The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [145]
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.
PART THREE
CHAPTER XIX
THE STRIVING FOR GOODNESS AND FOR GREATNESS
WE 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