No More Learning

Bishop Barker divided his imprisonment into two main phases:
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the first six weeks of pressures, directed at "personal factors"; and the remaining time, "when I realized that the Communist program was not against me, but against my religion. " During the first phase, his captors emphasized "real facts/' These included: a de- scription of Communist policies in his mission area which he had written at the request of an American officer (while he was strongly anti-Communist, much of what he described in this report had been far from unfavorable, and he felt that it would have been better for him if the Communists had actually seen the report rather than just hearing about it); and his presence at a meeting organized by Japanese occupiers in their attempt to obtain co- operation from the missionaries (his sympathies were always with the Chinese, and he emphasized the many risks he had taken in helping them against the Japanese). Although he felt that these incidents were misinterpreted and distorted, he nonetheless re- gretted the two actions greatly, and they contributed to a strong personal sense of guilt.
He also took the next step, and began to view himself in rela- tionship to the Communist doctrine:
I said that imperialism is the parent of pride and acquisitiveness, and that I would fight it. I thought that maybe there was imperialism in me.
But during the second phase, as he began to get a better grasp of the prison world (he had known very little about Communist doctrine or reform methods), he realized that his captors were indicting his mission society and his Church as part of an "espi- onage network," At this point the trend was reversed, and "I mobilized all of my strength for resistance. " As he "learned what play was going on," he consciously substituted within his mind the Catholic religious equivalents of the subjects under discussion:
This saving thought came to me: for the state I substitute God; for the people, my Christians; the imperialists' failings, greed and pride, are aptly represented by uncharitable self-love and love of pleasure, and the "helping" more than takes the place of fraternal admonition. . . . It was necessary for me to find the proper standpoint in relationship to God.
He began to view his imprisonment as a personal religious trial:
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I suffered . . . because my self-love had to give way to the love of God. . . . One time when the warden spit in my face, I felt pain, but it was instantly suppressed. The pain meant I still had self-love . . , when you lose self-love, there is almost instant disappearance of pain. . . . In the struggle between the selfish I and God, the selfish I causes pain, uncertainty, insecurity, and a troubled heart. When you are wholly relying on God, you calm down and there is a quietude and peace that you feel. , . . When this happened I could feel my inner happiness increasing. . . . I was thankful to them for a rare occasion to live my religion.
Meditating whenever he could, he thought of the early Roman martyrs and of Christ himself on the Cross, reconstructing in his own way the New Testament passage which applied to his situation:
You will be persecuted. People will kill you like a dog, but do not be afraid. They can kill your body but not your soul. When they press you with arguments . . . give them the answer. The Holy Spirit will give you the answer.
He sought to retain this reversal in symbols throughout his im- prisonment; "I would agree to personal shortcomings because I had many shortcomings regarding God. "
At the same time, he attempted to avoid involvement in the re-education program as much as he could, pleading poor eyesight (his glasses had been broken soon after his imprisonment and were never replaced), difficulty in hearing (also partially true), and an
incomplete knowledge of written Chinese.
He also tried to maintain his sense of the humorous and the
human, as the following incidents suggest. Once an intelligent fellow-prisoner, after subjecting Bishop Barker to a grueling in- dividual session of "informal help" shook his head and said, quoting a Chinese proverb, "Talking to you is like playing a violin before a cow. " Back in the group, Bishop Barker was asked about the session, and whimsically reported, "He has been playing music to a horse"--stimulating in his helper the response which he had hoped it would bring out--"I must be making some progress. " For, as Bishop Barker explained to me, "A horse is more sensitive to music than a cow. "
Similarly, he reported on the efforts of a cellmate with a strong but brief argument: "He played a big drum, but he ran away. " And
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at a lighter moment, his cellmates temporarily joined the game and asked him "Which instrument? " another less forceful cellmate had "played/' to which Bishop Barker replied, "He played a small drum. "
When pressed for his "thoughts," his humor was tinged with the poignancy of the prisoner's position: "I am a man who does not exist. I cannot have any thoughts. " And frequently, when he was being abused by his cellmates, he would appeal to their sense of personal ethics: "I can endure this, but I wonder how you can endure it. Does your conscience allow this evil treatment? " This last approach especially would sometimes bring at least temporary relief. Bishop Barker also felt that his advanced age was responsible for a certain amount of moderation, sometimes expressed in the backhanded prison vernacular as an admonishment for his stub- bornness: "You have no pity for your old bones. "
The occasional presence of other Westerners, including priests, was also of great importance to him, although he had little op- portunity for direct exchange with them. Once, however, after a particularly difficult day, he recited a German poem to a fellow- European in the cell: "The day was hot, the battle was fierce, the evening quiet--it will be cool in the night. " This poem helped him to express his feelings and rally his strength; but since he was overheard, it also resulted in severe criticism for "cursing us in a foreign tongue. "
Despite his friendly, personal approach to other prisoners, Bishop Barker was careful to avoid real intimacy with them:
They would say, "This Number Four is not a good comrade. He remains separate from us. It must be because of his imperialist pride. " They wanted me to sit down with the other prisoners and to have them as comrades. But I was afraid that if I did this, my resistance would grow weaker.
