The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [1]
I could address this topic at great length, but if I did so, I would fail to introduce the book we have before us, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach, a powerful, strange, and paradoxical story from another time, the time before deinstitutionalization. The time when it was reasonable to house the mentally ill somewhere where they could be shielded, to a limited extent, from the more florid tendencies associated with their disabilities. The time when housing them, even if imperfectly, was considered a just use of the resources of the people because it made life easier for many of the ill, for their relatives, and for all of us, especially those in urban settings, who have since, however, become used to stepping over bodies.
Rokeach’s very simple proposal was to see what would happen if you assembled three men, each of whom believed that he and he alone was Christ himself, and had them keep company with one another. These men were long-term inpatients, and Rokeach wanted to see if this procedure would free them from a shared but perhaps incompatible illusion. At the time of Rokeach’s experiment, there was support for such an effort to formulate a new treatment option. Novel approaches to the treatment of the mentally ill appeared throughout much of the twentieth century, in the work of Freud, Jung, Laing, Reich, Lacan, Bateson, and others. Who is to say that these ideas were wrong, simply because they did not effect a full-scale remission of symptoms? The ideas were more radical than those of the psychiatric mainstream of the time, and so were the sources of the ideas.
Rokeach’s experiment was prompted in part by a text from Voltaire, on the subject of one Simon Morin, burned at the stake in 1663:
He was a deranged man, who believed that he saw visions; and even carried his folly so far as to imagine, that he was sent from God, and gave out that he was incorporated with Jesus Christ.
The parliament, very judiciously, condemned him to imprisonment in a mad-house. What is exceeding singular, there was, at that time, confined in the same mad-house, another crazy man who called himself the eternal father. Simon Morin was so struck with the folly of his companion, that his eyes were opened to the truth of his own condition. He appeared, for a time, to have recovered his right senses.
One of the splendid things about The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is that, drawing inspiration from literature, it takes on literary qualities itself, in that literature, first and last, aims for the meaningful description of consciousness, of personhood. Rokeach, a social psychologist rather than an MD, is above all interested in the forms personhood can take, and it is with considerable flair that he limns the dramatic and very moving narrative of his experiment.
The dialogue with literature conducted within The Three Christs of Ypsilanti lofts it into the company of such great psychological and medical case histories as Freud’s Dora: Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, A. R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World, Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.
These case histories introduce us to unmistakable human beings with genuinely human difficulties, and so does Rokeach’s. The three Christs are three great characters. Clyde Benson,[1] the eldest (and, it seems to me, the most ill of the three), is a small-scale farmer who ran into a great number of personal tragedies (including losing a wife to an abortion), and who succumbed to the pressure of his losses. His is the least engaged and most bluntly reactive of the voices here: “You’re a bullheaded fool,” or “I am God!,” or “I own the hospital.”[2] Then there is Joseph Cassel, from francophone Quebec, a would-be writer and (in all likelihood) repressed gay man in his fifties,