Some things have to be done.  So for me, no good holiday is complete without seeking out the best book store in town and having a root around.  This is one of the things I did in New York recently when I visited the wonderful Strand book store, which boasts 18 miles of new, second hand and rare books and the tag line where books are loved.

Often I come away from my book shopping experience with books I have been hankering after for a while and this was no exception.  In addition, I also came away with a book which was new to me – though by an author known to me – Milton Rokeach’s The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

Rokeach was a social psychologist practising in the US in the middle of the twentieth century and with a particular interest in beliefs and values.  In July 1959, Rokeach brought together three men at the Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, who had all been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and each one of whom believed himself to be Christ.  Rokeach’s interest in the nature of beliefs and values was such that he wanted to study the impact on the three men’s beliefs about their identity of meeting with other men who also purported to have the same unique identity.  Rokeach and his colleagues worked with the three men for a period of two years, organising regular meetings between the men and observing the men’s responses.

Many years later, writing an Afterword in 1981 to the book he had written in 1964, Rokeach had cause to reflect on the nature of his experiments, recognising that he, too, had played God in the way that he imagined he could change the men by “omnipotently and omnisciently” arranging and rearranging the men’s daily lives, expressing some regret that he had not seen this at the time he first wrote the book and sharing his growing discomfort about the ethics of the experiment he had conducted all those years before.  It does, indeed, seem unlikely that such an experiment would be conducted today by Western scientists.  It seems to me that this fact serves to highlight rather than to diminish the book’s value.

Rokeach approaches his task from the point of view of the theoretical scientist, beginning, for example, by making some theoretical distinctions about different kinds of beliefs and ending – even in his afterword – by sharing key learnings.  His aim in conducting his experiment was to test some of those beliefs, which he did.  Even so, it’s striking to me that his book serves to bring the reader into close contact with the three men he studied.  It is by no means easy to understand the way they view the world and still, I found myself responding to them with compassion – that is, a fellow feeling with three men seeking to make their way in the world.

Throughout the book, Rokeach underlines how the delusions adopted by the three men serve a purpose even though we may not know what that purpose is.  As it happens, their beliefs are sufficiently far from reality that it’s easy to dissociate ourselves from these men.  At the same time, for me, Rokeach’s study serves to illustrate how we form certain beliefs in response to our early circumstances and how we continue to maintain those beliefs long after our original circumstances have changed.  It also highlights to me how a belief does not sit in splendid isolation in the human psyche.  Rather, it is part of a system of beliefs which are inter-connected.  To change one belief is to open up the need to change other beliefs that are connected.  This issue affects not only the three Christs of Ypsilanti.  Rather, it is one with which we all grapple.

I write more about the nature of beliefs elsewhere.  For now though, as I write, I am sitting with the experience of reading a book which is, in some ways, the most intimate of books.  It is a study about three (perhaps four) real men.  And as we read about those men we get to see glimpses of ourselves.