Although he made many concessions, his imprisonment--con- trary to most cases--ended on a note of resistance. During his last five months, he received his most severe treatment, including handcuffs and chains--which he referred to as "decorations"-- directed toward extracting a final "espionage" confession: "my repentance and witness letter. " He doggedly refused to follow the judge's suggested version, insisting that untrue accusations involving
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his colleagues and his Church be left out; he finally agreed to a compromise version consisting only of "facts"--somewhat exag- gerated, but mainly concerned with his own behavior. The prison officials, rather than hold him longer to extract a more desirable confession, were apparently determined to release him at this time for reasons of their own. He left with the feeling that he had forced the government to back down and had successfully de- fended the integrity of the Church.
He arrived in Hong Kong, gaunt but confident, expressing to his friends the conviction that he had successfully met a severe trial. He experienced much less fear and suspiciousness than most, and the physician who first examined him described him as a "superior person," much more composed than others he had examined im- mediately after the same ordeal.
When he spoke to me three months later, he retained this ex- pressed feeling of victory: "In the long run, I have won. " He was strongly critical of the "diabolical" Communist world he had seen, and specifically condemned its manipulation of people:
The Communists drop a net all over the country, closing the frontiers. Then the net is dropped over an individual person, and he loses his freedom of movement and must follow their wishes.
But as we talked more, it became clear that he had some inner doubts about the completeness of his victory. He spoke whimsically of being "almost converted" during the early period of imprison- ment, criticized himself for having then gone "too far/' and gave me the general impression that he felt very uncomfortable about whatever concessions he had made.
This impression was confirmed when he showed me a summary of his prison experiences which he had prepared. In attempting to convey, in characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, the full impact of Communist arguments upon missionaries, he revealed perhaps more than he meant to:
And now, like a monster from out of the abyss, the most fearful realiza- tion dawned: you, a missionary, the herald of the Gospel, are not you a messenger of the imperialistic conquerors, their pioneer, on account of your ethnological and industrial reports on your mission land? And after the occupation of your mission land, you go on rendering the conquer- ors many different services. And take your mission work as a whole: does
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it not now prove to be a big, long, and heavy sin? And the question whether your mission activity has been of more harm or good to the people answers itself. But because you grew up in imperialistic ideolo- gies, it'has never until now occurred to you how much you have been of help in the enslaving and the exploitation of a people which for- merly enjoyed liberty. Yes, the scope of your corrupting activities is en- larged: what you do, your colleagues do. Thus you cannot escape the fact that your society and your mission ought to be regarded as spy centers, sending out reports to both headquarters, and that Rome be- comes the world center, from where imperialist governments draw their perverting information. . . . as proof that you now condemn this process, you must at once give full information about the spy activities of your society, of your mission, as of Rome. By doing this you acquire the mentality of the new regime, which alone will make you realize the sins of your past life, and those of your comrades. Only this men- tality will give you true guidance for your future work.
Even as he condemned the Communists, he was deeply im- pressed with their power and energy, and compared these favor- ably to the shortcomings of the W est in general and of the Catholic Church in particular:
The Communists have tremendous enthusiasm in their outright devo- tion to their doctrine. . . . What they believe, they do. . . . Weare divided between doctrine and practice. . . . There is a discrepancy between religious life and doctrine. Therefore we are weak. . . . They are superior to us in carrying out their actions. . . . They have dialectic and a strange use of their proofs. . . . They have a keen instinct for finding out what each man may be doing against liis own creed and his work. . . . I don't know where human beings can find such proofs.
In resorting to the demonology of Catholic theology for his analysis of Communist strength, he expressed very little personal bitterness toward his former captors. Rather, he emphasized their antireligious (and therefore "unnatural") character as a cause of their ultimate failure:
Communists' faces are hard, reflecting cultivated hatred, insecurity with each other, and irritations. They are unsatisfied regarding human nature . . . because the essential relationship between the Creator andman is unsatisfied. . . . Their leaders have the greatest authority everfilled by human beings, but they obtained this authority by taking it them- selves, without the authority of God. . . . They are hanging in air without foundation, and the frame is too large for the image. . . . Al- though they aim to make people satisfied and happy by work and sacri- fice, in the long run they destroy this goal. . . . They rely only on
? APP ARENT RESISTERS 1 ^ 1
nature without God or any spiritual forces, but they do so many things against nature.
