Reckoning with our messiah complexes

A New Yorker cartoon depicts a couple of men in first-century garb beside a pack mule. “Right now, I’m his apostle,” one says to the other, “but my dream is to someday be my own Messiah.” The idea of a messiah complex has reached the bumper sticker world as well: “Honk if you are Jesus.” The term itself isn’t clinical in nature as much as it’s a category of religious delusion that can show up in individuals suffering perceptions of grandeur.

Sixty-two years ago, three male patients with paranoid schizophrenia and delusional disorder at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan were intensively studied for their own messiah complexes. Each believed that he was the physical reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Their mistaken perception of reality would have presented little problem had it not been for a social psychologist named Milton Rokeach who, for the better part of two years, manipulated their lives through a study with questionable ethics.

Using various methods of entrapment and deception, Rokeach sought to pit these three men against each other, in hopes that they might cure one another of their delusion. They were assigned adjacent beds, seats next to each other in the cafeteria, and jobs in the laundry room at the same time. Fights and rants regularly broke out amid daylong arguments. One of the men would claim, “I’m the Messiah, the Son of God. I am on a mission. I was sent here to save the earth.” “How do you know?” Rokeach would ask. “God told me.” That’s when another one of the patients would pipe up: “I never told you any such thing.”