The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [2]
Dear Dr. Yoder: I do so want to thank you for the nice letter, which you have forwarded to me. I do so wish to thank you, withal, for the .50 you have also sent to me! Thank you for praising me on my choicy perusal of literature.
Finally, there is Leon Gabor, the youngest, highest functioning, and most heartbreaking of the three, who has suffered greatly from the compulsive religiosity and social estrangement of a mother who was also probably psychotic. At the time of Rokeach’s study, Leon has been hospitalized just five years, the others much longer. Leon’s expostulations are prickly, engaged, morose, manipulative, hilarious, sad, and very, very human:
I have no use for money…. I don’t want a thing that don’t belong to me. I don’t deserve it…. Where thy treasure is, there is thy heart. If you are absorbed with engrams of thought that deal with money, you’re a stumbling block unto yourself in most instances—anxiety, worry comes with it after you obtain money, and your desire to have more money, and then your desire to have it protected—all these bring about something which is not helpful to the physical, mental, and spiritual.
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti unfolds over twenty-five months. Rokeach assembles his protagonists daily, at first with the intention of bringing about a collision of their “primitive beliefs,” in the hopes of shocking them into some kind of recognition of the truth, as in Voltaire’s story. This approach is central to Rokeach’s work as a scholar and psychologist, the notion that changes in belief can effect wholesale changes in self and in community (see his later work, The Nature of Human Values). In this case, however, Rokeach’s belief that he could somehow lastingly ameliorate chronic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia is nearly as unlikely as what Clyde, Joseph, and Leon believe themselves. And yet the sheer doggedness of his experiment, as documented and recorded here in painstaking and moving detail, does result in more subtle transformations, and these transformations are what make reading The Three Christs of Ypsilanti so compelling.
Rokeach brings forth from the shuttered interiors of institutionalized psychiatric care these three men and gives them an opportunity to talk to one another and to shine a little light on their circumstances. Talk they do, at length, and a sense of community grows among them, little disposed to it though they are and unlikely though it may be. The men begin to sing at their daily meetings (usually “America the Beautiful”), they begin to engage with one another, they even cooperate on a couple of creative projects, despite their erratic and tempestuous moods—as in this beautiful passage in which Rokeach, after describing the frictions between his charges, also describes some of the good that came about:
I would often walk into the recreation room to call the men together for their daily meeting. I rarely had to search for them among the hundred men—there they would be, physically close, Joseph at the end of the table, then Leon, and then Clyde, as if they needed one another’s companionship, as if they needed to cling to someone familiar.
Having said this—that there is an admirable compassion about Rokeach’s approach, and that this approach could only have been undertaken before deinstitutionalization had done its worst—it’s also true that Rokeach, in his wish to produce results, is very free in his intervention in the men’s lives, moving them forcibly from one ward to another, changing their circumstances, appointing them to periodic chairmanships over one another, even writing letters to them from characters selected from among their particular delusions, a level of psychic intrusion nearly as deliberate, and manipulative, as Lacan’s celebrated “short sessions” (in which an analyst would abruptly walk out on a patient after a very short interval, leaving him to wonder and to fret at