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What Can You Really Know?

November 8, 2012

Freeman Dyson

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

by Jim Holt

Liveright, 307 pp., $27.95

Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story is a portrait gallery of leading modern

philosophers. He visited each of them in turn, warning them in advance that he was coming to discuss with

them a single question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He reports their reactions to thisquestion, and embellishes their words with descriptions of their habits and personalities. Their answers give us

vivid glimpses of the speakers but do not solve the riddle of existence.

The philosophers are more interesting than the philosophy. Most of them are eccentric characters who haverisen to the top of their profession. They think their deep thoughts in places of unusual beauty such as Paris and

Oxford. They are heirs to an ancient tradition of academic hierarchy, in which disciples sat at the feet of sages,

and sages enlightened disciples with Delphic utterances. The universities of Paris and Oxford have maintained

this tradition for eight hundred years. The great world religions have maintained it even longer. Universities andreligions are the most durable of human institutions.

According to Holt, the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century were Martin Heidegger and

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heidegger supreme in continental Europe, Wittgenstein in the English-speaking world.

Heidegger was one of the founders of existentialism, a school of philosophy that was especially attractive toFrench intellectuals. Heidegger himself lost his credibility in 1933 when he accepted the position of rector of

the University of Freiburg under the newly established Hitler government and became a member of the NaziParty. Existentialism continued to flourish in France after it faded in Germany.

Wittgenstein, unlike Heidegger, did not establish an ism. He wrote very little, and everything that he wrote was

simple and clear. The only book that he published during his lifetime was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,written in Vienna in 1918 and published in England with a long introduction by Bertrand Russell in 1922. It fills

less than two hundred small pages, even though the original German and the English translation are printed side

by side. I was lucky to be given a copy of the Tractatus as a prize when I was in high school. I read it through in

one night, in an ecstasy of adolescent enthusiasm. Most of it is about mathematical logic. Only the last fivepages deal with human problems. The text is divided into numbered sections, each consisting of one or two

sentences. For example, section 6.521 says: “The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of thisproblem. Is not this the reason why men, to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not

then say wherein this sense consisted?” The most famous sentence in the book is the final section 7: “Wherof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

I found the book enlightening and liberating. It said that philosophy is simple and has limited scope. Philosophy

is concerned with logic and the correct use of language. All speculations outside this limited area are mysticism.Section 6.522 says: “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself. It is the mystical.” Since the mysticalis inexpressible, there is nothing more to be said. Holt summarizes the difference between Heidegger and

Wittgenstein in nine words: “Wittgenstein was brave and ascetic, Heidegger treacherous and vain.” These

words apply equally to their characters as human beings and to their intellectual output.

Wittgenstein’s intellectual asceticism had a great influence on the philosophers of the English-speaking world.

It narrowed the scope of philosophy by excluding ethics and aesthetics. At the same time, his personalasceticism enhanced his credibility. During World War II, he wanted to serve his adopted country in a practical

way. Being too old for military service, he took a leave of absence from his academic position in Cambridgeand served in a menial job, as a hospital orderly taking care of patients. When I arrived at Cambridge University

in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest

respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met himwalking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to

himself: “I get stupider and stupider every day.”

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed readingthe Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years

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earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I wasa student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.

Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his

lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left theroom. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his

rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in

winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the

stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone,

replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was nolonger an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living

a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.The philosophers that Holt interviewed wander over a wide landscape. The main theme of their discussions is a

disagreement between two groups that I call materialists and Platonists. Materialists imagine a world built out

of atoms. Platonists imagine a world built out of ideas. This division into two categories is a grosssimplification, lumping together people with a great variety of opinions. Like taxonomists who name species of

plants and animals, observers of the philosophical scene may be splitters or lumpers. Splitters like to name

many species; lumpers like to name few.

Holt is a splitter and I am a lumper. Philosophers are mostly splitters, dividing their ways of thinking intonarrow specialties such as theism or deism or humanism or panpsychism or axiarchism. Examples of each of

these isms are to be seen in Holt’s collection. I find it more convenient to lump them into two big groups, oneobsessed with matter and the other obsessed with mind. Holt asks them to explain why the world exists. For the

materialists, the question concerns the origin of space and time and particles and fields, and the relevant branchof science is physics. For the Platonists, the question concerns the origin of meaning and purpose and

consciousness, and the relevant science is psychology.

The most impressive of the Platonists is John Leslie, who spent most of his life teaching philosophy at theUniversity of Guelph and is now living in retirement on the west coast of Canada. He calls himself an extreme

axiarchist. The word “axiarchism” is Greek for “value rules,” meaning that the world is built out of ideas, and

the Platonic idea of the Good gives value to everything that exists. Leslie takes seriously Plato’s image of the

cave as a metaphor of human life. We live in a cave, seeing only shadows cast on the wall by light streaming infrom the entrance. The real objects outside the cave are ideas, and all the things that we perceive inside are

imperfect images of ideas. Evil exists because our images are distorted. The ultimate reality hidden from ourview is Goodness. Goodness is a strong enough force to pull the universe into existence. Leslie understands thatthis explanation of existence is a poetic fantasy rather than a logical argument. Fantasy comes to the rescue

when logic fails. The whole range of Plato’s thinking is embodied in his dialogues, which are dramatic

reconstructions of the conversations of his master Socrates. They are based on imagination, not on logic.In 1996 Leslie published a book, The End of the World , taking a gloomy view of the human situation. He was

calculating the probable future duration of the human species, basing his argument on the Copernican principle,

which says that the situation of the human observer in the cosmos should be in no way exceptional. Copernicus

gave his name to this principle when he moved the earth from its position at the center of the Aristotelianuniverse and put it into a more modest position as one of the planets orbiting around the sun.

Leslie argued that the Copernican principle should apply to our position in time as well as to our position in

space. As observers of the passage of time, we should not put ourselves into a privileged position at thebeginning of the history of our species. As Copernican observers, we should expect to be in an average positionin our history, rather than close to the beginning. Therefore, we should expect the future duration of our species

to be not much longer than its past. Since we know that our species originated about a hundred thousand years

ago, we should expect it to become extinct about a hundred thousand years from now.When Leslie published this prognostication, I protested strongly against it, claiming that it was a technically

wrong use of the theory of probability. In fact Leslie’s argument was technically correct. The reason I did not

like the argument was that I did not like the conclusion. I thought that the universe had a purpose, and that ourminds were a part of that purpose. Since the goodness of the universe was revealed in our existence as

observers, we could rely on the goodness of the universe to allow us to continue to exist. I opposed Leslie’s

argument because I was a better Platonist than he was.



The antithesis of John Leslie is David Deutsch, whose book The Beginning of Infinity I recently reviewed inthese pages.* Holt visited Deutsch at his home in a village a few miles from Oxford. The chapter describing the

visit is entitled “The Magus of the Multiverse.” Deutsch is a professional physicist who uses physics as a basis

for philosophical speculation. Unlike most philosophers, he understands quantum mechanics and feels at homein a quantum universe. He likes the many-universe interpretation of quantum mechanics, invented in the 1950s

by Hugh Everett, who was then a student in Princeton. Everett imagined the quantum universe as an infinite

assemblage of ordinary universes all existing simultaneously. He called the assemblage the multiverse.

The essence of quantum physics is unpredictability. At every instant, the objects in our physical environment —

the atoms in our lungs and the light in our eyes — are making unpredictable choices, deciding what to do next.According to Everett and Deutsch, the multiverse contains a universe for every combination of choices. There

are so many universes that every possible sequence of choices occurs in at least one of them. Each universe isconstantly splitting into many alternative universes, and the alternatives are recombining when they arrive at the

same final state by different routes. The multiverse is a huge network of possible histories diverging and

reconverging as time goes on. The “quantum weirdness” that we observe in the behavior of atoms, the “spooky

action at a distance” that Einstein famously disliked, is the r esult of universes recombining in unexpected ways.

According to Deutsch, each of us exists in the multiverse as a crowd of almost identical creatures, traveling

together through time along closely related histories, splitting and recombining constantly like the atoms of

which we are composed. He does not claim to have an answer to the question “Why does the multiverse exist?”

or to the easier question “What is the nature of consciousness?” He sees ahead of us a long future of slow

exploration, answering philosophical questions that we do not yet know how to ask. One of the questions thatwe know how to ask but not to answer is: “Does quantum computing play an essential role in our

consciousness?” For Deutsch, the physics of quantum computing is the most promising clue that may lead us to

a deeper understanding of our existence. He theorizes, Holt tells us, that “all the different parallel universes inthe multiverse” could “be coaxed into collaborating on a single computation.”

There are many other kinds of multiverse besides the Everett version. Multiverse models are fashionable inrecent theories of cosmology. Holt went to see the Russian cosmologist Alex Vilenkin at Tufts University in

Boston. Unlike Deutsch, Vilenkin has multiple universes disconnected and widely separated from each other.

Each arises out of nothing by a process known as quantum tunneling, spontaneously crossing the barrier

between nonexistence and existence with no expenditure of energy. Universes spring into existence withprecisely zero total energy, the positive energy of matter being equal and opposite to the negative energy of

gravitation. Mass comes free because energy is zero.The title of the Vilenkin chapter is “The Ultimate Free Lunch?” Holt describes a conversation between theyoung physicist George Gamow and the old physicist Albert Einstein when both of them were in Princeton.

Gamow, the original inventor of the idea of quantum tunneling, explained to Einstein the possibility of the free

lunch. Einstein was so astonished that he stopped in the middle of the street and was almost run over by a car.Opinions vary widely concerning the proper limits of science. For me, the multiverse is philosophy and not

science. Science is about facts that can be tested and mysteries that can be explored, and I see no way of testing

hypotheses of the multiverse. Philosophy is about ideas that can be imagined and stories that can be told. I put

narrow limits on science, but I recognize other sources of human wisdom going beyond science. Other sourcesof wisdom are literature, art, history, religion, and philosophy. The multiverse has its place in philosophy and in

literature.

My favorite version of the multiverse is a story told by the philosopher Olaf Stapledon, who died in 1950. Hetaught philosophy at the University of Liverpool. In 1937 he published a novel, Star Maker , describing hisvision of the multiverse. The book was marketed as science fiction, but it has more to do with theology than

with science. The narrator has a vision in which he travels through space visiting alien civilizations from the

past and the future, his mind merging telepathically with some of their inhabitants who join him on his journey.

Finally, this “cosmical mind” encounters the Star Maker, an “eternal and absolute spirit” who has created all of these worlds in a succession of experiments. Each experiment is a universe, and as each experiment fails he

learns how to design the next experiment a little better. His first experiment is a simple piece of music, arhythmic drumbeat exploring the texture of time. After that come many more works of art, exploring the

possibilities of space and time with gradually increasing complexity.

