do. Whereas Joseph denied the purpose of our research by reversing it (we were his allies, come to convince the others that they were not Christ), Leon perceived it more realistically. “I love truth even though it hurts,” Leon said. He did not deny that the others were Christ, but explained what kinds of Christs they were. And he did not deny, as did Joseph and Clyde, that
there were three persons at Ypsilanti claiming to be Christ, as was set forth in the news clipping. Instead, he angrily attacked the motives and competence of those responsible for the story.