The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (36 page)

“I have set up a Positive Etcetera Squelch Fund so that any positive-idealed G. M. can use the Fund to enjoy sexual outlet.”

In the same vein, Leon talked about cosmic eye squelches in the middle of his forehead, spider squelches, hurricane squelches, and sparkler squelches. He asserted that David Niven gave him a squelch in his vagina, and that he could use squelches to kill people but was forbidden to do so.

And, of course, Leon had enough insight to know what he was really doing. Asked one day to explain his preoccupation with squelches, he replied: “I could go into personal things, but that would be agitational.”

Changes In Delusional Beliefs

During the time Leon was waging his lonely struggle, from November of 1960 to the following July, we observed many additional developments in his delusional system. These changes reflected in general the course of his struggle; the majority of them took place in February and March of 1961. Only the most important of these changes are noted here.

In December, I showed Leon some portions of his handwritten manuscript,
Cause and Evolution
. Leon repudiated it with the statement that it was the insanity of God which had prompted these writings.

Early in February, Leon announced he was a “morphodite.” This was in contrast to his earlier, emphatic insistence that he was only a male. It is in the innate nature of a “morphodite,” he added, to kill its parents and to “born itself.”

All this was quickly followed by a significant change in the
way he signed his name to the Chairman List:
Dr. R. I. Dung, Sir, P. M., G. M.
—Potential Madame, God Morphodite.

Leon claimed he had just discovered his “femaleity.” “I have myself observed emotional feelings that are changing.” He conceived of himself as having breasts and a vagina which no one could see, not even himself, because they were covered up with “triangle-designed squelches.”

Associated with this conscious conception of himself as a hermaphrodite were Leon's announcements during February that he was about to give birth to twins. He sobbed when discussing these twins, saying that he did not want them to suffer from impositions, as he did. But early in March the twins were dead. They were “morphodites,” Leon informed us; they had bled to death before birth.

Leon's insistence that he was bisexual was followed by a change in his marital status. He announced that G. M. Ruth had gone the way of her predecessors, the Virgin Mary and Madame Yeti Woman, and was no longer his wife. Leon told us how she had met her end: “Ruth kicked me out of the truck and I was about ready to fall. I was lifted up by a power unseen, only felt, and the Ten Commandment Power Box appeared and killed G. M. Ruth.”

But Leon did not remain a bachelor for long. He immediately described his new marital condition. “I'm married to myself through the letter ‘o' of the Ten Commandments.” When I asked how anyone could be married to himself, he replied: “I died the death while my femaleity was having sexual intercourse with my maleity, compounded-compounded. There was a female seed and a male seed and the female seed died, yet through dying the death in such a manner the female body did not depart. The letter ‘o' in the Ten Commandments is the marriage ring between me as a foster brother and my foster sister. My foster sister is my wife now.” And, turning to Miss Anderson, he added: “The chair is open to the person who speaks the truth.”

I asked Leon how he could be sure that his femaleity was
there, since he could not see it. Leon answered emphatically: “Truth is self-evident—something that I don't see that I believe is there through the eyes of faith, that is, in a higher category than from a person who does see it and doesn't want to admit it.”

Two additional items regarding Leon's delusional changes are worth reporting. The first concerns his uncle, the second his real mother. Late in February we noted with considerable interest the beginnings of an increasing disillusionment with his delusional uncle. He claimed he saw his uncle on television, having sexual intercourse with his foster sister. “This truth hurts, but I have to accept it.” Two weeks later, Leon reported, he saw his uncle get beat up on television. He deserved the beating. Leon's uncle gradually faded away until we heard no more of him.

In May of 1961 I asked Leon if there was any news of the lady who claimed to be his mother.

“Concerning that G. M., as far as I'm concerned, is dead, was buried over here, going on two years, this coming Christmas. She's wherever the sanity of God permits.”

After a silence, he added: “As far as I know, you're up-to-date on that.”

