The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [152]
As Leon withdrew from Miss Anderson, additional changes developed in his system of beliefs, culminating in the delusion that he, being a G. M., P. M., was married only to himself. He thus did not need anyone else.
Paranoid States, Homosexuality, and Bisexual Confusion
While it was our main purpose to study the effects of certain experimental procedures on changes in delusional systems of belief and in behavior, we cannot conclude this study without asking ourselves how it came about that Clyde and Joseph and Leon lost—or, to be more precise, actively discarded—their identities in the first place and felt it necessary to take on more grandiose ones. The classic theory is the one originally advanced by Freud in his analysis of the famous Schreber case,[18] In essence, Freud says that paranoid delusions of grandeur are primarily a defense against homosexuality. More recent psychiatric views, such as those put forward by Norman Cameron, Sylvano Arieti, and Edith Weigert,[19] suggest that the basic problem is not homosexuality but a confusion about sexual identity. Our data support the more recent view. All three of the delusional Christs seemed to suffer from uncertainty about their roles as men.
Clyde, overprotected from birth, had never really had the opportunity to become an autonomous and active male. Even as he approached middle age, he seemed to be overly dependent on his wife, his parents, and his father-in-law, all of whom made the important decisions for him. It is not without significance that his break with reality had its onset when all the people he depended on died within a few months of one another. He was a passive, infantile man who needed others to take care of him, and we saw this pattern repeated in the role he played daily in the drama of the three delusional Christs. He was content to sit back and let things happen to him; he never took the initiative in trying to alter the social situation, as did Joseph and Leon. He made virtually no demands on his social or physical environment.
Our data suggest that Joseph, too, had grounds to suffer confusion about his sexual identity. He had been christened Josephine[20] by a harsh, sadistic father who, proud of his French heritage, did not permit English to be spoken in the home. Joseph rejected the name Josephine but at the same time was unable to form a masculine identification with his Francophile father. He thus became a weak God working for the cause of the English—a cause directly opposed to his father’s. Joseph’s sexual confusion expressed itself in other ways as well. It came out in his sexual relations with his wife, and in his desire that she go to work so that he could stay home and “write.” We see it break out occasionally, despite Joseph’s denial of interest in sex, in his delusional references not only to women but to men—both were apparently able to arouse his sexual passions.
The confusion about sexual identity is most clearly seen in Leon, who was raised from infancy by a psychotic woman in a home permanently vacated by the father. She had to serve double duty as a model for father and mother, and obviously played both roles badly, with disastrous results for her son. Leon’s confusion about his sexual identity expressed itself in many ways on many levels. He identified himself with Christ, the gentlest and tenderest of men; Jesus Christ represented the vine and the rock, and these represented both male and female sexual symbols. When Leon drew a picture of a penis, it also contained within it a vagina. Terrified of his confused sexual feelings, he was often observed to be fearful of men because they were men, and of women because they were women. To his name, Dr. R. I. Dung, Sir, he added the appellations God Morphodite, Potential Madame, the meaning of which is self-evident. And eventually Leon gave up all his successive wives to marry himself, his “maleity” being married, guiltlessly, to his “femaleity”. And as Leon’s delusions changed we learned more and more about what was really