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Our own universe comes somewhere in the middle, a big improvement on its predecessors but still destined forfailure. Its flaws will bring it to a tragic end. Far outside the range of our understanding will be the later

experiments, avoiding the mistakes that the Star Maker made with our own universe, and leading the way to

ultimate perfection. Stapledon’s multiverse, conceived in the shadow of the approaching horrors of World War II, is an imaginative attempt to grapple with the problem of good and evil.

For most of the twenty-five centuries since written history began, philosophers were important. Two groups of

philosophers, Confucius and Lao Tse in China, and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Greece, were dominant

figures in the cultures of Asia and Europe for two thousand years. Confucius and Aristotle set the style of

thinking for Eastern and Western civilizations. They not only spoke to scholars but also to rulers. They had adeep influence in the practical worlds of politics and morality as well as in the intellectual worlds of science and

scholarship.In more recent centuries, philosophers were still leaders of human destiny. Descartes and Montesquieu in

France, Spinoza in Holland, Hobbes and Locke in England, Hegel and Nietzsche in Germany, set their stamp on

the divergent styles of nations as nationalism became the driving force in the history of Europe. Through all thevicissitudes of history, from classical Greece and China until the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers

were giants playing a dominant role in the kingdom of the mind.

Holt’s philosophers belong to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Compared with the giants of the past,

they are a sorry bunch of dwarfs. They are thinking deep thoughts and giving scholarly lectures to academicaudiences, but hardly anybody in the world outside is listening. They are historically insignificant. At some time

toward the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers faded from public life. Like the snark in Lewis Carroll’spoem, they suddenly and silently vanished. So far as the general public was concerned, philosophers became

invisible.The fading of philosophy came to my attention in 1979, when I was involved in the planning of a conference to

celebrate the hundredth birthday of Einstein. The conference was held in Princeton, where Einstein had lived,

and our largest meeting hall was too small for all the people who wanted to come. A committee was set up todecide who should be invited. When the membership of the committee was announced, there were loud protests

from people who were excluded. After acrimonious discussions, we agreed to have three committees, each

empowered to invite one third of the participants. One committee was for scientists, one for historians of

science, and one for philosophers of science.After the three committees had made their selections, we had three lists of names of people to be invited. I

looked at the lists of names and was immediately struck by their disconnection. With a few exceptions, I knewpersonally all the people on the science list. On the history list, I knew the names, but I did not know the peoplepersonally. On the philosophy list, I did not even know the names.

In earlier centuries, scientists and historians and philosophers would have known one another. Newton and

Locke were friends and colleagues in the English parliament of 1689, helping to establish constitutionalgovernment in England after the bloodless revolution of 1688. The bloody passions of the English Civil War

were finally quieted by establishing a constitutional monarchy with limited powers. Constitutional monarchy

was a system of government invented by philosophers. But in the twentieth century, science and history and

philosophy had become separate cultures. We were three groups of specialists, living in separate communitiesand rarely speaking to each other.

When and why did philosophy lose its bite? How did it become a toothless relic of past glories? These are the

ugly questions that Jim Holt’s book compels us to ask. Philosophers became insignificant when philosophybecame a separate academic discipline, distinct from science and history and literature and religion. The greatphilosophers of the past covered all these disciplines. Until the nineteenth century, science was called natural

philoso phy and officially recognized as a branch of philosophy. The word “scientist” was invented by William

Whewell, a nineteenth-century Cambridge philosopher who became master of Trinity College and put his nameon the building where Wittgenstein and I were living in 1946. Whewell introduced the word in the year 1833.

He was waging a deliberate campaign to establish science as a professional discipline distinct from philosophy.

Whewell’s campaign succeeded. As a result, science grew to a dominant position in public life, and philosophyshrank. Philosophy shrank even further when it became detached from religion and from literature. The great

philosophers of the past wrote literary masterpieces such as the Book of Job and the Confessions of Saint

Augustine. The latest masterpieces written by a philosopher were probably Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke



Zarathustra in 1885 and Beyond Good and Evil in 1886. Modern departments of philosophy have no place forthe mystical.

1. *

The New York Review, November 10, 2011.

GuttedSteven Shapin A Modern History of the Stomach: Gastric Illness, Medicine and British Society, 1800-1950by Ian

MillerPickering and Chatto, 195 pp, £60.00, May 2011, ISBN 978 1 84893 181 7 Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century‟s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, theilliterate young French-Canadian was working as a „voyageur‟ for John Jacob Astor‟s fur-tradingcompany in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious andlikely to be fatal – his half-digested breakfast was pouring out of the wound from his perforatedstomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont wasnevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and wasamazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martinsurvived, though with a gastric fistula about two and a half inches in circumference. It was now

possible for Beaumont to peer into St Martin‟s stomach, to insert his forefinger into it, to introducemuslin bags containing bits of food and to retrieve them whenever he wanted. Human digestion had become visible.Beaumont took over St Martin‟s care when charity support ran out, and over the next ten years thepatient lived intermittently with the doctor, as both his domestic servant and a contractually paidexperimental object. St Martin‟s fistula was soon to become one of the modern world‟s mostcelebrated peepshows. The experiments were conducted at intervals over the eight years from 1825and a remarkable contract survives which established a legal basis for scientific access to St Martin‟sstomach: Alexis will at all times … submit to assist and promote by all means in his power such philosophical ormedical experiments as the said William shall direct or cause to be made on or in the stomach of him,

the said Alexis, either through and by means of the aperture or opening thereto in the side of him, thesaid Alexis, or otherwise, and will obey, suffer and comply with all reasonable and proper orders of orexperiments of the said William in relation thereto, and in relation to the exhibiting and showing of his said stomach and the powers and properties thereof and of the appurtenances, and powers,properties, situation and state of the contents thereof.In return for letting Beaumont in and out of his stomach, St Martin was to get board, lodging andabout $150 a year. But by 1833 he‟d had enough: he went back to his old life as a voyageur, and,amazingly, lived well into his seventies. At his death he was survived by a wife and six children, whohad him buried two feet deeper than usual so that the scientists could not retrieve the corpse anddissect his stomach.St Martin‟s fistula offered a unique form of scientific access to the living stomach, but throughout the19th century ever more powerful technologies were being devised to get at its contents and to render i visible, audible and, finally, manipulable. Physicians became more skilled in such non-invasivetechniques as auscultation, learning to distinguish and to mark the physiological significance of stomach sounds called, variously, „splashing‟, „gurgling‟, „ringing‟ and „sizzling‟. In 1868, the Freiburgphysician Adolf Kussmaul invented a rigid tube, developed through experimentation with a sword-swallower, that enabled him to retrieve samples from the oesophagus and stomach and even to see alittle of what was going on in there. In the 1890s, a New York doctor called Max Einhorn devised asmall silver „stomach bucket‟, secured to a string. Patients, suitably encouraged, swallowed the thing,and Einhorn would then pull up the bucket and have its gastric contents chemically analysed. Fromabout the 1930s, endoscopy became a key diagnostic tool, and now upper-gastrointestinal endoscopy extends medical vision as far as the duodenum, the bit of the small intestine just downstream of the



stomach. By the 1910s, X-ray technology was making a vital contribution to visualising the stomachand its lesions. Surgical access to the organs of the abdomen in the 19th century was slow indeveloping, partly because of problems with anaesthesia and infection, and partly because surgeonsinitially had little basis for understanding the significance of what they were seeing, but after the„Listerian revolution‟ in antisepsis surgeons became increasingly comfortable with a range of abdominal operations, especially in connection with peptic ulcers.Beaumont‟s work with his experimental subject was aimed at understanding digestion in general, notSt Martin‟s digestion in particular. He wanted to know how digestion normally went on, and was not

much interested in how it occasionally went wrong. He tabulated how long various types of food took to be digested; he recorded the temperature of the stomach under different dietary and climaticconditions; he compared digestion in St Martin‟s stomach with the action of extracted gastric juiceand food in vitro; he measured the dynamics of secretion of the juice; he analysed the juice andshipped samples to university chemistry laboratories at Virginia, Yale and Stockholm, whichconfirmed his judgment that its main active constituent was hydrochloric acid and that digestion was just a process of chemical decomposition, replicable in a test tube. St Martin‟s guts were becominguniversalised.St Martin‟s stomach also offered evidence about minor pathologies, their possible causes and likely treatments. So when St Martin had a fit of „violent anger‟, Beaumont observed an almostunprecedented appearance of yellow bile in the gastric juice, showing, he said, „the effect of violent

passion on the digestive apparatus‟. He watched St Martin‟s stomach carefully when he ateparticularly large meals, noted the peculiar appearance of the chyme (or partly digested food mass) inhis stomach, and drew conclusions about the physiological consequences of excess. When St Martindrank „ardent spirits‟, and when he ate „stimulating condiments‟ like mustard and vinegar, the doctorsaw a morbid appearance of the stomach lining which interfered with digestion and which was„prejudicial to the healthy stomach‟. An excited mental state, dietary excess and the use of stimulants– all of these had their effects on the volume and acidity of the gastric juice and, through the juice, were punished by indigestion, or, as doctors preferred to call it, dyspepsia. These were the categories– variously stressed and combined – used to understand and manage indigestion well into the 20thcentury. Excess acid was conceded to be the proximal cause of disease, with distal causes includingdiet and practically any aspect of human conduct you could think of. And these were the connections

that gave the stomach its moral significance. At the time of Beaumont‟s experiments, at most several hundred physicians and physiologists wereconducting research on digestion, but all the world was interested in indigestion. Dyspepsia wasrecognised as one of the great afflictions of the 19th century and medical stories about its causes were both unstable and resonant. Ian Miller‟s book begins at a point of rapid change in the scientificunderstanding of how the stomach functioned in health and disease and breaks off – unfortunately – short of the more recent changes brought about by the surprising discovery in the early 1980s of pathogenic bacteria in the stomach and by the development of a new range of acid-controlling drugs.It‟s a story about changing notions of the stomach‟s role in overall human bodily function, of thenature of its diseases in relation to other aspects of the human body and mind, of treatments broughtto bear on those diseases, and, above all, of contests for the right authoritatively to pronounce onstomach function and dysfunction. A Modern History of the Stomach isn‟t a delight to read – after the19th time I was told that different aspects of the stomach had been „prioritised‟, I was feelingsymptoms of gastric distress – but the big ideas that frame the book are good and one hopes Millerhasn‟t scared off writers who might tell the story more clearly and confidently. A history of thestomach really does work as a site for understanding how we‟ve come to think about minds, bodiesand modernity.In the 19th century, a lot of people cared a lot about dyspepsia because there were a lot of dyspepticsabout. Their sufferings were serious, making the worst cases „as wretched as human nature can bearand live‟. The stomach troubles of some of the century‟s great thinkers verged on common knowledge.Thomas Carlyle was advertised as a „martyr‟ to dyspepsia – there was, he confided, only a small part ohis life in which he „was not conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called a



