The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (7 page)

Ypsilanti State Hospital is located nine miles southeast of Ann Arbor and about seventy-five miles southeast of East Lansing. It was opened in 1931 with a bed capacity of 1,000; its present capacity is 4,100. Its personnel number 975; of them, five are staff psychiatrists and about twenty are resident psychiatrists. Despite such an unfavorable ratio of staff psychiatrists to patients, the staff at Ypsilanti State Hospital is typically engaged in a large variety of therapeutic programs and research projects designed to advance the theory and practice of psychotherapy with the mentally ill.

[
1
]For a discussion of earlier research on the theory and measurement of systems of belief, see Milton Rokeach:
The Open and Closed Mind
(New York: Basic Books; 1960).

[
2
]Erik H. Erikson: “Identity and the Life Cycle,”
Psychological Issues,
Vol. I, Monograph 1 (1959), p. 23.

[
3
]I am suggesting that ego identity in Erikson's sense depends not only on trust in parents but also on trust in the dependability of the physical world.

[
4
]Helen Merrell Lynd:
On Shame and the Search for Identity
(New York: Harcourt, Brace; 1958), pp. 45–7.

[
5
]I employ the concept of authority in the same way social psychologists employ the concept of reference persons or reference groups—any source outside the self to whom the person looks for information about facts or norms to guide his actions. The concepts of reference person and reference group have received increasing attention in recent years, and the research presented in Part Two of this work is intended as a contribution to the literature on this subject. See: H. H. Hyman: “The Psychology of Status,”
Archives of Psychology
, Vol. XV (1942); R. K. Merton and Alice S. Kitt: “Reference Groups,” in L. A. Coser and B. Rosenberg (Eds.):
Sociological Theory
(New York: Macmillan; 1957), pp. 264–72; T. M. Newcomb:
Social Psychology
(New York: Dryden; 1950); M. Sherif: “Reference Groups in Human Relations,” in L. A. Coser and B. Rosenberg (Eds.):
Sociological Theory
(New York: Macmillan; 1957), pp. 258–63; T. Shibutani: “Reference Groups as Perspectives,”
American Journal of Sociology
, Vol. 60 (1955), pp. 562–9; R. H. Turner: “Role-Taking, Role Standpoint, and Reference-Group Behavior,” in L. A. Coser and B. Rosenberg (Eds.):
Sociological Theory
(New York: Macmillan; 1957), pp. 272–90.

[
6
]Erikson, however, uses the term
ideology
to refer to unconscious tendencies that underlie religious, political, and scientific thought. His conception of ideology seems to be closer to our conception of primitive beliefs and beliefs about authority. See Erik H. Erikson:
Young Man Luther
(New York: Norton; 1958), p. 22.

[
7
]It may be suggested that what Erikson calls group identity develops through beliefs about authority and peripheral beliefs; ego identity develops through primitive beliefs.

[
8
]Lynd: op. cit., pp. 14–15.

[
9
]O. S. S. Assessment Staff:
Assessment of Men
(New York: Rinehart; 1948).

[
10
]Solomon E. Asch:
Social Psychology
(New York: Prentice-Hall; 1952).

[
11
] Robert J. Lifton:
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
(New York: Norton; 1961); Edgar H. Shein: “The Chinese Indoctrination Program for Prisoners of War,”
Psychiatry
, Vol. II (1956), pp. 149–72; Nathan Leites and Elsa Bernant:
Ritual of Liquidation
(Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press; 1954); Arthur Koestler:
Darkness At Noon
(New York: Macmillan; 1941).

[
12
]Lifton: op. cit., p. 68.

[
13
]Lifton: op. cit., p. 467.

[
14
] The literature on attitude change is too voluminous to cite here. Recent theory and research on attitude organization and change can be found in Leon Festinger:
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
(Evanston, Illinois: Row, Peterson: 1957); Fritz Heider:
The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations
(New York: Wiley; 1958); Daniel Katz and Ezra Stotland: “A Preliminary Statement to a Theory of Attitude Structure and Change,” in S. Koch (Ed.):
Psychology: A Study of Science
, Vol. III (New York: McGraw-Hill; 1959); C. E. Osgood, G. J. Suci, and P. H. Tannenbaum:
The Measurement of Meaning
(Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press; 1957); Helen Peak, Barbara Muney, and Margaret Clay: “Opposites Structures, Defenses, and Attitudes,” in
Psychological Monographs
, Whole No. 495, (1960); Milton J. Rosenberg, et al.:
Attitude Organization and Change
(New Haven: Yale University Press; 1960); M. B. Smith, J. S. Bruner, and R. W. White:
Opinions and Personality
(New York: Wiley; 1956).