But despite all of this, he was struck by the similarity ("the identical methods, the identical terminology") between these Communist conversion techniques and those of his own Catholic Church. He also emphasized, however, what was for him the crucial difference between the two: "The state demands such a complete change and turnover of mind as we only allow God to demand. " He summed up his admiration-tinged condemnation of the Com- munists in the simple statement, "They lie so truly. "
He extended his analysis to the sources of his own courage and resistance, dividing these into the religious, the ethical ("for others") and the personal He felt he was weakest in the last category, and for this he felt a certain amount of guilt and shame; but he believed that this "natural defect" was compensated for by his strength in the other two areas, and particularly by the necessary strengthening of his "religious motive": "I had to become more religious or else give way to the Communists. " As a consequence, he felt that the entire experience had left him "more separated from the outside world than before," because of his "deeper religious life. " Always important in his evaluation of his personal experience was the theological significance he attributed to it. "In my whole life, I have always given suffering a higher meaning. . . . always recalling, 'the blood of the martyrs is the seed of new Christians'. "
These religious preoccupations did not diminish his lively re- sponses to life around him. His enthusiasm for China and for the Chinese was always evident, and he was greatly affected by a short trip he took to a neighboring island whose landscape reminded him of the interior of China. He enjoyed wine with his meals, and was quick with a spirited metaphor at any time. He was impatient with clerical colleagues who were either dull or overly propagandistic. He criticized American women, both on moral grounds ("They show to everyone what only their husbands should see"), and for an implied defect in sensuality ("They are like a lukewarm shower bath"). He always welcomed psychological interpretations from me: "You are better in the natural. I am better in the supernatural," and asked for names of books from which he might learn the principles of psychiatric interviewing, which he thought would be
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useful for his religious work. At the same time, he repeatedly urged me in my future work to encourage my patients to deepen them- selves in their religion, whatever it might be; and he was not above a delicate pursuit of my own soul--recommending to me, and then producing the next day, a book written by a psychiatrist describing his spiritual journey from Judaism to psychoanalysis to Cathol- icism. 1
Toward the end of our talks, he summed up his feelings about his experience once more in an affirmative way: "My constant feel- ing is I have done good. . . . I have nothing to forget. " But once more I felt that while part of him believed this, another part of him required its expression in order to quiet guilty doubts. At that time, his prescription for the future was essentially a spiritual one: "I am convinced that we can resist Communism only if we are one hundred per cent adherents to God. "
I also saw him six months later, about ten months after his release, when he was passing through Hong Kong after a period of rest and travel, and after having lectured and given sermons on his experience. Then he spoke in a different key. He talked of the in- evitability of war, implying that we might as well "risk it now"; and he severely attacked the alternative path of negotiation and modera- tion: "You do not sit down with the Devil to discuss how to save your soul. " In developing this point of view, his explanation took a strange turn to economics: "America has lost many of her overseas markets--so something will happen--and this war must result" anyway. " In his activities, he continued to dedicate himself to what he called the "spiritual mobilization of Christians. "
To what extent did Bishop Barker resist thought reform? Cer- tainly, he was impressively successful in accomplishing what every imprisoned Catholic priest attempted to do (and what priests have
always attempted in these circumstances): to maintain a sense of inner theological experience rather than surrender to the influence <of those who would change him. His emotional strength upon re- lease, his clear preservation of his own ideals and his condemnation of those of the Communists, his capacity to place his entire experi- ence within the framework of his own theological idiom--all were very real demonstrations of strength and of resistance.
Nonetheless, there was clear evidence that his theological struc-
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ture had also been penetrated by significant thought reform in- fluences. His repeated need to affirm his "victory" had some of the quality of whistling in the dark, especially in the light of his awe and even admiration for the Communists' single-mindedness and "superhuman* (even if demonic) energies. His own written "fear- ful realization" statement expressed the depth to which one part of him had entered into the Communist idiom, the extent to which he had been made to feel guilty on their terms. His preparation of this statement was in fact his way of attempting to purge himself of this unwanted reform influence. Finally, there is his remarkable statement about economics a few months later--an extreme anti- Communist view, to be sure, but at the same time an orthodox Marxist analysis undoubtedly derived from his prison experience.