stomach‟ – and Charles Darwin‟s friends understood that his uncontrollable retching and fartingseriously limited his public life. Historical tradition had tended to associate indigestion and relatedailments with certain sorts of people, but new democratic elements were being introduced to 19th-century Anglophone culture. Physicians now began to insist that the „demon dyspepsia‟ was norespecter of rank or profession: „It knocks at the door of every gradation of society.‟ The rich man inhis castle, the poor man at his gate – the disordered stomach laid them all low.Miller writes about the British stomach and makes a case for indigestion in the 19th century as „thenational disease of Britain‟, in a lineage that earlier included „biliousness‟ and, especially, „the English

malady‟ – „melancholy‟, „hypochondriasis‟, „lowness of spirits‟ – or what tends now to be called„depression‟ or „anxiety‟. He‟s not wrong about that, even if dyspepsia was also frequently talked aboutas a defining American malady by British critics who reckoned that the whole country was sufferinguniquely from epidemic indigestion. One of those critics was the great English catering entrepreneurJoseph Lyons. Visiting New York in 1907, Lyons told his hosts that they were a „nation of dyspeptics‟and, in an excess of gastronomic chutzpah, that the cause was the appalling American diet. Locatingthe national chronic malady in the stomach may, however, be an Anglo-Saxon trait. The nationalcomplaint of the Germans is Herzinsuffizienz and the French have the crise de foie, both conditionsnot easily translatable into Anglophone disease categories, though French medical writers oftenacknowledged a causal link between the states of the liver and stomach.The democratisation of indigestion tracked changing understandings of its causes. Dyspepsia had

been, and long continued to be, classified by the doctors as an „atonic neurosis‟ –a lack of tone orelasticity in the nerves, causing a debilitation (or „imbecility‟) of the stomach – so the causes might besought in anything bearing on the state of the nervous system. Writing in 1840, an English physicianhad it as a matter of course that „a most intimate sympathy exists between the Stomach and theBrain‟. The stomach was a juice-filled bag, and, as Beaumont knew, the volume and composition of juices might be affected by mental states, but it was also a churn– and when its churning power was weakened, digestion suffered.In the past, a weak stomach and poor digestion was recognised as one of the diseases of philosophers,scholars and the learned. There was a finite quantity of vital spirits in the body: if they were called onto power digestion, they would not be available for the demands of deep thinking, and, conversely,philosophising interfered with the stomach‟s duties. In the late 15th century, Ficino wrote that „it is

bad to strain the stomach with food and drink, and worst of all, with the stomach so strained, to thinkdifficult thoughts,‟ and early in the 18th century the author of a treatise on occupational diseasesnoted that „all the men of learning used to complain of a weakness in the stomach.‟ It is this medicalsensibility that lay behind the etiquette of „table talk‟ – light, airy and undemanding stuff that didn‟tdraw the vital spirits away from the stomach‟s proper work. It was a courtesy medicine paid tomanners.Belief in a causal loop between the stomach and the mind never disappeared. In 1838 Darwinannounced that „I find the noodle & the stomach are antagonistic powers … What thought has to do with digesting roast beef, – I cannot say, but they are brother faculties.‟ And in the 1880s, Nietzschediagnosed the whole Western philosophical tradition as a case of indigestion. Thus spake Zarathustra„Because [the philosophers] learned badly and not the best, and everything too early and everythingtoo fast; because they ate badly: from thence hath resulted their ruined stomach.‟ WhereuponNietzsche took himself off to Turin to purge his philosophical-digestiv e system: „No more greasy,stodgy, beer-washed idealistic Christian German food for me! I shall curl up with gut pain, vomit if you don‟t give me Italian vegetables.‟ Just a few years later, a London physician called John Clarkeclosed the circle by suggesting that indigestion and evolution were causally connected: if Darwin‟sstomach had been healthier, „his view of humanity might possibly have been a more generous andexalted one.‟ Clarke had no doubt that the writings of „some pessimistic philosophers, w hich modern would-be thinkers waste their energies in trying to understand, are the pure products of disordereddigestion‟. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton wrote that the stomach is the „king of the belly, because if he be distempered, all the rest suffer with him.‟ Early 19th-century physicians agreed: „It is



a great mistake to regard dyspepsia as peculiarly or especially a disease of the stomach.‟ Through thenervous connections between the stomach and the rest of the body, and through the stomach‟s role intransforming sustenance into self, anything that went wrong in the guts could wind up disorderingnot just the mind but the liver, heart, gall bladder, spleen, pancreas, lungs and skin. In addition tocomplaints located in the stomach, the dyspeptic might suffer constipation, diarrhoea, headache,insomnia, jaundice, pallor, gout, bladder stones and mouth sores. „Sins against the stomach,‟ anEnglish physician wrote in the 1820s, „are sins against the whole frame.‟ Dyspepsia – its supposed causes and attempted treatments – ramified everywhere in the culture too.

Its democratisation was folded into an emerging social critique. The problem with indigestion wasnow said to reside in collective and not just individual patterns of life. The pace and the tension of themodern city, its unclean atmosphere, the lack of opportunities for exercise, too much sitting aroundand not enough brisk walking, were all responsible for weakening the stomach. Businessmen‟s rush-rush style rendered them particularly vulnerable, but all city-dwellers were at risk. Everyone was now living on their nerves and paying the price. The old English political faultline between court andcountry was now reconfigured in the demography of dyspepsia. Indigestion took its place as one of thesupposed diseases of civilisation, and, in turn, you could take the prevalence of stomach complaints asa marker of pathological modernity.If indigestion was brought about by modern life, so its management and cure constituted a restoredregime of virtue, or, if you preferred a religious idiom, a life in accord with God‟s natural laws.

(„Gluttony punishes the glutton,‟ Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables: „Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.‟) Relax, take a walk in the country, eat moderately andslowly, avoid intoxicating drinks and stimulants, get what‟s now called the work -life balance right.(There were indeed pills hawked about for the cure of indigestion, but for much of the century elitephysicians tended to look down their noses at the very idea of magic bullets: they were signs of thequack.)Over the 150 years of Miller‟s story, a great deal changed, and, less visibly, remained the same, in the way doctors and the laity understood stomach complaints. Driven by various brands of medicalexpertise, dyspepsia began to split into a range of more or less discrete conditions. It started out asone thing with many forms, and it became many things, each with its own diagnostic practices, causesand cures. Much of this followed on from the work of Beaumont and others in the 1820s and 1830s:

new techniques appeared for securing knowledge of the stomach and its doings. Different techniquestended to belong to different kinds of medical practitioner. Who had the right to interpret humaninnards? Among the increasingly prominent specific ailments, peptic ulcers took pride of place. Only a fractionof patients suffering from gastric distress actually had ulcers (or, worse, cancer), and physicians knewthat, but a number of new medical developments propelled ulcer diagnoses into significance at theend of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. At first– Beaumont‟s good luck excepted – there was no effective way to visualise the living stomach. Post-mortem dissection made a contribution, butsurgeons led the way. In the first years of the 20th century, the great English abdominal surgeonBerkeley Moynihan asserted the surgeon‟s right to define and to cure the diseases of the stomach. Thepathologist could only visualise dead guts, while the surgeon could see, feel and manipulate the livingorgan. Surgery, he said, was „the pathology of the living‟. Moynihan insisted that the ailments of thestomach were caused, importantly if not wholly, by organic lesions – in the case of ulcers, a lesion inthe gastric mucosa which surgeons could excise, stitch up or cauterise. The surgeon‟s direct approachalso threw up a surprise: the majority of peptic ulcers were not in the stomach lining at all but in theduodenum, and Moynihan could correlate the different organic lesions with different symptoms. It was the organic lesion that increasingly attracted medical interest, pushing the category known as„functional dyspepsia‟ – that is, the presentation of gastric symptoms without an evident organic basis– into the background and into the domain of self-management. This sort of thing could be dealt with by antacids and by changes in diet and behaviour, but it was of less and less interest to physicians.Doctors could still, of course, be interested in how ulcers were caused, and the causative role of excessstomach acid was widely conceded – in 1910, the Croatian physician Karl Schwarz formulated the



dictum „No acid, no ulcer‟ – but as long as surgery was as effective as advertised, it might not matter very much how excess acid was induced, whether, for example, by eating intemperately or in a rush,or by eating the wrong things, or through stress and anxiety. And so the surgeon‟s stomach was asecular organ, detached from the moral patterns of everyday life. It might, after all, be a good idea torelax, to take a walk in the country, to be temperate, to chew your food properly, and to go easy on theclaret and the spicy dishes, but your ulcers might nevertheless be cured by the surgeon‟s directintervention.The surgeons were optimistic about their curative powers, but, by the mid-1920s, evidence was

accumulating that their case had been oversold. Surgical patients were tending to relapse over time,stomach acidity was not being reduced and surgical risks and complications could no longer beignored. In the event, the notion that medical treatment and diet worked better than surgery had itsadvocates even in the first decades of the 20th century. And by the 1930s both medical treatment and„psychosomatic‟ accounts of ulcer causation were challenging the surgeon‟s primacy. In the early 1900s, the Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon argued for an important causative role of the emotions on the secretion of stomach acid: „Just as feelings of comfort and peace of mind arefundamental to normal digestion, so discomfort and mental discord may be fundamental to disturbeddigestion.‟ Cannon‟s view of psychic involvement in gastric disease was broadly supported by theexperimental work of physiologists in the 1930s and 1940s. In Britain, clinical research on pepticulcer patients found that episodes of high anxiety often preceded medical presentation. Emotional

states were said to be causal but they were not the sort of thing you could cut out or stitch up: they had to be addressed behaviourally. From the 1930s, psychiatrists, psychologists and social scientists were identifying what they called the „ulcer type‟ – tense, hard-driving, the man in the grey flannelsuit, unable to let go, to stop and smell the roses. In the early years of the Second World War, Britishmilitary physicians observed high levels of peptic ulcers among the troops and especially among theevacuees from Dunkirk. While dreadful army food and high levels of tobacco use were implicated,„military dyspepsia‟ and „war ulcers‟ were also linked to psychological stress. It was an association that became more durable during the Blitz, when psychiatrists diagnosed anxiety as a cause of „air-raidulcers‟ in the civilian population. The history of the stomach, as Miller shows, does not simply rise towards reductionism. Thestomach‟s management and feeding is too implicated in frames of personal identity and moral value

