In July, 1959, Dr. Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University, entered the Ypsilanti State Hospital to begin a research project. He took along with him a group of assistants and a tape recorder. In Ward D-23 of the hospital were gathered three men, pseudonymously named Clyde Bensen, Joseph Cassel, and Leon Gabor. Each suffered from the same psychotic delusion: that he was Jesus Christ. Dr. Rokeach had several intentions in bringing these men together: he wanted to observe the possible results of a direct confrontation of their delusions, to conduct research into general problems of identity, and to explore “the processes by which systems of belief and behavior might be changed through messages purporting to come from significant authorities who existed only in the imaginations of the delusional Christs.” For the next two years these three psychotic men lived together under the close supervision and observation of Dr. Rokeach and his assistants. They worked together, held frequent meetings, were set common tasks, and were subjected to a number of experiments. Tape recordings were made of their speech—soliloquies, their meetings together, interviews with Dr. Rokeach. After two years of this activity, Dr. Rokeach concluded his recordings and experiments and left the hospital. His three delusional charges were returned to their abandonment in the wards.
On one side, Dr. Rokeach’s work represents a further contribution to the study of how human beings behave in extreme situations and under extreme conditions; it is among the few such studies to have been cast in the form of an experiment. His three subjects shared a common systematic delusion about their identity, one that could not be broken into or changed from the outside, since it is in the nature of these delusions that they “cannot be effectively contradicted by another person because the deluded person will accept no external referents or authorities.” Certain psychotic states derive their stability and power from their ability to sustain themselves without reference to the outside world. Their stability is also their horror; to the observer such psychotic states seem as impenetrable as a rusty safe to which the combination has been lost. At the same time, however, even a psychotic who has a mistaken belief about his identity retains another “primitive belief which is based on reality…the belief that only one person can have a particular identity.” (Dr. Rokeach never explains why this belief cannot be given up too, but apparently it cannot.) In bringing these three Christs together, Dr. Rokeach “proposed to bring into dissonant relation two primitive beliefs within each of them: his delusional belief in his identity and his realistic belief that only one person can have a given identity.” In other words, Dr. Rokeach undertook to create a severe conflict in each of these men, to bring about “as untenable a human situation as is conceivable.” And his prediction was that “in a controlled environment wherein escape was not possible, something would have to give.” His project may be thought of as an effort to disrupt a stable, if insane, identity; with three crazy men in hand, he set about to derange their craziness. The circumstances inevitably suggest a concentration camp run in reverse, or brainwashing administered by angelic commissars. Indeed it is in the literature on both these subjects that Dr. Rokeach’s work in part takes its origins.
But The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is more than the record of an experiment in the outermost reaches of social psychology. Among other things it represents, in an unpretentious but remarkably vivid way, what institutionalized madness is like. Everyone knows the statistics which are supposed to define the mad scene in America today—that mental illness is our most common affliction, that more beds in institutions are given over to the care of the mentally ill than to any other disease, etc., etc. As so often happens, statistics like these blur our image of mental illness as much as they help to convey its reality. Dr. Rokeach operates on a slighter and more manageable scale: we learn from him that in Michigan there are more than 25,000 people confined to public mental institutions; that in the Ypsilanti State Hospital there are more than 4,000 patients; that to care for these patients there are five staff psychiatrists and twenty resident psychiatrists; that this ratio is typical as is its hideous inadequacy. Under these conditions, patients can expect to see a doctor “maybe once a year.” It is no surprise that public mental institutions are places of detention and custody, not of treatment, rehabilitation, or cure. The three delusional Christs of Dr. Rokeach’s study are permanent Inmates of the hospital. They have spent an appalling amount of time in the lock-up; two of them have been in mental hospitals for more than twenty years apiece; the third had, in 1959, already spent five years in “custodial confinement.” However inadequate the treatment offered to mental patients who are public charges, the three Christs received more “sustained attention” than any patients in the history of Ypsilanti State Hospital. Still, after two years with Dr. Rokeach they were as mad as ever.
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Part of the poignancy of psychosis is that in some odd sense it seems to make no difference whether it is treated or not. The institutionalized psychotic has been abandoned by his family and to some degree by society too, even though he is its charge. But the saddest fact of all is that before his final desertion by society, a whole series of catastrophic abandonments, including the abandonment of himself, has taken place. As a document of the quiet hopelessness of psychosis, of its simple and dreary finality, Dr. Rokeach’s book possesses a modest distinction. On a typical summer’s day, for example, “Joseph often wore three pairs of socks—yellow, then pink, then yellow. He wore a pair of women’s horn-rimmed glasses without lenses to which he managed to attach a lorgnette…. he also threw towels and loaves of bread into the toilet and tossed magazines and books out of the window. When Leon asked him why he did this, Joseph replied: ‘Everything’s all right—the world is saved.’ ” Who is this character out of a movie or comic strip, this familiar figure from Major Hoople’s boarding house? So long as one retains this comfortable distance, no further questions are necessary. But when one stops to consider that Joseph is a man sixty years old, that he has a family and children, that he worked and thought and lived for forty years before he took leave of the world for good—that he is still somebody’s father!—all one’s usual defenses against such terrible facts collapse. It is one of the virtues of Dr. Rokeach’s book that it never ceases to represent these men as human beings, that it is faithful to their humanity, including the humanity of their psychoses.
This Issue
June 11, 1964