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On July 1, 1959, at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics: Clyde Benson, an elderly farmer and alcoholic; Joseph Cassel, a failed writer who was institutionalized after increasingly violent behavior toward his family; and Leon Gabor, a college dropout and veteran of World War II. The men had one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their extraordinary meeting and the two years they spent in one another's company serves as the basis for an investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion that is poignant, amusing, and at times disturbing. Displaying the sympathy and subtlety of a gifted novelist, Rokeach draws us into the lives of three troubled and profoundly different men who find themselves "confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity."… (meer)
Fascinating not as a psychological experiment, and, due to the insuperable solipsism of schizophrenia, only somewhat as a study in group dynamics, I enjoyed this unique book for the wealth of wild and weird expressions of psychotic creativity. I’m not sure you can call them insights into the subjects’ mental state but the speech and writings of Christs Joseph and, especially, Leon — with his Madame Yeti Woman, his squelch chambers, his morphodites — are like the best art, perennially surprising, provoking, allusive, and somehow underpinned by a guiding structure or framework. It feels grubby somehow, peeping at these cracked minds, but I couldn’t look away. As an experiment it was nugatory, and obviously unethical, but as a book for reading it’s very excellent. ( )
The background story of this is intriguing and interesting— three men with different backgrounds, each believing they‘re Christ, are intentionally brought together in several group meetings, where they reside at Ypsilanti State Hospital (early 1960s). They are all diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics.
However, this is fully a case study with more detail than I wanted/needed. Additionally, some of the approaches taken then would be questionable today, something that the author (who ran the study) acknowledges in his afterword penned 20 years later after the study's conclusion.
Still curious to see the movie based on this book. ( )
On July 1, 1959, at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics: Clyde Benson, an elderly farmer and alcoholic; Joseph Cassel, a failed writer who was institutionalized after increasingly violent behavior toward his family; and Leon Gabor, a college dropout and veteran of World War II. The men had one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their extraordinary meeting and the two years they spent in one another's company serves as the basis for an investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion that is poignant, amusing, and at times disturbing. Displaying the sympathy and subtlety of a gifted novelist, Rokeach draws us into the lives of three troubled and profoundly different men who find themselves "confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity."
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Beschrijving van een historisch experiment waarbij de auteur/psycholoog Rokeach 3 schizofrene patiënten, die allen dachten dat zij Jezus Christus waren, met elkaar confronteerde in de hoop dat zij hun waanidentiteit zouden opgeven. In een proloog, 7 hoofdstukken en een epiloog, komen de patiënten uitgebreid aan het woord en wordt o.a. ingegaan op de opzet en het falen van het experiment. Voorafgaand een inleiding van de schrijver Henk Romijn Meijer over het originele taalgebruik van deze patiënten. In een nawoord gaat de Nederlandse uitgever in op de ethiek en de waarde van het totale experiment (waarvan slechts een gedeelte in de Nederlandse versie is opgenomen). Het boek biedt een fascinerende beschrijving van een dubieus, maar intrigerend experiment uit de psychiatrische historie.
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