[
15
]Cesare Beccaria-Bonesana:
An Essay on Crimes and Punishment. With Commentary by M. D. Voltaire
(Stanford, California: Academic Reprints; 1953), pp. 187–8. (A facsimile reprint of the American edition of 1819, translated from the French by Edward D. Ingraham. Philadelphia: P. H. Nicklin; 1819.)

[
16
]R. Lindner:
The Fifty-Minute Hour
(New York: Bantam; 1958), pp. 193–4.

Clyde Benson

C
LYDE'S FATHER
, a farmer and carpenter by trade, was a hardworking, successful, respected member of a rural community in western Michigan. His family and acquaintances described him as a man of good disposition, who was, however, “severe” and given to losing his temper. Clyde's mother, according to reports, was fretful, worrisome, ambitious, and hard-working, too. She was deeply religious and read the Bible every day. Both she and her husband belonged to a small Protestant Fundamentalist church and both were teetotalers. Mrs. Benson had been in poor health for a long time. Clyde was born after she had been married for six years and had suffered several miscarriages. It is, therefore, not surprising that Clyde was overprotected from the day of his birth, nor that throughout his life he maintained a childlike dependence on his parents. He was, however, closer to his mother than to his father and he complained bitterly that his sister, two years younger than he, was his father's pet.

Clyde married at twenty-four. His wife, Shirley, was the daughter of a prosperous farmer. For the first ten years of their marriage, the couple lived with Clyde's parents; for the next five they lived on a rented farm three miles away. Thereafter, with his father-in-law's help, Clyde bought a farm of his own. Since the father-in-law
was divorced, he moved in with the younger couple and Clyde worked both his own farm and Shirley's father's.

Shirley died following an abortion, eighteen years after the couple were married. Clyde, then forty-two, was left with three daughters. In the next year, a whole string of misfortunes assailed him.

Within four months, his father died, of a liver condition, at the age of seventy. Shortly thereafter, Shirley's father died. Next, Clyde's oldest daughter married and moved away. Then his mother, also in her seventies, died—case records state that she had become a morphine addict. By this time, Clyde had begun to drink heavily.

When Shirley died, Clyde tried to persuade his oldest daughter to put off her marriage and keep house for him and the two younger girls. She refused, and for a year and a half he had to depend on his two younger daughters to keep house for him.

Then, in 1934, Clyde married again. The two girls went to live with their maternal grandmother, and Clyde moved to the farm of his new wife, Alma. At the time of their marriage, Alma had two teen-age children of her own and was pregnant with Clyde's child. The couple had known each other from childhood, and it was Alma who had courted Clyde. She came to visit him often after Shirley died and, as she too was a heavy drinker, the two of them frequently went out drinking together.

By the time Clyde remarried he had acquired quite a bit of property. In addition to his own and Alma's farms, he had inherited a half share in his father's and all of his father-in-law's. He was angry that his father had left his younger sister the other half share, and he saw this as further proof that his father always did more for her than for him.

According to Clyde's second daughter, he was a devoted father, who often played with the children. She feels that he never really grew up. He seemed unable to make decisions on his own, and always sought the advice of his parents, wife, and father-in-law. She remembers from childhood that Clyde once left home with two
other men to ride the freights westward, where he had heard that there was a great deal of money to be made in little time. This would not have been surprising if Clyde had been very young, she commented, but he was then thirty-three years old. After having been gone for six weeks, he came home broke.

The daughter further says that Clyde was moody and had an uncontrollable temper, but that, fortunately, both his mother and his first wife had been able to handle him. Shirley, according to her daughter, was stronger than Clyde. “My mother babied him and treated him as his own mother did. But she loved him and the marriage was happy.”

