The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [154]
Like Golyadkin, the minor civil servant in Dostoevski’s novel The Double, Joseph approached middle age feeling himself to be an incompetent male and suffering under the enormous discrepancy between his level of achievement and his level of aspiration. As Norman Cameron says:
Some time toward middle age, when a person turns thirty, thirty-five, or forty, comes the dawning realization that his life span actually is limited. With this recognition may also come fears that his lifelong hopes, overt or latent, will never be realized.[22]
Joseph attemped to reduce the discrepancy between fantasy and reality in order to avoid, in Lynd’s words, the “crumpling or failure of the whole self.”[23] by becoming God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost, and other great personages as well. The only concession he was willing to make to reality was that he was a weak God who had temporarily lost his values. What he seemed to be saying was that even as God he felt himself to be an ineffective and incompetent male, afraid to venture forth into the world. “I prophesize,” Joseph once said, “that the world in the future will be on such a sound basis that the peoples of the world will be safe—no such thing as hiding themselves in the basement or attic and being scared to death.”
Of the three, Leon was clearly the most competent. He was the only one who had a capacity for disciplined, competent work. He was a skilled worker before hospitalization, having worked as a electrician in industry and during the war in the Signal Corps. In the hospital he insisted on working to pay for his room and board; he did not want to be obligated to anyone, not even the state. On many occasions he had demonstrated his skill with electrical gadgets, performing, for example, minor repairs on the tape recorder and on the television set in the recreation room.
Leon’s confusion about his sexual identity involves, above everything else, a moral problem arising in the first place from the inculcation of an unbearable sense of guilt by a fanatical, psychotic woman who served as model for both father and mother. He felt worthless as dung because of forbidden sexual impulses toward himself and toward men and women, and because of his tremendous hostility toward others—a hostility he tried to deny and which therefore expressed itself in the projected feeling that others were forever trying to tempt and seduce him. In playing the Christ role, Leon was above all trying to be humble and good, and to follow the Ten Commandments, which in his interpretation forbade all manifestations of sex and aggression. Only in this way could he curb and control his sexual and aggressive impulses and thus prove that he was deserving of love.
But this account of Leon’s confused sexual identity is still incomplete. Our data suggest that he was obsessed not only with whether he was man or woman but also, like the hero in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, with whether he was man or beast. Leon was confused about being man or Yeti man, or dove, or jerboa rat, or fly, or bull. In view of his single model of a mother and a father, and the fact that he felt as sinful, guilt-ridden, worthless, and isolated as he did, it is almost inevitable that Leon, in giving up his identity as a man, would also give up his identity as a human being. Beyond the question: Am I a man or a woman? is the question: Am I human or inhuman? We are inclined to pay serious attention to Leon’s frequent references to human persons. He would say: “I would accept them as a human person.” And again: “You relieve pressure by trimming it. Then when I go out the girls don’t mean anything to me except as a human person.” Leon denied having any human relatives, asserted that he was hollowed-out and conceived through the seed of sub-human foster fathers, and insisted that he could form no attachments to human persons.
In identifying himself with the immaculately conceived Christ of Nazareth,