to be encompassed by chemical and structural accounts. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuriesthere were many attempts to secularise the stomach – to disconnect the understanding of itspathologies and the prescription of its care from mental and moral life – but they never wholly succeeded. Apart from a few concluding gestures, the last half-century of stomach history isn‟t part of Miller‟s story, and that is too bad because the Nobel Prize-winning discovery in 1982 of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its causative role in peptic ulcers turned the stomach world upside down.It had long been assumed that the stomach was an antiseptic environment – how could bacteriapossibly live in car-battery-strength hydrochloric acid? The finding of microbial causes of a range of illnesses had been counted among the triumphs of scientific medicine, yet ulcers seemed clearly different. Now, however, another major human affliction had finally been assigned its bacterial causeand, with antibiotics at hand, its cure was assured. But it hasn‟t worked out exactly like that: themajority of people infected with H. pylori do not experience clinical symptoms and peptic ulcers may have other important causes, including aspirin and ibuprofen use. Ulcers can be treated withantibiotics that kill the bacteria, but acid-reducing prescription drugs developed from the 1970s(„proton-pump inhibitors‟ and „H2 blockers‟) are widely used in conjunction with antibiotics, andpatients are often counselled to eat and behave in ways that can reduce the production of stomachacid. Some experts now declare that there is no such thing as an „ulcer personality‟ and that worry andanxiety have nothing to do with ulcers. But some remain to be convinced, saying that „other factors‟are implicated in explaining why people infected by H. pylori do not fall victim, or why gastricsymptoms flare up, and these „other factors‟ include „lifestyle habits, like coffee drinking, smoking andongoing stress‟. „Stress,‟ the American gastroenterologist Howard Spiro writes, „increases vulnerability‟ to other ulcer-causing agents „like H. pylori ‟. Medical fascination with bacterial



causation has, he says, resulted in culpable neglect of the roles of the mind, the emotions and thedietary and behavioural patterns of everyday life.The modern stomach contains undigested pieces of its own history. It‟s like this: an American male inhis sixties goes to his doctor. He knows some of the language, so he says he‟s suffering from „acidreflux‟, not from „indigestion‟, „heartburn‟ or a „sour stomach‟. The doctor asks a few questions about when and how often the symptoms occur and how they respond to over-the-counter remedies, andshe refers him to a gastroenterologist. The specialist asks similar questions and then schedules anendoscopy to „have a look‟ and „rule out the bad stuff‟. Administered one of those „twilight‟ sedatives,

the patient and his gastroenterologist view the problematic oesophagus and stomach together in realtime, displayed on a high-def monitor: they‟re pink and surprisingly nice-looking, the patient recallsthinking. Meeting later to review the findings, the gastroenterologist does rule out „the bad stuff‟(cancer and ulcers), tells the patient he‟s got „gastroesophageal reflux disease‟ (GERD in the US;GORD in the UK), which is „our fancy name for heartburn‟. He asks whether the patient‟s job is„stressful‟, whether there are „any other sources of anxiety‟ in his life, and how much he drinks, to which the patient replies „yes‟, „yes‟ and „not enough‟. The patient leaves with a prescription for the blockbuster proton-pump inhibitor omeprazole, which he‟s directed to take daily, and which is meantto block the stomach‟s acid production. „Try to cut down on wine,‟ the specialist says and „foroccasional episodes, take an antacid.‟ The patient gets ready to leave, but the gastroenterologist hasone more thought: he asks whether the patient has ever tried yoga or meditation and suggests it migh

be worth a go.The Housekeeper of a World-Shattering Theory Jenny Diski Martha Freud: A Biography by Katja Behling, translated by R.D.V. Glasgow Polity, 206 pp, £25.00, January 2006, ISBN 0 7456 3338 2In the membership roll of the worshipful guild of enabling wives, the name of Martha Freud ranks with the greatest: Mrs Noah, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Marx, Mrs Joyce, Mrs Nabokov, Mrs Clinton, andtheir honorary fellows, Mr Woolf and Mr Cookson. Wives, of either sex, are what keep the universeorderly and quiet enough for the great to think their thoughts, complete their travels, write their books and change the world. Martha Freud was a paragon among wives. There is nothing moreliberating from domestic drudgery and the guilt that comes of avoiding it than having a cleaning

lady who loves cleaning, a child-carer who‟s content with child-care, a homebody who wants nothingmore than to be at home. And Martha Freud was all those things. Quite why she was those things issomething that her husband might have been the very person to investigate, but Freud was nobody‟sfool and knew when to leave well alone in the murkier regions of his personal life – especially thatdark continent in his mind concerning women. Freud mentioned in passing in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss (to whom he wrote that no woman had ever replaced the male comrade in his life),that at the age of 34, after the birth of her sixth child in eight years, Martha was suffering from writer‟s block. Impossible to imagine why. But like other mysteries about Martha‟s life, this new biography does not (or perhaps cannot because some of the source material remains unavailable)elaborate on what she might have been trying to write. A shopping list, I expect. Unless it was that book about interesting new ways she had thought of for interpreting her dreams, which she workedon in those odd moments when the children weren‟t down with chickenpox or needing theirstockings mended.History tells of Mrs Freud – the wife – as a devoted domestic, and there is little in Katja Behling‟s biography to suggest we adjust our view of her. The big idea seems to be that we must value hercontribution to the development of psychoanalysis as the provider of a peaceful home life for itsfounder. The sine qua non of radical thought is someone else changing the baby‟s nappy. In hisforeword to the book, Anton Freud, a grandson, puts it with incontestable logic: Would he have had the time and opportunity to write this foundational work if he had had,say, to take his daughter to her dancing classes and his son to his riding lessons twice a week?. . . His youngest daughter was born in 1895. When she cried in the night, was it Sigmund who got up to comfort her? . . . If Martha had been less efficient or unwilling to devote her life



to her husband in this way, the flow of Sigmund‟s early ideas would have dried to a trickle before they could converge into a great sea. Martha always saw to it that her husband‟senergies were not squandered. And if Freud had comforted his daughter when she cried in the night, would Anna have been sodesperate for her father‟s attention as to devote her life to publishing his papers and continuing his work? Apostles need more than ordinary unhappiness to fit them for their task.Juliet Mitchell, in praise of the new biography, berates those who dismiss Martha Freud as astereotypical Hausfrau rather than seeing in her „a highly ethical and decent human being‟, though

it isn‟t at all clear to me that they are mutually exclusive descriptions. As to dismissing her, on thecontrary, one wrings one‟s hands and weeps over her, or would if she didn‟t seem to have beenperfectly content with her existence. In his biography of Freud, Peter Gay quotes Martha‟s reply to aletter of condolence after Freud‟s death that it was „a feeble consolation that in the 53 years of ourmarriage there was not a single angry word between us, and that I always tried as much as possibleto remove the misère of everyday life from his path‟. Like strange sex between consenting adults,there‟s nothing to be said against contentment and a division of labour which both parties are happy about. We must read and wonder at the good fortune that each should have found the other. Whichof us would not wish for a Martha of our own to take care of the misère in our daily life while we sitin our study or silently at the lunch table bubbling up enlightenment for the world? Then again, whoamong us would wish to be Martha, no matter how essential her biographer might claim her to be in

the production of the grand idea? To be a muse, an inspiration, might, I suppose, have itsattractions; but to be the housekeeper of a world-shattering theor y isn‟t quite the same. There‟s no point in pretending in the light of 53 years‟ evidence that there was a great originator inMartha struggling to get out. But you can‟t help wondering how it could be that she wanted only thisof herself, a woman who at her marriage was neither thoughtless nor completely self-effacing.Martha was a voracious reader of John Stuart Mill, Dickens and Cervantes, though her husband-to- be warned her against the rude bits unsuitable for a woman in Don Quixote. She was interested inmusic and painting, and had no shortage of suitors. When Freud became obsessively suspicious of her brother (and the husband of Freud‟s sister), Eli, who controlled the Bernays‟s finances, heinsisted, on pain of ending their relationship, that she break with him completely. She held her own,firmly reflected Freud‟s ultimatum back at him, and maintained her relationship with Eli. She

travelled to northern Germany to holiday with only her younger sister for company and had a wonderful time in spite of her fiancé‟s suspiciously heavy -handed use of ironic exclamation marks:„Fancy, Lübeck! Should that be allowed? Two single girls travelling alone in North Germany! This isa revolt against the male prerogative!‟ But as soon as they were married Freud forbade his devoutly Orthodox Jewish wife to light the sabbath candles. It wasn‟t until the first Friday after her husband‟sdeath that she lit them again. What do women want is one thing, but the real question is what madeMartha run: run the household, the children, the travel arrangements, the servants, and with never a word of complaint except a mildly expressed bafflement at her husband‟s choice of profession. „Imust admit that if I did not realise how seriously my husband takes his treatments, I should think that psychoanalysis is a form of pornography.‟ Marriage, they say, changes people, and it does look as if Martha Bernays might have had themakings of another woman – at any rate, another life – altogether. What this otherwise ratherdutiful biography (the mirror of its subject, perhaps) does offer us is a glimpse (but sadly very littlemore) of the by no means uninteresting Bernays family and their oldest daughter, Martha, beforeshe became the other Mrs Freud. Three of Martha‟s six siblings died in infancy; her oldest brother,Isaac, was born with a severe hip disorder and walked on crutches; and the next brother, Eli, was notmuch liked by his mother. When Martha was six, her father, Berman Bernays, was imprisoned forfraudulent bankruptcy after some shady dealings on the stock market. Two years later, the family moved away from the public shame in Hamburg to Vienna, and Martha recalled hearing the „sizzlingof her mother‟s tears as they landed on the hot cooking stove‟. She was teased at her new school forher German diction. Isaac died when Martha was 11, and seven years later Berman collapsed in thestreet, dying of „paralysis of the heart‟ and leaving the family without an income. Berman‟s brothers



had to support them, and Eli took over his father‟s job in order to help out. Not an uneventfulchildhood, not lacking in trauma to be lived through. There are all sorts of pain and difficulty there, yet Martha did not take to her bed and succumb to the vapours. There is not the slightest indicationthat she lost the use of her legs, or found herself unable to speak. And this is all the more remarkablein view of the fact that when her father died, her mother appointed as her temporary guardian noneother than the father of Bertha Pappenheim, later better known as Anna O., who might have told hera thing or two about the proper way to react to family loss. Nor is there any indication that herpositively neurotic lack of neurotic symptoms (unless you count obsessive compulsive caring for her