After his marriage to Alma, Clyde continued to drink heavily. “I have to drink to drown my sorrows,” he said. Within seven years there were two more girls and a boy, but money and land had been literally squandered away. Alma says that he drank so heavily he had to sell his stock and even his furniture to get money for liquor. Once he had raised the necessary cash he would go off for three or four days at a time, leaving the stock untended. When the money finally ran out, Clyde left Alma and the three children, and took a cheap room in town.

Because of his excessive drinking, Alma was separated from Clyde in 1940 and divorced him in 1941. She took a job as a farm laborer to support herself and the three children. In 1942, Clyde was sent to jail for drunkenness. There he became violent. He tore up the bedding, ripped off his clothes, and, standing at the jail window in the nude, tried to break it. Then he began to rant, praying one minute and cursing the next. He claimed to be God and Christ and said he heard Shirley's voice from an airplane. Moreover, he said he was King of Heaven, reborn through Shirley, the Queen of Heaven. The religious character of his delusions was surprising to his family, since Clyde had never been a particularly religious man. It was after this episode that he was committed to a mental hospital.

The only previous sign of instability that Clyde showed was ten years earlier, shortly after Shirley died. At that time, he is reported
to have walked into a grocery store, where an acquaintance of his, Charlie, was standing at the counter. When the clerk asked Clyde what he wanted, he said he would take everything Charlie was taking. Just to see if Clyde meant what he said, Charlie ordered a superfluous amount. Clyde did take all the groceries and left.

At the time of his commitment, Clyde was fifty-three. Diagnois: schizophrenia, paranoid type. Prognosis for recovery: poor. He had been hospitalized seventeen years when he, Joseph, and Leon were brought together.

Joseph Cassel

Joseph was born Josephine Cassel in a city in the province of Quebec, Canada. He was the first of nine children, seven of whom are still living. Josephine disliked his name intensely and changed it to Joseph. He had been given the girl's name, Josephine, by his father in memory of a young woman, already dead, whom the older man admired.

The community in which Joseph grew up was almost entirely French-Canadian. His father would not allow English to be spoken in the home, even though he himself had been born in Canada of French parents and had been taught English in school. The schools emphasized English rather than French history and literature, but Joseph's father was insistent in preserving his French origins and cultural patterns. Among his ancestors had been a famous historian and a poet.

Joseph's birth and early development were apparently normal. He completed the eighth grade in parochial school at the age of twelve. He was a good student, and at an early age acquired an unusual interest in English literature. His father did not approve of his interest in books and got him a job as grocery boy as soon as he finished the eighth grade.

Although the entire family attended the Catholic Church, neither of Joseph's parents were particularly religious. His grandmother, however, was and often appealed to God on a personal
level. When Joseph's mother died (the boy was then sixteen), she took him to live with her.

Joseph's father was described by those close to him as independent, quick-tempered, and cruel to his wife. In later years he is said to have become very nervous and so fearful at night that he always slept with the lights on. He worked as an inspector for the city in which he lived. Joseph's mother, who died while giving birth to a ninth child at the age of thirty-six, was described by Joseph and others as a good woman and mother. Joseph cannot easily be made to speak of his early life, although he did say once that his father had picked him up bodily in a rage and thrown him down. Joseph was afraid of his father as a boy, and he did not get over his fear even as a grown man. His father had remarried and was still living, now on a small farm.

All the children left home as soon as they could. Two of the brothers refused to let their father know their whereabouts for several years. The other children—four boys and two girls—are now married and doing well. None has any history of mental illness.

As a young man, Joseph immigrated to Detroit with high hopes of getting a better job. He wanted money for more education and for travel. He had always wanted to be a writer, and he read voraciously late into the night—novels, dramas, biographies, philosophy, history, and current events. He enjoyed sports and liked to attend the theater.

He showed little interest in women until he met Beatrice, whom he married when he was twenty-four. During the first year of their marriage Joseph was cold and undemonstrative. He said it was unhealthy to kiss and would not let his wife touch his face. He did not want children and tried to persuade Beatrice to share this view. Nevertheless, she remembers the early years of their marriage as happy. Joseph was sexually adequate as long as they were careful about “rituals”; that is, everything had to be clean—the sheets, the clothes, herself. Beatrice wanted children on religious grounds and because, she said, “you get married to have children.”