The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [3]
One of these interventions, described in one of the most arresting passages in the book, features the unmarried Leon, who comes to believe in a fictitious wife that Rokeach has invented for him and in whose name Rokeach has regularly been writing him letters.
Leon’s initial response is disbelief. Without divulging the contents of the letter, he tells the aide that although he has never seen his wife’s handwriting he knows that she didn’t write or sign this letter. He says further that he doesn’t like the idea of people imposing on his beliefs and that he is going to look into this.
A couple of hours later, during the daily meeting, we notice that Leon is extremely depressed and we ask him why. He evasively replies that he is meditating, but he does not mention the letter [from his wife]. This is the first time, as far as we know, that he has ever kept information from us.
He’s depressed about the letters! And about the diminished opportunities for love in his long-term incarceration! What a surprise! And yet this passage is followed by one even more poignant: “August 4. This is the day Leon’s wife is supposed to visit him. He goes outdoors shortly before the appointed hour and does not return until it is well past.” That is, Leon waits for his wife, a wife who doesn’t exist and who doesn’t materialize when she says she’s going to, and when no good comes of Leon’s desire for reunion with this wife, he withdraws further. A strange thing does occur in the process, however: Leon, under the siege of his imaginary wife,[3] stops responding to the divine sobriquets he has affected (the most frequent is Rex), and demands that he be called by the more earthy name of R.I. Dung. The reader acquainted with schizophrenia will likely construe this development as an expression of mitigated self-regard, played out in the symbolic realm, or perhaps a response to a “double bind” of the sort that Gregory Bateson imputes to schizophrenics. But there can be no doubt that, at least for a time, Leon no longer asserts himself as the son of God, or at least is willing to modify or suppress his belief for short-term gain: matrimonial society.
A 1981 afterword to a paperback edition of Three Christs finds Rokeach seriously reconsidering his intrusions into the men’s lives: “I now almost regret having written and published [the study] when I did.” Rokeach further casts himself as a fourth delusional Christ in the project, noting his “God-like” control of the lives of the men. This is a point well taken. While “almost regret” feels slightly withholding as regards the moral of the story here, Rokeach’s willingness to recast his views from a later vantage point is uncommonly graceful for a man of science:
… while I had failed to cure the three Christs of their delusions, they had succeeded in curing me of mine—of my God-like delusion that I could change them by omnipotently and omnisciently arranging and rearranging their daily lives within the framework of a “total institution.” I had terminated the project some two years after the initial confrontation when I came to realize—dimly at the time but increasingly more clearly as the years passed—that I really had no right … to play God and interfere around-the-clock with their daily lives. Also, I became increasingly uncomfortable about the ethics of such a confrontation.
This “almost regret” is keen enough that the author gives scant details of the later lives of the men—as if to allow them some much needed privacy. At last. The silence is respectful. And, it seems to me, penitential.
There’s an earnestness in Rokeach, both during and after the experiment—no matter his theoretical naïveté and ethical lapses. There’s an earnestness in any attempt to reach a schizophrenic on her or his own terms. Looking back from our moment in history, it’s hard not to feel that Rokeach’s study validates the notion that schizophrenics are in distinct ways beyond help. But this is to miss the art of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, its nuances, its descriptive elegance. If literature were a treatment