Bishop Barker--in his exposure to Communist indoctrination, and in his long life before this--had struggled with inner demons of his own. On the one hand, his life is a remarkable study in continuity. From the age of three to seventy, the direction of his life and of his view of the world never changed, only expanded. Moreover, he was one of those fortunate men who could achieve the unachievable, and live out fully during his adult life the imagina- tive fantasies of his childhood--which may not be, as Freud claimed, the only form of true happiness, but which is certainly one of the best paths to self-realization. His was undoubtedly an identity of great strength and consistency, combining fundamentalist ab- solutism with a well-developed worldliness and a taste for the human drama.
What, then, were his demons? They were his feelings of weak- ness, of being unable to accomplish what he so wished to do, his self-doubts (and possibly even lapses of faith), and the sense of guilt and shame which accompany such doubt. They were, in short, his negative identity.
His adolescent identity crisis was specifically his struggle with these demons, and he overcame them through subordination of self to the greater authority of Church and God. Like Vincent and Luca, he found his solution in an absorbing profession; in terms of belief and ideology, it was attained more by rigorous reinforcement of what already consciously existed than by the use of some new principle from the outside or of something long-buried within.
Although this ideological solution was certainly a successful one,
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the demons frequently re-emerged and gave rise, in later life, to anxiety, fatigue, and despair; and in a man as sensual as Bishop Barker, probably to considerable sexual temptation as well. Men are perhaps at their most heroic when fighting such inner demons, however, and Bishop Barker never succumbed. Instead, he used his form of totalism--his urge toward absolute surrender to an all- powerful supernatural force--as a means of taming them. Totalism was not, as it was with Miss Darrow, a threat to his self-affirmation. Quite the reverse; it was the power behind his most cherished self- image, the emotional counterpart of his ideal of martyrdom.
But the Communists would not meet him on this ground. By focusing upon personal weaknesses, and by creating a situation in which martyrdom was impossible, they denied him his strongest inner support. His early susceptibility to their influence was due to their circumventing his totalism and making contact with his per- sonal demons of guilt and self-doubt. And I believe this is what Bishop Barker really meant when he spoke of the alliance between the Communists and the demons: he was expressing in theological symbols what he knew from profound psychological experience-- the alliance between the undermining pressures of thought reform and his own negative identity, for him a particularly dangerous entente. It created an inroad for thought reform influence; and with his degree of totalism, the emotional extremes of Communist ideology and behavior held a seductive appeal. The process was, of course, enhanced by his painful awareness of having committed actions (the report for the American officer, and the attendance at the Japanese-run meetings) which violated both Communist law and his own moral standards.
He could protect himself from seduction only by reaffirming his tie to the Church, by reclaiming his totalism as a source of de- fensive strength. This was possible for him once he felt that the Church itself was under attack. Then he was able, as he always had been, to bring his inner demons under control, even make them work for him. By placing his negative identity squarely within the Catholic perspective, he could denounce his selfishness to his heart's content, as a prisoner was supposed to do, and through the denunciations move closer to the Catholic Church and create distance between himself and the Communists. At the same time he could also call upon that humane and flexible part of himself
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which had always lived side-by-side with his Catholic fundamen- talism and totalism, and which had contributed so much to his stature as a human being.
He was still in the midst of this reclaiming process when I saw him, simultaneously accentuating his totalism, and re-emphasizing its alignment with his Catholic supernatural identity. The thought reform seduction remained a constant threat and gave several evidences of its unconscious presence. Yet despite Bishop Barker's inner doubts about his "victory," it was by no means entirely a hollow one. He had resisted thought reform's disruptive pressures more effectively than most.
Methods of Resistance
Bishop Barker illustrates dramatically the psychological strengths and weaknesses of the apparent resisters. The same factors are present to some extent in all prisoners, but in the apparent re- sisters these strengths are most effective and the weaknesses most dangerous. These methods of resistance (for that is what both the strengths and weaknesses are) may be classified under five main headings:
The first form of resistance is the acquisition of a sense of under- standing, a theory about what is going on, an awareness of being manipulated. In Bishop Barker's case, this understanding was not immediate; and in a man of his intellectual and psychological breadth, we m^y assume that it was his "demons" which were re- sponsible for the delay. But once he began to grasp "which play was on" it could become for him just that--something of a con- trived drama, by no means completely artificial, but one in which he could do his "acting" while keeping in touch with his own spiritual tradition. In his explanation, he undoubtedly oversimpli- fied the importance of this understanding, but it was important nonetheless. Each of my subjects formulated his own psychological, theological, or philosophical concepts to explain the experience to himself, even while he was going through it. These theories offered protection: they gave each prisoner a capacity to predict what was coming next, a sense of anticipation;2 and they provided him one of the rewards of knowledge, a sense of control. This understanding, always partial at best, cannot offer complete immunization; but as
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Bishop Barker and many others demonstrated, a grasp of the techniques being used and the emotions being called forth helps to dispel the terrifying fear of the unknown and the sense of complete helplessness--two great stimulators of human anxiety upon which thought reform depends. The prisoner is thus enabled to mobilize his defenses and bring into play the other methods of resistance.