husband‟s welfare) struck the father of psychoanalysis as worth a paper or two. What Sigmund and Martha had in common were families embroiled in shadowy financial scandals.Freud‟s uncle was imprisoned for trading in counterfeit roubles, and persistent rumour had it thathis father was implicated in the scam. The way both dealt with the discomfort of public shame andlived happily ever after together was by embracing a perfect 19th-century bourgeois existence,provided you don‟t include Sigmund‟s incessant thoughts about child sexuality, seduction theory,the Oedipus complex, penis envy and the death drive – or perhaps even if you do. Presumably it wasprecisely that exemplary bourgeois surface, the formal suits, the heavy, glossy furniture, the rigidtable manners, ordered nursery and bustling regularity, that made it possible for those deeper,hardly thinkable thoughts to be had and developed into something that looked like a scientifictheory. By polishing that surface and keeping the clocks ticking in unison, Martha was as essential to

the development of Freudian thought as Dora or the Rat Man. It‟s just that she didn‟t have the timeto put her feet up on the couch, and Sigmund never cared to wonder what all that polishing andtimekeeping was about. Martha was not there in order to be understood; she was there so that hemight learn to understand others.Not that women weren‟t interesting. Anna O. and Dora were fascinating. Minna, Martha‟s youngersister, who lived with them, was someone to whom, when no serious man was around, Freud couldtalk about intellectual things. Who could have been more stimulating than Lou Andreas-Salomé,Marie Bonaparte, Hilda Doolittle, Helene Deutsch or Joan Riviere? But they were none of them his wife. It is the woman‟s place, Freud said to his oldest daughter, Mathilde, to make man‟s life morepleasant. Intellectual companionship was to be found elsewhere. The more intelligent young menlook for a wife with „gentleness, cheerfulness, and the talent to make their life easier and more

beautiful‟. (Not Lou, then.) In 1936 he spoke to Marie Bonaparte of his married life: „It was really nota bad solution of the marriage problem, and she is still today tender, healthy and active.‟ Heexpressed his relief to his son-in-law Max Halberstadt, „for the children who have turned out so well,and for the fact that she‟ – Martha – „has neither been very abnormal nor very often ill‟. In fact, it was precisely Martha‟s sturdy, if somewhat timekeeping and cleanliness-fixated naturethat Freud found most attractive, according to Behling. She was the lodestone, the quintessence, theelixir to which his life‟s work was ostensibly devoted. He was the Doctor and she was what the cured would look like. She was normal. Obviously, it would have been extremely trying had Anna or Doraor the Wolf Man been like her. But in his world of psychical distortion, Martha represented what noone who takes his works seriously could ever really believe in: the ordinary, undamaged specimen. According to Ernest Jones, „her personality was fully developed and well integrated: it would welldeserve the psychoanalysts‟ highest compliment of being “normal”.‟ No problem for Martha comingto terms with her missing penis at the right stage of her development, no big deal about transferringher Oedipal desire for the mother to the father. She had adapted nicely to her castration, andalthough it meant her superego was a flimsy thing compared to that of a man (woman „shows lesssense of justice than man, less inclination to submission to the great exigencies of life, is more oftenled in her decisions by tender or hostile feelings‟), it served well enough for Freud‟s purposes.Imagine if Freudian analysis had gone quite another way and the master had studied the normality he apparently had so close to home instead of its deformation. What was it that Emmeline (whose bossiness and self-absorption Freud hated) and Berman Bernays did so right? How could he nothave been in a rage to know? But what intellectual innovator would want to give up interesting for



ordinary, especially when ordinary, if left to its own devices and sublimation of desires, arrangedsuch a comfortable life for him?Behling suggests that Martha‟s great value to Freud was her very existence, which prevented himfrom getting too depressed about the nature of human nature. He was able to see in her „someone who stood apart from what he learned about humankind in general‟. She was not part of the „rabble‟,as Oscar Pfister explained, of „good-for-nothing‟ mankind. So not only did he not study her, he didnot communicate any of his professional thoughts to her. „Freud did not wish to share the blackestdepths of his knowledge with Martha, but rather to protect her from them,‟ Behling writes. Or

perhaps, more likely, to protect himself. During their engagement Freud was taken „greatly by surprise when she once admitted that at times she had to suppress bad or ev il thoughts‟. Martha‟s sunny nature, so very different apparently from human nature, was encouraged if notcarefully tutored by her fiancé during their epic four- year engagement. Martha‟s mother had set herface against the marriage of her daughter to an impoverished researcher, and they were reduced to writing letters and stealing occasional meetings. It seems to have been Freud‟s single stab at passionand he went at it with all the will of an adored son. He must have found it alarming, because theheavy curtains of contentment came down as soon as the wedding was over. Before that, he raged with jealousy at the mention of other men, demanding, for example, that Martha stop calling herinteresting painter cousin by his first name. „Dear Martha, how you have changed my life,‟ he said inhis first letter to her. And when they were engaged and he was battling against her mother for

Martha he explained: „Marty, you cannot fight against it; no matter how much they love you I willnot leave you to anyone, and no one deserves you; no one else‟s love compares with mine.‟ Clearly the time for the master‟s self -analysis had not yet come, so he was free to wish to give his fiancée afashionable gold snake bangle and write how sorry he was that in the circumstances she would haveto settle for „a small silver snake‟. He wanted her well turned out so it would „never occur to a soulthat she could have married anyone but a prince‟. But his letters also made other things clear.Martha‟s nose and mouth, he told her, were shaped „more characteristically than beautifully, with analmost masculine expression, so unmaidenly in its decisiveness‟. It was as if nature wanted to saveher „from the danger of being merely beautiful‟. Even so the romance was powerful: the two younglovers exchanged flowering almond branches, and Freud told her that his addiction to cigars wasdue to her absence: „Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.‟ But in describing his views

on the state of marriage he explained that „despite all love and unity, the help each person had foundin the other ceases. The husband looks again for friends, frequents an inn, finds general outsideinterests.‟ Martha, who would apologise each time she screamed during her labour, had been warned. After his death, Martha did not run wild, aside from lighting theshabbos candles, but sat on a chairon the half-landing between the first and second floors of the house in Maresfield Gardens and took to reading again, though only, she assured a correspondent in case she was accused of idleness, inthe evenings. Life, she said, had „lost its sense and meaning‟ without her husband, but she quiteenjoyed receiving the grand visitors who came to the house to pay homage. Anna took over herfather‟s work and Martha suddenly began to take an interest in it. Her daughter found Martha fartoo inquisitive about the patients who came and went. Martha even expressed a view: „You‟d beamazed what it costs, this child analysis!‟ Freud blamed Martha for preventing him from gaining early recognition in the world of medicalscience. „I may here recount, looking back, that it was my fiancée‟s fault if I did not become famousin those early years,‟ he wrote in his self -portrait. His experiments with cocaine in the 1880s weretaken up and elaborated by others. What the late Princess Margaret knew as „naughty salt‟ wasfound to have a beneficial effect as a local anaesthetic, a use Freud inexplicably hadn‟t thought of and which he had omitted to mention in his paper „On Coca‟. It was an unexpected opportunity to visit Martha that had distracted him from fully exploiting the potential of his discovery, he claimedin old age, but was generous enough to excuse his wife since, as Behling puts it, „49 years of wedlock had compensated him for missing out on fame in his youth.‟ But here‟s a thought, an unconsideredkey, perhaps, to understanding Martha. While Freud was making his experiments with cocaine, he



sent several vials of it to his fiancée extolling its effect on vitality, with instructions on how to dividethe doses and administer it. Martha wrote and thanked him, saying that although she didn‟t think she needed it, she would take some as he suggested. She reported back to her fiancé that she found ithelpful in moments of emotional strain. From time to time, Behling says, Martha „enhanced hersense of well- being with an invigorating pinch of cocaine‟. For how long she continued to do this isunknown, but it does suggest an altogether different way of viewing the devoted, domestically drivenMartha Freud, who for half a century went about her frantically busy daily round of cleaning, caring,tidying, managing and arranging all the minute details of her husband‟s life with a fixed and

unfaltering smile. What might they want?Jenny Diski

The Myth and Mystery of UFOs by Thomas BullardKansas, 417 pp, £31.95, October 2010, ISBN 978 0 7006 1729

The problem with that „blue sky thinking‟ we were introduced to by New Labour is that we happen toperceive the sky as blue only because of our particular physiology and arrangement of senses on thisparticular planet. „Blue sky thinking‟ doesn‟t so much encourage limitless imagination as embed in itsown metaphor our absolute inability to think outside our perceptual and conceptual limitations. Wecan‟t help but do it our way. We get a poor enough result when we use „blue sky thinking‟ to figure out

innovative ways to deal with economic or social problems, and do no better contemplating thepossibility of life elsewhere in the universe. We think of aliens and immediately cut them down or up(or some other inconceivable dimension) to our size. They can be bigger or smaller, their heads huge,their eyes bulbous; they are usually humanoid, occasionally reptilian, but they are always recognisableas variations on the theme of life on planet earth. This is as true when we set out to imagine alien behaviour as it is when we imagine their shape.In 1967, astronomers in Cambridge listening to deep space with their new radio telescope heardsignals pulsing at precise and regular intervals. One possible explanation they came up with was thatthey had tapped into an invitation to say hello sent out by intelligent beings from another galaxy.Martin Ryle, the future astronomer royal, was in charge of the group. His response was unambiguousif they had really found extra-terrestrials they should immediately dismantle the new telescope and

not tell a soul about the signals, on the grounds that they wouldn‟t be able to resist replying andalerting the possibly hostile aliens to our existence in this cosy, uninvaded corner of the universe. Infact, they had discovered pulsars. Stephen Hawking agrees: „If aliens visit us, the outcome would bemuch as when Columbus landed in America, which didn‟t turn out well for the Native Americans.‟ When the truth seems to be out there, our best bet for surviving would appear to be not to let a pindrop while circling our wagons. They might be peaceable seekers after companionship in the universe but they might not be, and far safer to overestimate ETs‟ aggressive tendencies than risk inviting Wellsian Martians or Wyndham‟s triffids to do their worst. We are star stuff, and if star stuff isanything like us, it would be wise to reason, we should be very wary indeed. Ryle and Hawking aren‟tthe only ones who suppose that if they‟re beeping us, there‟s something they want, and if there‟ssomething they want and we have it, they‟ll certainly come and get it. Better to err on the side of planet survival and assume that they are greatly in advance of us technologically, and hostile. After allthey‟ve been sending out radio feelers for millennia and we only got our radio telescope the other day.In relation to aliens, we invariably consider ourselves to be the junior thinkers and makers, thoughoften we imagine we are nicer. But they are so much older and more savvy that in all likelihoodthey‟ve used up their own planet‟s resources and are looking around the universe for a handy new planet to inhabit. Ours, we think, would be just dandy for the kinds of alien we imagine. So answerthem and chances are they‟ll be enslaving us or harvesting us for food, interbreeding with, orgenetically modifying us so that our children are born with uncanny blue eyes and an emotionlessstare that turns all human hearts to stone.That is one standard story of human contact with extra-terrestrials. Another view is that they have been watching us, even walking among us, for millennia. Quietly waiting for us to outgrow our