Going It Alone

The delusional changes reported above can be thought of as a series of projections which describe symbolically Leon's inner struggle. But we need not rely solely on these projections to trace the main directions that struggle took. Leon himself on various occasions told us, often quite explicitly, how he perceived and interpreted his conflict-ridden, ambivalent relationship with Miss Anderson; also, how he perceived his relationship with the outside world, and, in addition, the direction in which he was planning to move in order to resolve his relationship with Miss Anderson and the social world she represented. Taken as a whole, the account which follows may be said to represent Leon's philosophy of life—and, more generally, the philosophy of schizophrenia.
November 21, 1960. Leon talks about a Dung Chapel in the Sahara Desert where he intends to live for the next five to seven years.

December 23. When Miss Anderson asks Leon what he did while in the army, he replies: “In the service I lived for positive nothing. I didn't care to go out with WAC's; didn't go out with the fellows. I had my prayers.”

February 6. “G. M. Anderson, please. I have mentioned from my earliest remembrances was persuasion through sex, living my life against my will, and I don't go for this stuff. It's better to live alone, relating to positive nothingness. There is no better. I'm trying to bring out that that's the focal point of human behavior—the way they mistreated me. I cannot forget that. I was trying to give one hundred per cent love with pure intent. What did I get in return? Cheat, steal, belittle, suppress! What's the sense of living with society? That's what I found out in most of my life. Trying to turn me inside out.

“I'm looking forward to living alone. My love is for infinity and when the human element comes in it's distasteful.”

February 22. “This particular body cannot have direct attachments to no person, place, or thing, except through the medium of truth.”[
1
]

“I want positive-idealed love without attachment. That's what my femaleity wants. Nobody offered it to me so my maleity offered it and I married myself.”

March 27. “I've found out whenever I receive something, there's always strings attached and God bless I don't want that.”

May 12. Leon responds to the news that I will be leaving before the fall. “I have to take things in stride,” he comments. “I live
from moment to moment; I find that is the best. Living in the present correctly forms the future and does not bring about remorse of the past. It adds up.”

May 16. I ask Leon how he would feel if we were to call him Rex instead of Dung. He retorts: “I prefer Dung. That's the way I became invisible.”

May 17. Leon elaborates on his invisibility. He became completely invisible in 1932, and speaks of three stages of invisibility: (1) invisible to others, visible to self; (2) invisible to others and invisible to self, but can feel self; (3) invisible to others and to self, and cannot feel self.

May 19. Leon elaborates further on being invisible. “The purpose of this will be for dissociating that person”—he looks at Miss Anderson—“due to metaphysical phenomena, dissociating where the person will be independent.”

May 24. “I still want to live according to the Ten Commandments. If they don't want it, I'll live alone, period! They can all go to hell. I know I'm missing out on pleasure—eating, drinking, merrymaking, and all that stuff—but it doesn't please my heart. I have met the world. I got disgusted with the negative ideals I found there.”

June 7. “I feel that everyone sees me now. I mean I feel I'm being seen, the first time since I was ten or ten and a half years of age. I feel there's light of truth inside as well as light of truth outside.”

After the group meeting is adjourned, Miss Anderson asks Leon if he would like to see her. He replies: “There isn't very much to talk about unless you want to ask some questions.”

She asks what it means for him to be “completely seen.”

“If it isn't so,” he says, “I stand corrected. It so happens when there's light on the inside, it's a comfortable feeling concerning
my case. There was an optic chiasma of trees in which I was squeezing out darkness and putting in light.” He goes on to say that he would not be seen if he had intercourse with a G. M., adding: “My wife protected me from their intentions. I'm thoroughly satisfied with my wife. As far as I'm concerned, I'm facing my problems.”

June 22. “You seem so angry,” Miss Anderson remarks.

“I'm always angry. You cannot have sanity without hatred of the evil ideal. I have love of hatred towards negativism. I have to have sound hatred—an outlet—if you haven't got that, you explode. Sound psychiatry tells me that.”

“Isn't is uncomfortable to be angry all the time?”

“No, it isn't, on the grounds that it's an incentive to go on.”

“You're so hard on yourself.”

“No, I'm not! I know what I want, why I want it, what I'm getting out of it, which way I'm going, and I want to keep it that way. If a person can say that as far as he's concerned the Ten Commandments is civilization, everything, that man can go and live alone anywhere and be satisfied, in the sense of inner peaceful conscience—that's a man!”