The second important resistance technique is the avoidance of emotional participation; in other words, the prisoner remains as much as possible outside the communication system of thought reform. Bishop Barker was doing this when he emphasized his dif- ficulties in sight and hearing, and his limited knowledge of written Chinese. Others, who had lived for shorter periods of time in China, managed to resist learning even spoken Chinese while in prison; still others, at their own request, were allowed to study Marxist writings or Russian, and thereby avoided more intense personal involvement in confession and re-education. Bishop Barker went even further. In his human relationships he steered clear of the kind of intimacy which would have drawn him more deeply into the group structure of the cell and integrated him more firmly into the prison world. This in turn enabled him to do what was most important of all--to maintain a private inner world of values, judgments, and symbols, and thereby keep3a measure of inde- pendence from the ever-pressing environment.
Since a prisoner could never fully avoid participation, the next best form of resistance was to adopt a neutralizing attitude, one which deflated rather than contested, and which thereby took the sting out of the assaults. Hostile rejoinders gained a prisoner little, and in fact brought about even more devastating pressures. But humor or humane stoicism (both of which Bishop Barker demon- strated) put officials and cellmates in a difficult psychological posi- tion.
A show of humor had the effect of breaking the general tension and dissipating the anxiety and guilt which hung heavy in the en- vironment. As one subject expressed it, "Since the judge is a tragedian before you, if you keep a smile this protects you, because the impressiveness of the tragedy is avoided. " This was not often possible, as the same subject was quick to add. But when it was possible to use it, humor was a way to express a tone contrary to
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thought reform's self-righteousness, an implication that the intense doings of the moment could be made fun of because they were merely a speck on the great human canvas. Since humor is a shared emotion, it can create a bond of sympathy (as it did for Bishop Barker) independent of and frequently antithetical to the world of reform.
Humane stoicism, the turning of the other cheek in the face of abuse, is, as Bishop Barker made clear, an attitude extremely dif- ficult to maintain in the prison environment. It is a form of passive resistance in the Gandhian tradition; but a prisoner can never flaunt the resistance, and even his passivity, or lack of enthusiasm in any direction, is highly suspect. Moreover, it requires unusual dedi- cation to a supernatural or humanitarian ideal. Yet it may produce startling effects, even to the extent of so dominating the cell for a moment that harsh behavior suddenly seems shameful in everyone's eyes. It is not long, of course, before there is a return to the usual prison standards; but the impact of this stoicism outlasts the brief moment of its effectiveness. It reaffirms--in the eyes of the stoic prisoner and his cellmates--a moral position superior to the grandiose moral claims of thought reform.
The steadfastness of humane stoicism is related to the fourth and generally most important resistance technique, that of identity reinforcement. Bishop Barker's major way of resisting thought re- form was to make it a Catholic theological struggle, rather than a Communist remolding. He sought always to maintain himself as a priest struggling against his selfishness, rather than as a stubborn imperialist spy. To do this, he needed a continuous awareness of his own world of prayer, Catholic ritual, missionary experience and Western cultural heritage; with nothing around him to encourage it, this awareness could come only from within. His behavior re- sembled Father Luca's conscious recollection of the people and places which had special meaning for him. This kind of identity reinforcement was for any prisoner the essence of self-protection, both against reform influence and against always-threatening psy- chological disintegration.
One priest expressed this very succinctly:
To resist . . . you must affirm your personality whenever there is the opportunity. . . . When I was obliged to speak my views about the
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government, I would each time begin, "I am a priest. I believe in religion. " I said it strongly every time.
This statement was perhaps a retrospective exaggeration of his self- assertion, but there was no doubt that so personal a reminder served him well.