reptilian, mammalian and higher primate incarnations until our poor homo sapiens brain finally fangled the right telescope to hear their signals. Like wise parents, or paternalist gods, they are givingus our head in adolescence and will be on hand to teach us what we really need to know about themeaning of life and the universe when we are ready (see Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick). Or – another benevolent scenario – they are like those concerned parents who would, we‟ve been told, haveprevented the recent earthly riots. They have already stepped in, alarmed at the way earthlingcivilisation is going and have been taking steps to prevent us blowing ourselves up or indulgingourselves to pieces. The free-will thing may have prevented us from growing as wise as we could be,

but imagine what the planet would be like without their surreptitious interventions. Aliens have nothing but contempt for us, or they love us. Oddly, they don‟t seem to be indifferent to u(how could anyone be?), though this is surely the best explanation for the apparent absence of signalsgiven – so the calculations go – that there are at least ten billion planets in the universe capable of producing intelligent life. Even this bit of arithmetic may be based on our incapacity to think beyondourselves. A recent paper I don‟t pretend to understand uses „a Bayesian analysis of the probability of abiogenesis‟ to show that life might, after all, be very rare; rather lax mathematical assumptions aboutthe term „likelihood‟ caused the error in the old equation. It‟s all maths to me, but I think this relatesto the fact that the terms used for the way life might come about are based on the sole example weknow of universal life, which is us and our fellow creatures on this planet.Try as we might to imagine ETs that are not like us, we remain the baseline. InThe Myth and Mystery

of UFOs, Thomas Bullard suggests that this may be more interesting than merely evidence of compulsive anthropocentrism and a limited imagination. Surely, we aren‟t really trying to grasp theactuality of extra-terrestrials. Or at any rate, the narratives related by believers in and experiencers ofUFOs, aliens among us and extra-terrestrial abductions tell us as much about human fears (andhopes) as about the real or fancied activities of visitors from outer space. Bullard is a board member othe Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), a privately funded research group set up in 1973 to make UFOstudies more academically respectable – „the flagship of scholarly excellence for the field‟. CUFOS washeaded until his death in 1986 by Josef Allen Hynek, a professor of astronomy at NorthwesternUniversity and longtime consultant to the US air force. He publicly switched from doubter to believerin the fact, at least, of unidentified flying objects, having decided that in spite of all the false sightingsthere was „a stubborn, unyielding residue of incredible reports from credible people‟. Bullard echoes

Hynek in holding that „the body of data points to an aspect of the natural world not yet explored by science‟ and goes further, to say „that enough threads of coherent experience exist to reject culturalexplanations as less than the whole story, though cultural influences contribute much to our interestin the phenomenon even as they do much to confuse our understanding of it. Both sides deserve theserious attention they have never received.‟ He describes numerous classical UFO sightings and abduction claims, allowing that many of them were fake or misinterpretations of astronomical or covert military phenomena. Those that remaincome from reliable sources, lack alternative explanations, or have a compelling cross-cultural andhistorical consistency. He says no more than that some stories can‟t be accounted for by otherexplanations. This makes him a surprisingly restrained advocate of little green men. His backgroundis in folklore – his PhD from Indiana University was on that subject – and it inclines him to give fargreater cultural and anthropological weight to his understanding of sightings and experiences of thephenomenon of UFOs than you‟d otherwise expect. In a subject where the lack of non-anecdotalevidence means it is only possible to believe in extra-terrestrial visits, not to prove them, a culturaldescription is probably the only alternative to evangelical sermonising. Evangelism works wackily both ways: in 1997, Pat Robertson called for people who believe in „space aliens‟ to be stoned to deathsince if „space aliens‟ did exist they (and therefore believers in them) would be nothing more thanagents of the devil trying to lead people away from Christ.Stories of sightings and meetings with aliens take up a good deal of The Myth and Mystery of UFOs,and are familiar from science fiction in all its forms as well as reports in newspapers. The mother of all sightings is centred on Roswell in New Mexico, where in 1947 (and as it happens, in the week I was born – just saying) debris was found which was, according to taste, the remains of a crashed UFO or



of a military weather balloon from a secret spy programme called Project Mogul. Rumours that deadaliens were found with the debris and hidden in Area 51, a top secret military base in Nevada, werekept alive by a scratchy film that emerged in 1995, showing a large-headed, bug-eyed alien corpse being dissected on an operating table by a man in a white coat. In 2006, the film was revealed by itsmaker to have been a hoax, but Roswell was the first of a slew of mid-20th-century sightings whichsupplied the prototype of the conspiracy theory that still circulates among believers. At its most vivid,the story is that the US government made contact with aliens decades ago and formed a secret worldgovernment in alliance with them, keeping the masses ignorant and themselves in power. They

deliberately mock or ignore believers in UFOs, who are something like seers or liberationists in theface of devilish or imperialist forces of oppression. Close Encounters of the Third Kind fed alluringly off this theory. To more sceptical but still paranoid observers, UFOs at their most plausible are indeedunidentified flying objects: secret military hardware mistaken for something otherworldly. The worldgovernment story remains, but the threat is earthly and the solution individual survivalism or TeaParties. At their most useful as propaganda at the height of the Cold War, evil, non-individualistaliens in American movies and on the radio regularly threatened the earth with obliteration, and withmuch more determination and animus than Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the desk at theUN.However, it is Bullard‟s account of the myth, rather than the mystery, that offers the most acceptableaccount of alien sightings and abductions. Or at any rate the most familiar and easiest to take. Aliens

who whisk innocent sleepers off to their spaceships and give them medical examinations orimpregnate them are only doing what fairies and hobgoblins have been doing since long ago and faraway. Perfectly ordinary people in folk stories the world over are regularly stopped on the road andtaken away by mischievous or sinister Others. In Western European culture, mermaids drag sailors tothe depths, Oberon and Puck do a number on Bottom, Rumpelstiltskin demands a human child of hisown in return for a magical favour, the witch entices lost children into a gingerbread house, theinscrutable Pied Piper, dressed half in yellow and half in red, seduces away rats and then, when thecitizens of Hamelin prove incorrigible, whisks off the younger generation. In the Bible there was atime when giants walked among us and sons of God or angels mated with fair-faced human females,or appeared to individuals to tell them that they were pregnant with a changeling, or to deliver a warning of things to come and save the world from itself. These stories of underground and parallel

worlds have comforted or terrified human beings for centuries. Why wouldn‟t we include the spaceabove our heads in our narratives, and why wouldn‟t we update the stories? Bullard describes aZimbabwean sighting at Mutare in 1981. A brightly lit sphere was seen by 20 workers coming back from the fields. It rolled along the ground and then burst into flames. Clifford Muchena saw threemen standing observing the fire. They were „tall and luminous, they wore silver suits, and a powerfrom them caused him to fall to the ground.‟ He told the investigator, Cynthia Hind, that they werethe spirits of his ancestors. She pointed out that his ancestors would „wear hides and crocodile teethinstead of silvery suits‟, to which Muchena replied: „Yes, but times change!‟ Investigators have culturalimitations as well as witnesses.Bullard is doing cultural anthropology of a more functional kind, but it‟s an effective way of analysing vast amounts of annoying and otherwise unpresentable data. Conversely, the old stories can bereinterpreted from a modern ufologist‟s point of view as alien sightings which a non-technological world used its own cultural assumptions to describe. Aliens interfere in very similar ways, dangerous,powerful but compelling. They aren‟t angels, but visitors from far-off planets, not ancient questingheroes but high-tech travellers from unimaginable distances. Or they are embedded in the mysteriesof the planet so that wonders of ancient architecture and earthworks– Egyptian pyramids, EasterIsland sculptures, the Nazca Lines in Peru – are to be taken as evidence of advanced alientechnologies fallen into disrepair. They‟ve already been and gone. Did they give up on us or were they only passing through and planting a little alien know-how for their own comfort? Anythingincomprehensible is available to be either a sign from God or evidence of an extra-terrestrial visitation. Sleep paralysis is used to explain the helplessness of physical abduction experiences, but



believers‟ stories of what ufologists call „high strangeness‟ are so compelling that it‟s a pity to insist ona terrestrial physicalist explanation.Either to give his book a what-the-hell pro-believer kick in the tail that non-believers can at leastsmile at, or because the silliness of the example is so great that it can‟t be fantasy, Bullard, the anti-sceptical sceptical director of CUFOS, offers as the most convincing case for the existence of alien visitations the account of an alien raccoon giving the nod to the Nobel laureate Kary Mullis. In hisfinal chapter, Bullard tells of Mullis arriving after midnight (having „passed the functional sobriety test‟: he‟d driven „successfully through the mountains‟) at his ca bin in the woods of northern

California in 1985.Once he turned on the lights and left sacks of groceries on the floor, he lighted his path to theouthouse with a flashlight. On the way, he saw something glowing under a fir tree. Shining theflashlight on this glow, it seemed to be a raccoon with little black eyes. The raccoon spoke, saying,„Good evening, doctor,‟ and he replied with a hello. You will have read more than a couple of folk and fairy stories that start like this, to say nothing of Alice in Wonderland , the raccoon being a geographically specific protagonist rather than a whiterabbit, a woman of the sidhe from Eire, a biblical angel or a swan formerly known as Zeus, so you won‟t be more surprised by the encounter than Mullis seemed to be. Yet for all his clarity about the way alien encounters mesh tightly with older and more terrestrial human legends (those other kindsof Other), Bullard thinks that this is the hardest story to deny. Mullis himself later came across

