The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [4]
After two years and a month Rokeach’s experiment drew to a close—as it happens, just as deinstitutionalization began to accelerate throughout the nation. In the epoch that followed, our epoch, an experiment like Rokeach’s, featuring close experimental contact in a controlled hospital setting over the course of years, seems next to unthinkable. And yet it’s the new environment we live in that makes an enlightened perspective on Three Christs possible. And what would be the features of that enlightenment? Perhaps a regret about the “total institution,” as Rokeach has it, alongside an approval of compassionate, personal interaction with the ill. Because: refusal to reconceive of the institution in a humane form and refusal to care for the sick continues to leave schizophrenics at large, or in the shelters and jails of the nation. We have achieved liberty for schizophrenics and liberty does not always look so great.
In the original conclusion to Three Christs, in some of the most pas-sionate writing in the book, Rokeach describes the ultimate goal of his experiment: to help the men depicted therein to “transcend loneliness.” And maybe, after all, he did achieve this end for a time. And maybe this book, as a literary act, will help us along these lines, too, in its generosity and its quixotic ambition. That said, the last words of the introduction plausibly ought to belong to Joseph Cassel, the most exacting writer among the three Christs, who did on occasion describe carefully what he felt, and whose yearning for self-improvement in the experiments is palpable, even when mixed up with a lot of mumbo jumbo about espionage and life in merry old England. Here’s the envoi he wrote to Rokeach after the men’s meetings had come to an end:
We, the workers for the world, will keep on going, and, one beautiful day, there will not be an enemy left.
This beautiful day will never come soon enough.
I’ll see you in the next report.
So long, I feel much better, thank you.
—RICK MOODY
[1]Pseudonyms all.
[2]See, for example, page 62.
[3]There are more devastating missed connections with this fictitious wife, but I’ll leave them to the reader to discover.
Preface
THE ACCOUNT presented herein concerns three men, all of whom claimed the same identity, and tells what happened in the two years they lived together. The report describes a scientific research project, but it is also a story worth telling in its own right. In many of its readers it may well provoke anxiety and tension; to most of us it seems a terrible thing for a person not to know who he really is. This is the only study on which I have ever worked that has aroused the interest of children. I shall never forget my neighbor’s children running after me to inquire whether the three men who had lost their identities and believed themselves to be Christ had made any progress in finding out who they really were.
I have tried to tell this story in sufficient detail so that other behavioral scientists will find it useful for purposes other than those discussed in Chapters I, XI, and XIX. At the same time, it must be pointed out that the present account is necessarily a highly selective condensation of a far greater body of material consisting of hundreds of tape recordings, personal notes, case records, reports by research assistants, nurses, and aides, and reports and letters written by the subjects themselves.
This project could never have been carried to a completion without the support, active co-operation, and encouragement of many individuals and institutions. I am happy to acknowledge my deep gratitude to the Social Science Research Council for its support through a Faculty Research Fellowship in 1960. This was supplemented by Michigan State University through a special grant from its Development Fund and also through additional annual