A European professor used a more creative approach. He some- how managed during moments when pressures were relatively re- laxed to make a series of drawings representing precious moments in his past: a mother and baby, a boy before a Christmas tree, a university city, a young man on a romantic stroll with his fiancee. He also wrote a brief, idealized account of the incident in his life each drawing represented. He worked on both the drawings and the essays during moments when he was off by himself in a corner of the cell or with other Westerners; and they became so precious to him that he smuggled them out of the prison at great risk and proudly displayed them to me during OUT interviews. They re- established for him the world in which he wished to exist: "I could escape the horrible world around me and move in a world whose values I agreed with. "
The first four methods of resistance depend upon strength--ego strength, strength of character, strength of identity. Another aspect of Bishop Barker's response may be termed pseudo strength, and this method of resistance is a potential psychological danger. I am referring to his inability to come to conscious terms with thought reform influences, and his need instead to make use of the psycho- logical mechanisms of denial and repression in order to keep from himself the recognition of undue "weakness. " In this pattern he differed, not only from the obviously confused, but also from the apparent converts (although both of these groups of prisoners, especially the latter, had much of their own to hide from them- selves). Bishop Barker shared with other apparent resisters a sig- nificant attraction to the reform program; his repeated protesta- tions of resistance and his strong condemnations of Communism expressed his attempts to cast off this attraction. The potential danger of this pseudo strength lies in the effects of a highly unac- ceptable, and at the same time completely unresolved, set of emotions.
Thus, when Bishop Barker advocated "war now" with the Com-
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munists--at the same time justifying his view by Communist theory--he was attempting to eradicate these compelling thought reform influences (his new demons) which so deeply threatened his sense of who he was and what he believed. He was, in effect, saying: "If we can destroy all of the demons in the world, it will eliminate those within me without my having to recognize that they have been there/'
The apparent resisters characteristically combine these real and pseudo strengths. Their form of totalism, along with their habitual use of denial and repression, create a paradoxical situation in which those who have been least influenced by thought reform uncon- sciously feel themselves to be most in danger of being overwhelmed by its influence. They struggle continually against a breakthrough of despair.
Survival and Influence
We have been discussing in this, and in the previous two chapters, problems of indvidual thought reform experiences, and especially the problems of survival and influence. The two are closely related: for a prisoner to survive--hold on to physical and psychic life--he must avoid being totally overwhelmed by environ- mental influence. From the standpoint of identity, survival and resistance to influence converge, at least in an absolute sense: one cannot have his deepest feelings about who and what he is totally replaced, and still survive in a nonpsychotic state.
But one can go quite far in permitting his identity to give way to outside influence, and still function adequately, both physically and psychologically. Indeed, in thought reform, a prisoner had to submit to some degree of environmental influence as the price of survival. 4 This was especially clear in the cases of Professor Castorp and Miss Darrow, both of whom were aware that they had bartered the acceptance of reform views for survival. This bargain was also struck by prisoners like Bishop Barker, even though more of the bartering occurred outside of awareness. To survive thought reform and retain absolutely no trace of its influences was an ideal impos- sible to achieve--whether the ideal was held by the prisoner him- self, his colleagues, or the shocked onlookers of the outside world.
This paradoxical relationship between survival and influence al-
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lows a better understanding of the Westerners' performances during imprisonment. As far as survival is concerned, these men and women, when put under extreme forms of stress, were able to sum- mon an impressive store of strength and ingenuity. Bishop Barker's use of humor, Dr. Vincent's characterological shift from isolation to "togetherness/' even Father Luca's delusions all were methods of survival, as were the confessions and the "reformed" patterns of behavior elicited during imprisonment from every prisoner.
Thought reform succeeded with all Westerners in the first of its aims, the extraction of an incriminating personal confession, because it made this confession a requirement for survival. It fell far short of its more ambitious goal of converting Westerners into enthusiastic Communist adherents; for although none could avoid being profoundly influenced, virtually all prisoners showed a gen- eral tendency to revert to what they had been before prison, or at least to a modified version of their previous identity. The barter of influence for survival which Western prisoners made with their reformers turned out to be reasonable enough; only the unreason- able demands of their inner voice of conscience made some of these Westerners feel that their bargain had been a Faustian one.
One very important question remains: granted the variations in external reform pressures, what factors in individual character structure are responsible for the differing susceptibilities to thought reform influence? I found that it is not so much the specific type of character structure which is important, as is the degree of balance and integration; not so much who one is as how well one is put together. To speak, for instance, of "hysterical" or "obses- sive" character types does not help us, since these characterological tendencies appear among people in all three categories. Distinguish- ing "authoritarian" from "liberal" character traits5 is a bit more useful; but it does not explain why one apparent convert (Miss Darrow) falls into the liberal category, and another (Father Simon, discussed in Chapter 11) into the authoritarian.
