science

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Three Christs of Ypsilanti rather than just read about it. In short: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Narrative Study of Three Lost Men is an American book-length psychiatric case study by Milton Rokeach, concerning his experiment on a group of three males with paranoid schizophrenia at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, United States. The book details the interactions of the three patients—Clyde Benson, Joseph Cassel, and Leon Gabor—each of whom believed himself to be…

Key takeaways

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Three Christs of Ypsilanti to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Narrative Study of Three Lost Men is an American book-length psychiatric case study by Milton Rokeach, concerning his experiment on a group of three males with paranoid schizophrenia at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, United States. The book details the interactions of the three patients—Clyde Benson, Joseph Cassel, and Leon Gabor—each of whom believed himself to be Jesus Christ.

Synopsis Rokeach got the idea from an article in Harper's Magazine describing two women who both believed they were the Virgin Mary. After being assigned as psychiatric hospital roommates, one of the women recovered from her delusion as a result of conversations with the roommate and was discharged. Rokeach was also influenced by Cesare Beccaria's essay On Crimes and Punishments, concerning the subject of Simon Morin, who was claimed to have been potentially cured in a similar way. As a similar study of delusional belief systems, Rokeach brought together three men who each claimed to be Jesus Christ and confronted them with one another's conflicting claims, while encouraging them to interact personally as a support group. Rokeach also attempted to manipulate other aspects of their delusions by inventing messages from imaginary characters. He did not, as he had hoped, provoke any lessening of the patients' delusions, but did document a number of changes in their beliefs. While initially the three patients quarreled over who was holier and reached the point of physical altercation, they eventually each explained away the other two as being patients with a mental disability in a hospital, or dead and being operated by machines. The graduate students who worked with Rokeach on the project have been strongly critical of the morality of the project because of the amount of dishonesty and manipulation by Rokeach and the amount of distress experienced by the patients. Rokeach added a comment in the final revision of the book that, while the experiment did not cure any of the three Christs, "It did cure me of my godlike delusion that I could manipulate them out of their beliefs."

Editions The Three Christs of Ypsilanti was first published in 1964. Rokeach came to think that his research had been manipulative and unethical, and offered an apology in the afterword of the 1984 edition of the book: "I really had no right, even in the name of science, to play God and interfere round the clock with their daily lives." The book was re-published by New York Review Books in 2011.

Cultural impact

Literature The title is also mentioned in Anne Sexton's poem 'Rapunzel' in her 1971 collection Transformations.

Music and theatre The book served as inspiration for the song "Ypsilanti" on the Detroit band Protomartyr's debut album No Passion All Technique. The book also served as the inspiration for the memory play Trinity by Gary C. Hopper, with music by Tim Kloth. In 2010 it was announced that Corey Dargel (score) and Honor Molloy (libretto) were developing a stage musical based on the book. The project received a Meet The Composer Commissioning Music/USA Award, and had a developmental workshop presentation at New York Theatre Workshop in 2011. In 2012 Dargel and Molloy received a MAP Fund grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to further develop the musical.

Movie adaptation

A drama film based on the book, Three Christs, starring Peter Dinklage, Richard Gere, Walton Goggins and Bradley Whitford, and directed by Jon Avnet, was released on September 12, 2017.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Three Christs of Ypsilanti claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Three Christs of Ypsilanti before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Three Christs of Ypsilanti ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

In research: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Three Christs of Ypsilanti in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1960s in Michigan, 1964 non-fiction books, Alfred A. Knopf books, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Three Christs of Ypsilanti outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The Three Christs of Ypsilanti in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Three Christs of Ypsilanti means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The Three Christs of Ypsilanti out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Three Christs of Ypsilanti in simple terms?

Why does The Three Christs of Ypsilanti matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Three Christs of Ypsilanti?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.