Free The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach Page A

since he doesn’t love his wife and his wife doesn’t love him. This is evidenced by her cessation of visits. Patient adds that he has completely lost faith in his wife as far as sexual love is concerned, and he states that he is locked in the hospital because his wife has had three children with other men and was found out.

    The second matter concerns Joseph’s delusion that he is God, about which there is no record until ten years after his initial hospitalization. Then, in 1949, Joseph wrote to one of his daughters: “My wife is Binnie Barnes, movie actress. I am prince and God and keeper of the courts. This is the truth. I have civilized the whole world. I am aeons and aeons of years old. I’m the richest man in the world and England. I was the strongest and mastered psychiatry. It came out just beautifully, charming and nice.” Sometime after he had written this letter, a hospital psychiatrist asked Joseph if he had ever seen God. To this he replied “I can’t very well see God when I am God.” Concerning his wife, he said: “My wife was always under my command. I sanctioned that she could go out with other men because she could not do otherwise.”
    Since then there have been no further references to Binnie Barnes but, of course, many references to his being God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost. When his oldest daughter learned of this delusion, she commented: “He always wanted to be important, better than other people, but he just wasn’t aggressive enough.”
    Leon Gabor
    Leon’s parents, Mary and Leon, Senior, were married in 1916 in Detroit. Their first child, Stanley, was born in 1919. In 1921 the family returned to their homeland in Eastern Europe for a year’s visit. While they were there, Mary gave birth to Leon. Leon, Senior, returned alone to Detroit after only six months in Europe. He had become interested in another woman before leaving Detroit, and he went back to live with her. Mary, Stanley, and Leon returned to the United States in 1923. Mary tried to persuade her husband to come back to her but he refused. He divorced her the following year on grounds of cruelty and on the ground that “she was not a wife to him.” He promptly married the other woman.
    Following her return to Detroit, Mary rented a house threeblocks from a Catholic church in a neighborhood composed almost entirely of people from the Old Country. She spoke in her native tongue and could barely make herself understood in English. She would lock her two little boys in a room when she went out to work as a scrubwoman, leaving them instructions to stay in bed since there was no heat in the house during the day.
    Mary was a religious fanatic and was reported to hear voices. Her own priest, whom we interviewed, said she spent too much time in church. In a broken accent he told us: “I tell her, ‘Go home.’ I say to her, ‘See me, Father, I say Mass half hour; see the Sisters, they go to Mass half hour. Then we go work—it’s enough.’ And then I look and she back saying rosaries. Leon, every day worse. She not cooking for boy, crackers and tea, not food for a boy growing. She not cleaning her house, praying, praying, all the time praying.”
    Stanley, Leon’s older brother, was sent back to the Old Country to study for the priesthood and eventually left for New Zealand, where he started a successful business. Leon went to parochial school. There he was an above-average student, “a good boy, nothing wrong, a quiet boy.” After he graduated he went to the Catholic high school for a year, and then his mother somehow managed without the assistance of the parish church to get Leon accepted in a pre-seminary school in another state. Leon attended for about two and a half years, and then when he was seventeen was expelled for reasons unknown to our informants.
    At about this time, Leon’s father came to see him and tried to persuade him