Rather, each tended to be influenced to the degree that his iden- tity, whatever it may have been, could be undermined through the self-deprecating effects of guilt and shame. This susceptibility in turn depended largely upon his balance between flexibility and totalism, and their special significance for his character structure. Apparent converts shared with apparent resisters a significant amount of
? APPARENT RESISTERS 1J1
totalism; hence both extreme responses. 6 But apparent resisters (Bishop Barker) possessed great strength of identity in contrast to the apparent converts (Miss Darrow) who tended to show identity diffusion. Those among the obviously confused were able to be more flexible in experimenting with identity alternatives, without feeling the need to totally accept or reject the new influence. This is not to say that they were without elements of totalism, any more than the apparent resisters were completely devoid of flexibility; every character structure has both. It was more a question of degree
and of lifelong pattern. 7 Some individual cases (Dr. Vincent) defy even these broad patterns: his totalism was predominant throughout his life and during reform itself, but his idiosyncratic identity strength and flexibility were responsible for his ending up in the most moderate of the three categories.
Each of the three styles of response had its own psychological advantages and disadvantages, as well as its variations. None held a monopoly on human limitation, strength, or courage.
? CHAPTER 9
GROUP REFORM: DOUBLE-EDGED
LEADERSHIP
A consistent feature of all the cases discussed so far
has been the isolation of the Western prisoner. Even when physically part of a cell group, he was completely re- moved from it--emotionally, culturally, and ideologically--until he "changed" and adopted its standards. Never did the group sup- port him as an individual, or help him to resist the onslaughts of thought reform; rather, the group was the agent of thought reform, the conveyor of its message.
There was just one exception to this pattern among my Western subjects. One all-European group was permitted to reform itself; it developed in the process a remarkable series of resistance ploys, and at the same time an incomplete immunity to the reform effects of these ploys. This group showed a poignant combination of solidarity and antagonism, of tortured and tender behavior; its story is one of a struggle to maintain group autonomy-in an environ- ment specifically geared to prevent the appearance of any such autonomy,
This unusual Western group functioned for two-and-one-half years, and conducted its thought reform in English. The six men
15*
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who were its members for most of its existence averaged close to two years of this form of re-education; and each spent at least one year with all five of the others. There were several manipulations and changes in personnel, so that four additional Westerners spent short periods of time in the group; but these men did not play as important roles in the group. The Europeans never constituted an entire cell by themselves, but were always a subgroup within a larger cell which also contained eight Chinese prisoners. A Chinese cell chief was always in charge of both subgroups. All the prisoners involved--Western and Chinese--were completely occupied during these two-and-a-half years with their re-education. Before each Westerner joined the group, he had been in prison for at least a few months; each had already made some concession to the govern- ment's demands, some form of incriminating personal confession.
The Europeans were brought into the cell one by one, for the apparent purpose of "helping" each other with their confessions and reform. The early pattern was essentially as follows. One European who had achieved some degree of adaptation to his en- vironment by making a satisfactory confession and taking part in the criticism of others would be joined by a second Westerner who was still in acute conflict over how much to submit. The influence of the adjusted upon the conflicted European would inevitably be in the direction of confession and reform, but his motivations for this "progressive" influence were complex and uncertain. Always present, in combinations only partially understood by himself, were a genuine desire to help a fellow Westerner to accept the inevitable; an attempt to demonstrate his own "progressiveness" to the authori- ties in order to gain "merits" toward release; and the need to justify his own self-surrender through bringing a person similar to himself into the sphere of those who have already surrendered-- a way to share guilt, shame, and weakness. All this "helping" pre- ceded the existence of a true group structure, and served as a pre- liminary softening up for the group re-education process. It also set much of the pattern for the complicated personal relationships which were later maintained within the group.
The particular people involved in this group brought to it ad- ditional sources of friction of a very formidable nature. The group eventually included a German physician with ardent Nazi sym- pathies, a highly-trained French Jesuit philosopher, a Dutch priest
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of lowly origin, a successful North German merchant, an adventur- ous South German businessman, and a French Jesuit science teacher. Among such a group, personal, cultural, intellectual, na- tional, political, and religious conflicts were always potentially dis- ruptive, and were particularly apt to emerge at times when things were not going well. The potential conflicts included the German versus the Frenchman, the Nazi versus the anti-Nazi, the priest versus the layman, the Catholic versus the Protestant, the Jesuit priest versus the non-Jesuit, the crude peasant versus the middle- class gentleman, the North German versus the Bavarian, the uni- versity graduate versus the man of limited education, the profes- sional man versus the merchant.
