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J Relig Health (2010) 49:560580 DOI 10.1007/s10943-009-9317-z
ORIGINAL PAPER
Donald Capps
Published online: 30 December 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009
Abstract From July 1, 1959 to August 15, 1961, Milton Rokeach studied three male patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital who believed that they were Jesus Christ. They met regularly together with Rokeach and his research staff, a procedure designed to challenge their delusional systems. He believed that Leon Gabor, the youngest of the three, would be the most likely to abandon his delusional beliefs. Instead, Leon met the challenges that the procedure posed by creative elaborations of his delusional system, especially through the adoption of a new name that gave the initial appearance of the abandonment of his Christ identity but in fact drew on aspects of the real Jesus Christs identity that were missing from his earlier self-representation.
Keywords Milton Rokeach Leon Gabor Delusional identities Jesus Christ
Psychosis Paranoid schizophrenia Fictive identity
The Research Study
On July 1, 1959, an unusual event occurred in a small room of one of the large wards at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Three men who believed they were Jesus Christ met together for the rst time with Milton Rokeach, a psychology professor at Michigan State University who specialized in social psychology and personality theory and had recently published The Open and Closed Mind (1960). Three of his research assistants, assigned to be the mens companions, were also in the room.
Through the assistance of the State Department of Mental Health, inquiries had previously been sent to ve of Michigans state mental hospitals requesting names of patients with delusional identities (1964, p. 36). The purpose was to nd patients who claimed the same delusional identity and bring them together to see how they would respond to a situation in which their chosen identity is claimed by another patient. Of the 25,000 mental patients in the ve state hospitals, there were only a few with delusional identities. A half
D. Capps (&)
Princeton Theological Seminary, P.O. Box 821, Princeton, NJ 08542-0803, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Identity with Jesus Christ: The Case of Leon Gabor
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dozen or so were reported to believe that they were Christ, but closer investigation revealed that some...