THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 89
I realized I was foolish, but I had to go through my experience.
I realized I was foolish, but I had to go through my experience.
Lifton-Robert-Jay-Thought-Reform-and-the-Psychology-of-Totalism
Under attack is the deepest meaning of his en- tire life, the morality of his relationship to mankind.
The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of emotional influence over its participants.
Revolving around it are issues most decisive to thought reform's outcome.
Why call this process logical dishonoring? Surely it is not logical to have one's identity so disparaged--unless one sees this disparage- ment as a small but necessary part of a greater system of events. And this is precisely the kind of systematic rationale which the Communists--through their ideology--supply. A prisoner's incon- sistencies and evildoings are related to historical forces, political hap- penings, and economic trends. Thus, his acceptance of his negative identity and the learning of Communist doctrine become insepa- rable, one completely dependent upon the other. The realignment of affirmation and negation within one's identity requires an end- less repetition, a continuous application of self to the doctrine-- and indeed, this is the essence of re-education. The prisoner must, like a man under special psychological treatment, analyze the causes of his deficiencies, work through his resistances (or "thought prob- lems") until he thinks and feels in terms of the doctrinal truths to which all of life is reduced. In the process, he may be guided
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by a particular "instructor" (sometimes referred to as "analyst" or "case analyst") who has special charge of his case, keeps all personal records, and conducts many individual interviews with him. The prisoner's psychological strengths and weaknesses become well known to his personal instructor, then to other officials as well, and are effectively utilized in the undermining process.
What we have said so far of "re-education" hardly lives up to the name: we have talked more of breakdown than of remaking. In actuality, the remaking is also well under way. Even during the earlier stages of identity assault and compulsion to confess, the prisoner experiences stirrings of restitution. The buildup of his negative identity, along with his developing acceptance of Com- munist doctrine, provide the first contours of something new. He continues, during the years of imprisonment, to loudly proclaim his own demise; but as his re-education proceeds, he finds himself first announcing, and then experiencing, the refashioned identity which is emerging. His sense of nakedness and vulnerability nourishes the growth of the "new man. "
9. PROGRESS AND HARMONY
The prisoner's new self requires emotional nutriment if it is to continue to develop. This nutriment is supplied by the prisoner's achieving a sense of harmony with his no-longer-strange surround- ings. Harmony is partly a matter of gradual adaptation, as both Dr. Vincent and Father Luca made clear. Adaptation in turn is contingent upon progress in reform; and only when this progress has been demonstrated does the prisoner begin to receive the rec- ognition and acceptance which is so precious in such an environ- ment.
Then, as Dr. Vincent described, the prisoner can experience the deep satisfactions of solving all problems; of group intimacy in living, working, and suffering; of surrendering himself to an all- powerful force, and sharing its strength; of laying himself bare in the catharsis of personal confession; of sharing the moral righteous- ness of a great crusade of mass redemption.
Toward the end of their imprisonment, both Dr. Vincent and Father Luca were living under quite comfortable circumstances. The improvement in their physical surroundings was important enough; the atmosphere of frankness and of being met halfway was
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exhilarating. Both had regained the status of being human. Talks with judges were man-to-man encounters between people who un- derstood each other and considered one another's feelings. Indeed, Father Luca felt free enough to voice doubts and criticisms; and although he did this partially as a tactic, he was at the same time accepting therapeutic assistance from his captors.
To appreciate the emotional appeal of harmony, one must--as the prisoner invariably does--contrast it with the basic fear and estrangement of the earlier phases of imprisonment. Instead of an- tagonism and total conflict, he feels in step with a milieu which ap- preciates him. Identified as a "progressive," he is permitted (and grasps at) a more direct form of self-expression. To be sure, he is still partly the actor; but performance and life have moved closer together, and he is not acting as much as he thinks he is. As he achieves a more intimate communication with his reformers, his entire experience takes on a much greater feeling of reality. Officials in turn show a beginning willingness to accept the prisoner as he is --by no means perfect in his reform, but at least more genuine in his partial reform.
10. FINAL CONFESSION: THE SUMMING UP
In this atmosphere of harmony and reality, the prisoner is ready
to make a conclusive statement of what he is and what he has been. The confession has long been developing, of course, but it is likely to take its final shape only after he has achieved sufficient "progress" to produce and believe in a "correct" version.
In Father Luca's case--which is especially illustrative for the entire confession process--the two short paragraphs of his final confession seem almost anticlimactic after the millions of self- accusatory words he had already poured out. Yet this briefest of confessions was both a symbol and a summation of all that had gone before. For the officials, it was the confession, the statement for the record. For Father Luca, it was the last of an arduous series of confession identities. To understand this, we must review the sequence of his confession responses and his existential involve- ments, since any confession, whether true or false, contains an in- terpretation of one's present and past relationship to the world.