She asks him whether he is so hard on himself because his conscience is perhaps not so peaceful.

“I'm
not
hard on myself, G. M. Anderson. I hate the negative ideal because I want to be sane. You have to have a goal in view at all times. My goal is to live with truth, and I stated if the society doesn't want truth, I can tell them all to go to hell. I can live alone to prove that sound civilization is the Ten Commandments.”

The Final Break

Despite the tremendous amount of time Miss Anderson spent with Leon, it was to be of no avail. His tentative moves toward improvement were finally abandoned. Actually we had an inkling
of this very early in his relationship with her—even before the blindfold episode, when we observed that Mondays were typically black Mondays, and Fridays, blue Fridays for Leon. Miss Anderson was away from the hospital on weekends and he apparently interpreted this as an abandonment—proof that she did not really care about him and that he could not really count on her. Regularly, every Monday, when her daily visits resumed, Leon sulked, refused to talk, was curt or withdrawn, walked out or was openly hostile. But, as the week progressed, his feelings would gradually thaw out—until Friday, when the meeting was permeated with his anticipations of an empty weekend.

At about the same time it became evident that he was also especially difficult on the two days a week when I was present; then, because I had conferences with Miss Anderson after the meetings, his eager anticipation of the post-meeting tête-à-tête with her was doomed to disappointment. As soon as I realized what was happening, I abandoned these conferences with her. This led immediately to an improvement in relations all the way around and eliminated an important source of frustration for Leon. Now he could at least count on seeing her alone every day except on weekends.

And so it went, for weeks and months. The meetings, however, were complicated by other incidents, which, inevitably, interrupted their normal, even stereotyped pattern. Because Miss Anderson had other research commitments and duties at the hospital—which Leon knew about—her sessions with him were sometimes interrupted by a message, or terminated earlier than usual. Occasionally, something came up—her other projects, illness, a snowstorm—that made it necessary for her to cancel a meeting altogether, or to be absent for a day or longer. When this happened, she informed Leon, Joseph, and Clyde in advance or—if this was not possible—relayed a message to them through ward personnel. Clyde and Joseph, who also looked forward to the daily group meetings, accepted these messages with reasonably good grace. But not Leon. He always managed to convey the impression, mainly by
protesting too loudly how much he couldn't care less, that once again he had been abandoned or betrayed.

At the end of June, Miss Anderson left for a vacation. “Take care of yourselves,” she said to the three Christs the day of her departure.

“Truth will take care of me,” Leon replied.

A week later she returned and found him extremely tense and upset. Announcing that he would not commit adultery, he refused to see her alone after the group meeting. “Truth is my friend,” he asserted. “I have no other friends.”

And so it was that Leon, who had “to see the relationship to infinity,” ended his relationship with a woman who was not God.

[
1
] Leon's use of the double (and sometimes the triple) negative is worth noting in this instance and in others.

J
OSEPH HAD
many times referred to Dr. O. R. Yoder, the superintendent of Ypsilanti State Hospital, as his Dad. We did not know why he did this—he himself refused, or was not able, to enlighten us—but it had been going on for as long as we had known him. Moreover, it was to Dr. Yoder that he turned when he felt the need for any kind of assistance from above. On July 14, 1960, when he was agitating to be transferred to another ward, or “deported back to England,” he had even gone to see the superintendent to petition his intervention. During the interview he had also discussed his sexual difficulties with Dr. Yoder—something he had never talked about with us, although he did tell us about the interview afterwards. “I want to talk to you, man to man,” he said to Dr. Yoder. “I can't get a hard-on. My sex was all right before. I was wondering if you could arrange the mind so that you wouldn't have to think about getting a woman. A man must have a hard-on. He feels better all around. The libido doesn't forget. Just the thought that you can't hurts you.” This was virtually the only bit of information we were ever able to get
about Joseph's sex life, since he was very secretive in general and often gave us the impression of deliberately deciding to “keep his mouth shut,” as he said. But, with Dr. Yoder, Joseph would open up.