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or in part, when such a confrontation occurs. Some years ago I observed exactly this while on the staff of a psychiatric sanitarium in Maryland. At that time we had a middleaged paranoid woman who clung to the delusion that she was Mary, Mother of God. It happened that we admitted another patient with the same delusion some months after the first had been received. Both were rather mild-mannered people, both Catholics, both from a similar socio-economic level. On the lawn one day, happily in the presence of another staff member and myself, the two deluded women met and began to exchange confidences. Before long each revealed to the other her “secret” identity. What followed was most instructive. The first, our “oldest” patient, received the information with visible perturbation and an immediate reaction of startle. “Why you can’t be, my dear,” she said, “you must be crazy. I am the Mother of God.” The new patient regarded her companion sorrowfully and, in a voice resonant with pity, said, “I’m afraid it’s you who are mixed up; I am Mary.” There followed a brief but polite argument which I was restrained from interfering with by my older and more experienced colleague, who bade me merely to listen and observe. After a while the argument ceased, and there followed a long silence during which the antagonists inspected each other warily. Finally, the “older” patient beckoned to the doctor standing with me.

“Dr. S.,” she asked, “what was the name of our Blessed Mary’s Mother?”

“I think it was Anne,” he replied.

At once, this patient turned to the other, her face glowing and her eyes shining. “If you’re Mary,” she declared, “I must be Anne, your mother.” And the two women embraced.

As a postscript to this story, it should be recorded that the woman who surrendered her Mother of God delusion thereafter responded rapidly to treatment and was soon discharged.[16]

Both accounts suggest a confrontation leading to recovery. In Simon Morin’s case, the recovery was short-lived. In that of the Mother of God, we are not told what happened to her subsequently, whether she too “relapsed into a former state of derangement.” Both cases are quoted above in their entirety, and in neither are there any details about the process, sequence, or scope of change either in the delusional system of belief or in behavior.

Through the good offices of Dr. Vernon Stehman, Deputy Director of the Department of Mental Health in Michigan, inquiries were sent in the fall of 1958 to five hospitals for the mentally ill within the state. The objective was to locate two or more patients who believed delusively that they were the same person. The replies revealed that of the 25,000 or so mental patients in the state hospitals of Michigan there were only a handful with delusional identities. There were no Napoleons or Caesars, no Khrushchevs or Eisenhowers. Two people claimed to be members of the Ford family, but not the same person. We located one Tom Mix, one Cinderella, a member of the Morgan family, a Mrs. God, and an assortment of lesser known personages.

About half a dozen or so patients were reported to believe that they were Christ, but closer investigation revealed that some of them did not consistently evince this delusion, and that some were suffering from obvious organic damage. From the records it appeared that only three who were free of organic damage did consistently believe they were Christ. Two of them were at Ypsilanti State Hospital, the third at another. The latter was transferred to Ypsilanti, and all three were shortly thereafter assigned to the same ward. All this, of course, was the result of the cordial cooperation of the psychiatric staff at Ypsilanti State Hospital, all of whose members shared my hope that the research we were about to engage in might lead to results of considerable scientific importance and, furthermore, to significant improvements in the mental state of the three patients.

Ypsilanti State Hospital is located nine miles southeast of Ann Arbor and about seventy-five miles southeast of East Lansing. It was opened