The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (46 page)

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).

[
22
] Cameron: op. cit., pp. 511–12.

[
23
] Lynd: op. cit., p. 52.

T
HE 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.

Some Second Thoughts About the Three Christs:
Twenty Years Later

T
WENTY
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 method 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.