As though this were not enough, these men also had conflicts with each other which had existed before imprisonment--some personal and social, some ideological--for instance, disagreements among priests about whether to stand firm against all Communist pressure, or to adapt flexibly to it and accept the Communist- sponsored "independent church" movement in China. Members of these separate families within the group (priests, Germans, pro- fessional men, and so on) tended to support each other on manyis- sues, but also found themselves in the most severe personality clashes; these were sometimes so extreme that the mildest statement or action on the part of one automatically became the cause for overwhelming resentment on the part of another, and group mem- bers often quoted the maxim: "No one is the other man's devil like one priest together with another. "
Could any cohesion at all develop among such contending and unwilling guests? One might easily doubt it. Yet somehow leaders did emerge, along with a rather remarkable esprit de corps. In fact, the story of this group is really a study in leadership under stress1 --leadership not absolute or static, but active and changing. It is also a study of group, rather than individual, resistance patterns. These patterns reveal much about the group process specifically produced by thought reform, as well as something about group process in general; they also tell us something about the interplay among the personal qualities of a leader, the special demands of a milieu, and the behavior of a group.
This group experience can be divided into three phases, each identified by a particular atmosphere, and by the domination of
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one man. To be sure, what happened in one phase also occurred to some extent in the others; but the following descriptions record what was most characteristic of each phase.
The Academic Phase
When Dr. Bauer, the German physician, arrived in the cell, he found there three other Westerners, each struggling to recover from severe personal pressures, and all living in an atmosphere of great fear.
The first, Mr. Weber, the businessman from Bavaria, had just a short time before made an attempt to kill himself, and had also experienced delusions and hallucinations; with the help of the other two, he was in the process of recovering his faculties. A man of extremes, he had lived a life of great heroism and of alcoholic excess, always in conflict between his very demanding internal ethics, and his intense need to act out his rebellion. In prison, this pattern continued: he was at times absolutely unyielding in his resistance, at other moments unduly "progressive. " Inclined to be petulant and moody, he was leaning heavily upon the other two men.
The second, Mr. Kallmann, the North German merchant, had also attempted to take his own life a few months before in the midst of a severe depression with psychotic features. He had been given more time and opportunity to recover, and he had learned a "progressive" stance which he tried to convey to Mr. Weber. Mr. Kallmann possessed what the others described as "typically Ger- man" traits--loyalty, reliability, sentimentality, irascibility. At this point, his great fear was expressed in an attitude of extreme submis- siveness: "I was so submissive that when going to the water closet, they told me I was bending my head too much, and that I might run into something. "
The third, Father Emile, the French Jesuit scientist, had been a great comfort to both of the other two men. He impressed them with his outward calm and with his religious devotion, and had exerted a particularly strong influence upon Mr. Weber in reviv- ing within him the will to live. Father Emile was slow, deliberate, and was regarded by the others as "the most sober of us mentally. " He managed to remain cheerful, even to interject an occasional humorous monologue or bawdy story. But he did not possess either
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great intellectual breadth or quick tactical responses; and he was still under great personal pressure because much in his case was considered to be "unsolved. "
Dr. Bauer's arrival heralded a change in fortune for this oppressed trio. Having been subjected to relatively minor pressures, his at- titude was still one of confidence, and his entry was an injection of strength. As Mr. Weber expressed it: "He arrived like a breath of fresh air . . . He still had guts. "
Very soon after his arrival the four men were instructed to study together in English, since none of them had an extensive knowledge of spoken or written Chinese. They were to follow the usual procedure--reading from Communist documents, criticism, and analytic self-criticism--under the general direction of the Eng- lish-speaking Chinese cell chief. Thus the Westerners' group re- education began.
For the first three months, the pressures from above were relatively mild. The prison officials had apparently not yet fully worked out a system for the foreigners to follow, and the cell chief himself was notably easygoing, almost friendly. Although he met daily with prison officials, he did not seem to be greatly pressed about the behavior of the Europeans. Thus he demanded of them only that they maintain an attitude of study--without exercising any great control over what it was they were studying.
The four Westerners took advantage of this situation, and began to organize their resistance. ("It was then that our group opinion formed. ") They went through the motions of reading and dis- cussing Communist material for just a few minutes at the beginning of each study period. Then, still maintaining a strict outer decorum, they made use of their varied intellectual backgrounds to discuss principles of philosophy, religion, science, and business practice. Further, they pooled their knowledge to evolve a critique of the Communist position. As Dr. Bauer explained: "We developed the concept that modern science completely disproved Marxist materialism, and that modern science was forced to recognize a divine being. "
No one among the four Westerners had any official status as leader, but Dr.