The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (40 page)

April 1

What was the psychological import of Joseph's letter to President Kennedy, we asked ourselves. It was clear, at least, that we were witness here to a significant change in his delusional system. He now saw President Kennedy as his father. And it is unlikely that Joseph was only pretending; his letter to his wife suggests he was in dead earnest. Did this mean that Dr. Yoder was no longer Dad? But he continued to address Dr. Yoder as “My dear Dad.” Despite this, however, it was reasonable to suppose that Joseph had written to President Kennedy to ask for a job as a writer because he was unhappy that his incompetence in this field had been exposed and for this reason felt compelled to seek out a yet more powerful protector—the President of the United States.[
1
]

By means of our experimental procedure we had put Joseph in what has been called a “double-bind”[
2
]—either he must change his behavior to comply with suggestions made by a positive authority or he must change his attitude toward authority itself. This had happened earlier to Leon, who had either to go along with Madame Yeti Woman's suggestions or else to change his attitudes toward her. At first Leon had gone along with her suggestions, but not without some ambivalence. As the ambivalence increased, he changed his attitudes toward her, eventually giving up the delusion that he was married to her or even that she existed, and more generally giving up the delusion that he was a Yeti man, a member of the Yeti tribe of remote Mount Komuru, which had very specific norms and values.

We now see a similar double-bind leading to a similar change in Joseph's delusional system. Dr. Yoder had made the suggestion that perhaps Joseph would like to do some writing. Although Dr. Yoder had tried to reassure him that he didn't have to write if he didn't have the “head for it,” the suggestion had apparently rearoused Joseph's long-dormant, deep-seated inferiorities. He clearly wanted to follow Dr. Yoder's suggestion, but he simply was not up to it. Joseph resolved this conflict by writing to President Kennedy. “I am unready to scribble literature at this moment. What remains? To get a job from you, President Kennedy.” What kind of a job? “If you want a good writer with you, I am the one. I can write.” And a bit further on: “I hear voices that you are my dad, my father.”

Both Joseph and Leon were unable to carry out certain suggestions made by their positive referents. And they resolved the double-bind situation by getting rid of these referents and substituting others. There is a further interesting fact. As Joseph and
Leon found it necessary to substitute new referents, they both conjured up referents of higher status, personages who were more powerful than the preceding ones. In Joseph's case, President Kennedy replaced Dr. Yoder. In Leon's case, Madame Yeti Woman was promoted to God and, a bit later, to Grand God. It is as if Joseph and Leon had to upgrade their delusional referents in order to provide themselves with increasing protection against and explanation for the frustrating and puzzling events which had taken place. And in doing so they may well have repeated at the delusional level what happened years before at the level of reality.

Further light was thrown on the matter a couple of days later, on Easter Sunday, when Joseph, in his meeting report, wrote that it was he who had died on the cross. He also said he was sick; he had vomited. From that day on, he began to complain again of his “stomach pains.” It was then well over two months since he had begun taking four placebo capsules a day; during all this time he had not once complained of any kind of physical distress. On earlier occasions, to ask him how he felt was only to invite him to go into detailed, hypochondriacal discussions of how sick he was and how much he needed his mineral oil or baking soda or Alka Seltzer. One of the most startling effects of the letters from Dr. Yoder was the sudden and complete cessation of all such physical complaints.

When Joseph's complaints intensified during the next few days, we ordered a full medical examination by a specialist, including X-rays. The findings: Joseph had a duodenal ulcer.

Within a week or two after being placed on an ulcer program, with amphojel, interval feedings, tincture of belladonna, and phenobarbital, Joseph stopped complaining of the stomach pains. Since it seemed there was no further purpose in continuing the placebos, the ward once again “ran out of them.” But Joseph was not to be denied. He put up such a fuss in letters to Dr. Yoder and instituted such a relentless harassment of ward personnel that the placebos had to be reinstated once more. Meanwhile, the ulcer
program was continuing. At the end of four months, a re-examination showed no trace of the ulcer.

There was no way to be sure exactly when Joseph had developed the ulcer. He had, indeed, begun to complain of a pain in his stomach early in December, and shortly afterward of nausea from the smells in the vegetable room. But then—when had Joseph not complained? One clear-cut fact does, however, emerge:
placebos, prescribed for a paranoid schizophrenic by his authority referent, had served to inhibit for approximately two or three months, not imaginary pains, but somatic ones
. This finding is probably the most striking of all the findings reported herein for either Joseph or Leon. It demonstrates most dramatically the positive effects which can be achieved by suggestions originating with the paranoid schizophrenic's own delusional authority figures. This finding is all the more remarkable when one remembers that paranoid schizophrenics are typically negativistic, that, because they view other people with suspicion and mistrust, they resist suggestions that others make. But our data clearly suggest that paranoid schizophrenics are, like everyone else, quite capable of following positive suggestions when the suggestions originate with positive referents. In this respect, the major difference between normal people and paranoid schizophrenics lies not so much in the fact that the schizophrenics are less suggestible but in the fact that they have no positive authorities or referents in the real world; if they have any at all, these positive referents exist only in the world of their delusions.

[
1
]Joseph's letter to President Kennedy, like all letters from patients, was first scanned by ward personnel, and then, after the contents of the letter were copied, it was mailed. A few weeks later, Joseph casually mentioned he had received an acknowledgment from the White House. He hastened to add, however: “I don't think the President saw it. The secretary probably answered it. I wrote him a long letter about getting me out of the hospital. That's going to be a failure, not a reality. That's not realistic. You just simply ask but they don't pay any attention to it. I doubt very much I'm going to be taken out.”

[
2
]G. Bateson, D. D. Jackson, J. Haley, and J. H. Weakland: “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,”
Behavorial Science
, I (1956), pp. 251-64.

T
HE CHANGES
in Joseph's behavior that were produced as a result of the letters from Dr. Yoder, and particularly the effects of the placebos on his physical state, were sufficiently dramatic to lead us to a further question: Could placebos issued by his authority figure alter his delusional system too?

It should be stated at the outset that the feat we now tried to achieve proved impossible. We did not succeed in changing a single one of Joseph's delusions. But, in the course of trying, we gained some additional clinical and theoretical insights about the limits beyond which his delusional system could not be pushed.

On April 12, Joseph received a letter from Dr. Yoder which read in part:

April 13

This was the first time Joseph had used the phrase “caught in the net of 3 jesus-christs.” But the idea was not new. Joseph suffered
severely from feelings of depersonalization—an experience common among schizophrenics, in which the boundary between the self and not-self is extremely blurred—and he was afraid of being “caught in the net of 3 jesus-christs” because he would then not know which one of them he was. He expressed this fear at other times: when he spoke of the “double” and when he pleaded with President Kennedy: “And nobody else is to be picked up in my place.”

I did not understand what depersonalization meant until I myself experienced it under LSD. At certain times I could not tell where I ended and my physical surroundings began. Nor could I tell whether I was I or whether I was the two other people who were attending me. To find out, I had to explore the contours of my own face, arms, and shoulders, and then theirs.

April 20

This letter, like the many others in which Clyde and Leon were mentioned, was not delivered during the regular group meeting. We took this precaution to assure that conflict would not be generated among the three.

April 21

April 24. Joseph tells an aide that he is tired of hearing how many Jesus Christs there are, that he is the one and only—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

April 25