Whitley Strieber‟s huge-selling book about his own alien abduction, Communion, and recognised thetime he lost that night, but as a chemist couldn‟t quite bring himself to accept that he‟d been abducted by aliens. Why would they pretend to be a talking raccoon, and anyway, if they‟re so smart, how comethey invariably have to stick probes up abductees‟ bottoms to see what we‟re made of? On Star Trek didn‟t they have a little gadget that you popped into an alien‟s ear and it told you instantly what kindof life form it was? In fact, I think I‟ve seen very similar machines used in present-day Las Vegas atthe CSI laboratories. So holding back on a definitive yes to alien visitation, Mullis speculated insteadthat the raccoon „was some sort of holographic projection and … that multidimensional physics on amacroscopic scale may be responsible‟. And, getting out my Occam‟s razor, I too am inclined to preferthe little green talking raccoon from outer space as the more plausible explanation. Bullard‟s point isthat here is a highly respected scientist who is adamant that something perfectly ridiculous actually

happened to him. Mullis, in his autobiography Dancing Naked in the Mind Field , insisted: „To say it was aliens is to assume a lot. But to say it was weird is to understate it … It‟s what science callsanecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can‟t reproduce. But it happened.‟ Believers in all manner of paranormal phenomena regularly argue that science can‟t effectively test orfalsify such experiences, precisely because it‟s normal science. This argument doesn‟t help their caseamong sceptical scientists, but normal science ought to know by now that almost everything has atone time been beyond its capacity to test. Maybe it takes a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to come up w ith the phrase „But it happened.‟ Diary Jenny DiskiIn 1959, Dr Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist, received a research grant to bring together threepsychotic, institutionalised patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, in order to make a twoand a half year study of them. Rokeach specialised in belief systems: how it is that people develop andkeep (or change) their beliefs according to their needs and the requirements of the social world they inhabit. A matter of the inside coming to terms with the outside in order to rub along well enough toget through a life. As a rule people look for positive authority or referents to back up their essential beliefs about themselves in relation to the world: the priest, imam, Delia Smith, the politburo, gangleader, Milton Friedman, your mother, my favourite novelist. It works well enough, and when it does, we call ourselves and others like us sane. When it goes awry, when people lose and/or reject allpositive referents in the real world for the self inside, we call them delusional, psychotic, mad. Inorder to count as sane, you don‟t necessarily have to conform to the norms of the world, but you dohave to be nonconformist in a generally acceptable way. One of the basic beliefs we all have, according



to Rokeach, is that we are who we are because we know that by definition there can be only one of us.I‟m Jenny Diski. You therefore aren‟t. The converse is also true: you are the sole example of whoever you say you are. Therefore I can‟t be you. It keeps things simple and sane for both you and me, and it‟easy to check the basic facts with each other, as well as with such socially sanctioned authorities as thepassport office or the registrar of births and deaths. According to Rokeach that is a fundamentalrequirement of living coherently in the world of other people, the only world he believed we caneffectively live in. He tested it one evening on his two young daughters by calling each of them by theother‟s name over the dinner table. At first it was a good game, but within minutes it became so

distressing to the girls („Daddy, this is a game, isn‟t it?‟ „No, it‟s for real‟) that they were starting to cry.If you‟re thinking Rokeach is a bit of a sadistic daddy, I got the same impression readingThe ThreeChrists of Ypsilanti when it was first published in 1964.[*] But what researcher doesn‟t use thematerials to hand – usually family – to begin to investigate a theory? Darwin observed and wroteabout his children, as did Freud. And so did that particularly unpleasant behaviourist father in themovie Peeping Tom, made around the same time as Rokeach‟s dinner table experiment. Rokeach didat least stop once the girls became tearful. But what would happen, he wondered, if he made threemen meet and live closely side by side over a period of time, each of whom believed himself to be theone and only Jesus Christ?The men chosen were Clyde aged 70, Joseph 58, and Leon not yet 40 when they were broughttogether. They were all long-term asylum inmates: Clyde and Joseph had been incarcerated for

decades, Leon for five years. They had daily meetings with Rokeach and a research assistant, and afterthe first few months were given their own private sitting room, where they ate and could spend theday in each other‟s company instead of having to use the day room. They were also given simple tasks which they were required to do together. (This may be the much more gripping prototype of Big Brother, although in the modern version everyone in the house deludedly believes themselves to becelebrities or interesting.) At the first meeting Rokeach asked the three men their names. Joseph said„My name is Joseph Cassel.‟ Was there anything else he had to tell the meeting? „Yes, I‟m God.‟ Clydeintroduced himself: „My name is Clyde Benson. That‟s my name straight.‟ Did he have any othernames? „Well, I have other names, but that‟s my vital side and I made God five and Jesus six.‟ Did thatmean he was God? „I made God, yes. I made it 70 years old a year ago. Hell! I passed 70 years old.‟Leon, who demanded that everyone call him Rex, as Leon was his „dupe‟ name, replied: „Sir, it so

happens that my birth certificate says that I am Dr Domino Dominorum et Rex Rexarum, SimplisChristianus Pueris Mentalis Doktor.‟ (This, Rokeach explains, included all the Latin Leon knew: Lordof Lords, King of Kings, Simple Christian Boy Psychiatrist.)They all agreed with Rokeach that there could only be one Jesus Christ. Joseph was the first to take upthe contradiction. „He says he‟s the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. I can‟t get it. I know who I am. I‟mGod, Christ, the Holy Ghost, and if I wasn‟t, by gosh, I wouldn‟t lay claim to anything of the sort … Iknow this is an insane house and you have to be very careful.‟ Very quickly he decided that the othertwo were insane, the proof being that they were in a mental hospital, weren‟t they? Therefore Clyde and Leon were merely to be „laughed off‟. Clyde concluded that the other two were „rerises‟, lower beings, and anyway dead. He took, perhaps, the most godlike tone: „I am him. See? Now understandthat!‟ Leon, who became adept at ducking and diving in order to maintain his position withoutcausing the social disruption they all found threatening, explained that the other two were „hollowed-out instrumental gods‟. When Rokeach pushed Leon to say that Joseph wasn‟t God, he replied: „He‟s an instrumental god, now please don‟t try to antagonise him. [To Joseph] My salute to you, sir,is as many times as you are a hollowed-out instrumental god … My belief is my belief and I don‟t want your belief, and I‟m just stating what I believe.‟ „I know who I am,‟ Joseph said.„I don‟t want to take it away from you,‟ Leon said. „You can have it. I don‟t want it.‟ Leon‟s standard response to any claim from the others that went against his delusions was „That‟s your belief, sir,‟ and then to change the subject. As to their understanding of why they had been brought together, Clyde, often baffled, took what wasto be his habitual stance and remained silent on the subject, while Joseph was clear that they were

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there „to iron out that I‟m the one and only God‟ and for Rokeach tohelp him convince the other twothat they were crazy, so that Joseph could do his work „with greater tranquillity‟. Leon, right from thestart quite aware of the agenda and able to articulate his opinion of it, had another answer:I understand that you would like us three gentlemen to be a melting pot pertaining to our morals, butas far as I‟m concerned I am myself, he is him, and he is him. Using one patient against another,trying to brainwash and also through the backseat driving of electronic voodooism. That has animplication of two against one or one against two … I know what‟s going on here. You‟re using onepatient against another, and this is warped psychology.

A great problem for the mad in the mid-20th century was that the sane were always trying to get in ontheir act. Sincere people who were not mad wanted to interfere with the mad in various ways in orderto relieve them of their suffering and isolation, while others, equally sincere, wanted to get down withthem and reinterpret their crazy ramblings as meta-sanity. What was no longer an option for the mad was to be left alone in asylums to get on with their deluded lives in their own way. There had beensome historical pockets of interference and understanding. In 1563, more than two centuries beforePhilippe Pinel and Jean-Baptiste Pussin released the patients in Bicêtre from their chains andannounced they needed treating not punishing, Johann Weyer reported to the Inquisition that the so-called witches everyone was so keen on strangling and burning were in fact delusional and mentally ill, as indeed was anyone who thought themselves a victim of their spells. Nevertheless, for the mostpart, until the middle of the 20th century, raving, delusional and pathologically withdrawn men and

women were got out of society‟s way by being incarcerated for much of their lives in formidableasylums, where their keepers had little thought beyond keeping them still, in one place, allowed outonly when they died.By the 1960s and 1970s a coalition of right-wing libertarians, left-wing radicals and the kind-heartedset their faces against such a fate, and, without the left and kind-hearted quite getting the agenda of the libertarians, collaborated to shut down the fortresses and free the mad to roam, not so much caredfor in the community as dosed into a palsied stupor or undosed in manic terror, up and down our highstreets to participate in the real world. R.D. Laing, along with others in the anti-psychiatry movementstarted well by living with and listening to the speech of the mad, but ended up imposing on them his belief that he too had the gift of tongues and took charge of speaking truth to normality. He began astheir interpreter but finally lost interest in the middle-mad-man (who kept behaving badly and had to

be carted off back to the loony bin) and became the source of his own wisdom. Before and after thetime of the anti-psychiatrists, the pro-psychiatrists did everything in their ever increasing „scientific‟power to liberate the mad from the bin and bring them back to the world of normality with coldshowers, electric shocks, insulin shock, brain cutting and anti-psychotic medication. The libertarians,for their part, simply announced that there was no such thing as madness and therefore the state wasnot required to oversee and pay for the care of those who were making themselves socially unwelcome(see Thomas Szasz). The so-called mad were to be turned out of the asylums and become part of thegeneral population. If any individual‟s behaviour was intolerable to society, they were to beimprisoned, not given sick notes.Milton Rokeach came in as these diverse voices began to be heard. His interest was not so much inpsychopathology as with „the general nature of systems of belief and the conditions under which they can be modified‟. In the book Rokeach acknowledges that his experiment with his children had to stop where the trial of the three Christs started, with signs of distress: „Because it is not feasible to study such phenomena with normal people, it seemed reasonable to focus on delusional systems of belief inthe hope that, in subjecting them to strain, there would be little to lose and, hopefully, a great deal togain.‟ This is a very magisterial „non-deluded‟ view of who in the world has or has not little to lose.Evidently, the mad, having no lives worth speaking of, might benefit from interference, but if they didn‟t, if indeed their lives were made worse, it hardly mattered, since such lives were already worthless non-lives. It also incorporated the bang-up-to-the-moment idea that if you want to know about normality you could do worse than watch and manipulate the mad. The three Christsthemselves, however, were of the certain opinion that they had something valuable to lose and madetruly heroic efforts, each in his own way, to resist, as well as to explain to Rokeach and his team that



their lives had considerable meaning for them. All of them, though Leon in particular, had a very clearunderstanding of what it was to be deluded, why it might be a useful option to choose over normality,and who did and didn‟t have the right to interfere in their self -selected delusions. Over the course of the research, each man indicated how far he was prepared to go along with Rokeach, how much he valued what was on offer, and when his boundary had been reached. And they did it with more thanordinary grace and dignity.There was indeed something on offer. Rokeach describes Clyde, Joseph and Leon as long-terminmates of overcrowded wards of custodial mental hospitals with inadequate staffing who might

expect to see a doctor maybe once a year. Suddenly they were receiving a deluge of attention: daily meetings which began and ended with a song of their choice, nurses and a research assistantattending to them, watching and noting their activities all through the day, and special demands madeand allowances given that they had never experienced as regular inmates. Even when they expressedanger at being manipulated, they tended to turn up every day to the voluntary meetings, and took their turn as rotating chairmen, writing up the minutes and choosing their favourite song and book.These most psychologically isolated of men were given (enforced) company, novelty in place of rigiddaily routine, special privileges and (apparently) the attentive ear of the highest and mightiest in their world (each of them being God notwithstanding). In return they were required consciously toconsider their delusions and challenged to alter their particular grasp on reality. The problem thatfaced them initially was: how can there be another one of me? Rokeach hoped they couldn‟t help but

conclude, as they looked from one to the other Christ, that logically they were not therefore who they thought they were, though he says nothing about what assistance was available in the overstretchedstate mental hospital in the event of their suddenly losing their delusions and having to confrontthemselves with their lost years as plain Clyde, Joseph and Leon. In fact, all three men resolved thelogical trap set for them by sinuously changing the nature of the problem. The others were deluded,dead or lesser kinds of god. A kind of positive stability emerged, they associated with each other, sangtogether, read to each other and, apart from occasional bust-ups usually triggered by the researchers,generally refused to be drawn on the matter of who exactly was or wasn‟t the one true Christ. Leon was the most deft, perhaps because he had the clearest understanding of the invidious situationhe was being put in, and found it harder to suppress the logic. He announced one day that he was nolonger Rex, but had transformed into Dr Righteous Idealed Dung. One in the eye for his tormenters,

you feel, cheering him on. Henceforth he would only answer to the name Dung or, as a concession tothe head nurse, who attended a meeting to say that she couldn‟t bring herself to call him Dung, simplyR.I. He directed the meeting to Philippians 3:8: Yea, doubtless, and I count all things but loss for theexcellency of knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things anddo count them but dung, that I may win Christ. Rokeach knew that, covertly, Leon hadn‟t renouncedhis belief that he was Christ, but had instead shape-shifted, gone underground to the abject opposite. As he said before his transformation, „I believe that God is in this chair. He is in my dung and urineand farts and burps and everything.‟ („That‟s crazy,‟ Joseph replied. „You don‟t believe that God can bea patient in this hospital … I‟m the real God and I know I can be in many forms.‟) Now Dr R.I. Dung was going to be „the humblest creature on the face of the earth –so lowly as not to be worth bothering with‟, Rokeach explains. His brilliant plan allowed him to be a secret Christ, who no longer had toconfront and defend himself against the claims of the other two, and who in this way could continueto enjoy the companionship and privileges on offer.Since the researchers had been unable to shift the delusions of the three Christs, they decided toconfront the men‟s fantasies in other ways. They were shown a newspaper article about a speechRokeach had given on three psychotic men who thought they were Christ. Clyde read it and fell asleepJoseph claimed to have no idea who these men were. „Why should a man try to be s-somebody [sic]else when he‟s not even himself? … He should be sent to a hospital – not to be gotten out, not to bedismissed until he has gotten well … when he claims he‟s not Jesus Christ any more.‟ Leon, lucid asever, knew exactly who the three men were and expressed his anger: „When psychology is used toagitate, it‟s not sound psychology any more. You‟re not helping the person. You‟re agitating. When you agitate you belittle your intelligence.‟ Joseph, too, made himself clear: „I look forward to



quietness. We can win over negativism. By “we” I mean the five of us having the meeting. It‟s notgoing to do us any good. Then the meetings might be dissolved.‟ Next the men were asked if it was all right for the researchers and the staff in the hospital publicly torefer to Rex as Dung, Joseph as Mr God, and Clyde as Mr Christ. All three joined forces (apsychologist‟s triumph in itself) against Rokeach. „Now, don‟t be funny,‟ Clyde said. „You mustunderstand, it‟s too heavy for an individual to participate in these meetings over here, to go into thatGod business,‟ Joseph said. „It‟s indirect agitation. There‟s a confliction … It‟s frictional psychology,‟Leon said. From which Rokeach deduced that „a psychotic is a psychotic only to the extent that he has

to be.‟ As Christ, Leon had been married to an absent wife called Dr Blessed Virgin Mary of Nazareth. Withhis translation to Dung, she was married off to Leon‟s mystery uncle, and Leon took a new wife: thepowerful but invisible Madame Yeti Woman. Joseph‟s „delusional authority‟, whom he called Dad, wasDr Yoder, the actual head of the hospital. Dad and Madame Yeti Woman became the main players inthe final phase of Rokeach‟s plan to test the nature and persistence of the three Christs‟ belief systemsClyde, too old and rigid to be further experimented on, was allowed to continue with the meetings but wasn‟t confronted with his delusions. Rokeach‟s idea was to see if Leon‟s and Joseph‟s fantasy authority figures were real enough to them to instruct their „husband‟ and „son‟ to enact „normal‟ behaviour. Leon and Joseph began receiving letters. Leon‟s were signedYour loving wife (andsometimes Truthfully yours), Madame Yeti Woman. Some of Joseph‟s letters from „Dr Yoder‟,

written on hospital headed paper, ended: be assured that I will always love you just exactly like a father who deeply loves his own son. Sincerely yours, O.R. Yoder, MD. Leon‟s initial refusal to acceptletters from Madame Yeti Woman excited Rokeach into wondering whether he didn‟t, after all, really believe in his delusions. Do the deluded take on their persona more consciously than it seemed, as ashield against having to cope in the regular world? Are the mad really mad? Did Leon only want themto think he believed what he said? Leon at first firmly rejected the fleshing out of his fantasy, becameextremely depressed and said he didn‟t like the idea of people imposing on his beliefs. But gradually,unable to resist the temptation in spite of his deep suspicions, he came to accept her as a realpresence. She sent money, told him to buy things for himself and to give the change to Clyde andJoseph. Leon, the only human being Rokeach had encountered who genuinely had no interest inmoney, did as he was instructed. Madame Yeti Woman made Dung‟s inner world as real as the

meetings he attended. In one letter she enclosed a „positive cigarette holder … I think you willenjoy this one since it also has a cosmic boupher.‟ It is excruciating to read of his capitulation, as he accepts the existence of and is ready to interact withsomeone else in his isolated world. In a meeting where Leon is given a letter with a dollar bill,Rokeach notes a breakthrough for the study:Suddenly I realised that he was really doing something I had not expected to witness. He wasstruggling to hold back his tears. With this much effort he would surely succeed. But he did not … Does the letter make you happy or sad? „I feel somewhat glad‟ … Are you crying? „No, my eyes aresmarting because of some condition.‟ You say you feel somewhat happy? „Yes, sir, it‟s a pleasantfeeling to have someone think of you. But there‟s still a tugging against her and I don‟t care for it.‟ Doyou want to disobey her? „No, no! I don‟t! That‟s the point! I don‟t care for the temptation againsther.‟ It seems as if the invasion is complete, but Rokeach goes too far as both Madame Yeti Woman andDad. Madame Yeti Woman arranges a meeting, which Leon goes to, but, of course, finds no one there„When he returns to the ward he is visibly upset and angry. He tells an aide that he is very angry withhis wife because she was in the back of the cafeteria having relations with aNegro.‟ After transferringhis love to a new female research assistant and finding his yearning intolerable, Leon at lastannounced that all his former wives were dead, that he had discovered his „femaleity‟, married himselfand been pregnant with twins who bled to death before birth.I‟m looking forward to living alone. My love is for infinity and when the human element comes in it‟sdistasteful … I‟ve found out whenever I receive something, there‟s always strings attached and God bless I don‟t want that.



Joseph also had his sticking point. When Dad asked him to go to church, he did for a while, but whenDad suggested that he write an article (Joseph had dreamed of being a writer when he was young) andsign a formal statement that he was not Jesus Christ, he wrote back, not to Dr Yoder, but to PresidentKennedy, offering to be his speechwriter. He announced that he was „caught in the net of the threeJesus Christs‟, and refused „to tell a lie‟ by signing Yoder‟s statement. Joseph gave up Dad and foundhimself a higher fantasy authority, in order to live as he had to live. Rokeach at last discovered that hehad not succeeded in changing „a single one of Joseph‟s delusions‟ but in the course of trying hadgained „clinical and theoretical insights about the limits beyond which his delusional system could not

be pushed‟. In an epilogue written some months after the experiment ended, Rokeach updated the reader:Clyde and Joseph give every appearance of remaining essentially unchanged. But Leon continues toshow evidence of change or at least further elaborations in his delusional system of belief … Theprognosis for schizophrenia, paranoid type is poor … But to say that a particular psychiatric conditionis incurable or irreversible is to say more about the state of our ignorance than about the state of thepatient. This study closes with the hope that at least a small portion of ignorance has here beendispelled.It turned out that Milton Rokeach was the one who gained the most from his experiment. Anafterword, appended when the book was reissued in 1981, is called „Some Second Thoughts about theThree Christs: Twenty Years On‟. By then Clyde had been released back to the custody of his family,

and Leon remained in the „back wards‟ of Ypsilanti State Hospital; Joseph died in 1976. Rokeachreread the book with regret. There were, he says, four people with delusional beliefs, not three. Hefailed to take himself into account, and the three Christs, not cured themselves, had cured him of his„God-like delusion that I could change them by omnipotently and omnisciently arranging andrearranging their daily lives‟. He came to realise that he had no right to play God and interfere, and was increasingly uncomfortable about the ethics of his experiment. „I was cured when I was able toleave them in peace, and it was mainly Leon who somehow persuaded me that I should leave them inpeace.‟ Back when Leon was shown the newspaper article, he‟d explained to Rokeach: „A person who is supposed to be a doctor or a professor is supposed to lift up, build up, guide, direct,inspire! … I sensed it at the first meeting – deploring!‟ Deploring? Do you know I’ve come 75 miles in snow and storm to see you?

„It is obvious that you did, sir, but the point still remains, what was your intention when you camehere, sir?‟ No one could have done more than Leon to explain to Rokeach what was wrong with his experiment:„You come under the category where a person who knows better and doesn‟t want to know is alsocrazy to the degree he does not want to know. Sir, I sincerely believe you have the capabilities to castout negative psychology. I believe you can aid yourself.‟ Rejecting his false wife he said: „I know I‟mmissing out on pleasure – eating, drinking, merry-making and all that stuff – but it doesn‟t please my heart. I have met the world. I got disgusted with the negative ideals I found there.‟ The best Rokeachcan manage is the acknowledgment that psychosis „may sometimes represent the best terms a personcan come to with life‟. In 1964, having spent some time myself in a psychiatric hospital, I read The Three Christs, and soonafter came on Laing‟s early books, which confirmed what I had seen in it. It has made me very wary ofreading „case histories‟, written about the disturbed by those who believe themselves to know better. Italso seemed to me, aged 16, that The Three Christs of Ypsilanti contained everything there was toknow about the world. That‟s not the case of course, but if resources were short, I‟d still be inclined tosalvage this book as a way of explaining the terror of the human condition, and the astonishing factthat people battle for their rights and dignity in the face of that terror, in order to establish their placein the world, whatever they decide it has to be.

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