Luca's first confession statement (so unacceptable as a confession that it might better be called his pre-confession statement) was his
? PSYCHOLOGICAL STEPS 8 l
defiance. In claiming that his arrest was either a mistake or a con- sequence of his faith, he was clinging to the identity of the priest with integrity. But as he began to surrender more and more of this part of himself, and became lost in the labyrinth of his own false confessions, he took on two additional identities: the secret con- spirator and the "novelist/' or creative confabulator. His belief in his own falsehoods indicated both the degree to which his identity had broken down and the strength of the image created within him of this conspiratorial self. When he consented to speak about his clerical colleagues, and give details about Catholic groups, he was assuming the imposed identity of the betrayer, and especially the self-betrayer. Then, when the "novel" was abandoned, and he began for the first time to confess everything--to lay before his reformers all that came to his mind--he became the ignorant supplicant, groping for acceptance. Next, in organizing specific points in an acceptably self-damning fashion, he was simultaneously the re- pentant sinner (he could be repentant because he knew better what his sins were) and the relatively advanced confessor (one who had learned the techniques of his environment). In the two para- graphs of his final confession--in which he referred to his "espi- onage" relationship with another priest, and to his "illegal" church activities--he took on (although hardly completely) the final identity of the "confirmed" criminal.
The reformers thus ended precisely where they had begun. From the beginning they had labelled Luca a criminal; and these two "crimes" were clearly the ones they had originally selected for him to "recognize. " Why, then, did they put everyone to so much trouble?
They did so because confession is as much a part of re-education as re-education is of confession. The officials demanded that their accusations become the prisoner's seZ/-accusations, and that the confession be made with inner conviction. They required that he present himself in the evil image they had constructed for him--and their reasons for requiring this, as we shall later discuss, are by no means completely rational.
Father Luca's sequence of confession was neither unique nor accidental; the sequence was essentially the same for Dr. Vincent also, and for almost all other prisoners. There is first the at- tempt at accuracy, then the wild confession, then the return to
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real events in distorted focus, and finally, the brief "criminal" con- fession. Since the development of the wild confession usually occurs during the first few days or weeks (Father Luca's lasted for an exceptionally long time), the main trend is a shift from the im- aginary to the concrete. Although fantasy and falsehood are by no means eliminated, this shift does give the prisoner the sense that he is moving in the direction of truth. His confession changes from an uncontrolled dream-like (or nightmarish) vision to a more re- sponsible reinterpretation of his own life. Thus he becomes more "engaged" in the confession process, more closely bound to his own words. At the same time, the effect of his wild confession has not been entirely lost upon him; he is apt to retain feelings of guilt over it, as if he had really done the things he described.
While each step in the confession is the result of changes in the strength and tone of the environmental pressures, the prisoner experiences many of his responses as personal discoveries. Both Luca and Vincent, in shifting from falsehood to exaggeration, thought they had hit upon a useful and ingenious technique; only later did each realize that the officials' manipulations had made this reaction inevitable. Each step in the confession, then, is a means of adaptation; and it is also, for both prisoner and reformer, a compromise: he wishes to say less, and they demand more.
In this confession sequence, there is a good deal of structuring and planning on the part of prison officials. But they too can be victimized by their impulses, and by the contagious paranoid tones of the environment; their confusion over what is true and what is false--so evident in their treatment of Father Luca--can add to this general emotional turmoil.
The confession thus embodies demand and response, molded creativity, adaptation, compromise, working through, and a good deal of confusion on all sides. Its final version is the prisoner's subjective perception of the environment's message, guided by his reformers, but also including his own guilty re-evaluation of his past actions. Its beginnings in real events, the "logic" of its distor- tions, and its documented flavor may make it quite believable-- both to the outside world and to its creator as well,
1 1 . REBIRTH
Just before his release Dr. Vincent became once more the physician and teacher, and at the same time he became the ad-
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vanced and sympathetic student of Chinese Communism. At the end, reformers made it clear he should combine these two aspects of himself. He was expected to bring the scientific and technical emphasis of his profession to his study of Communism, and to carry over a "progressive" approach (pedagogical shortcuts geared to the needs of "the people") to his medical teaching.
The same principle was applied to Father Luca. Toward the end of his imprisonment he was more and more recognized as a priest with the right to hold his religious views, even if the officials would not go so far as to allow him to practice his religion--an enemy ideology--in the prison. Simultaneously he reached a stage of maximum participation in the Communist movement. This com- bination is best symbolized in his assuming the role of the re- former, working on a Chinese Catholic priest to bring him to con- fession. The foreign European missionary who had helped to train Chinese colleagues was once more taking the role of the spiritual mentor, but this time under the imposed sponsorship of the Chinese Communist movement which now encompassed them both.
They did not cease to be priest or physician; rather each became a priest or physician sympathetic to, or at least in a working relationship with, Chinese Communism. Although much of their former identities had been dishonored during imprisonment, they had suffered only a temporary, controlled, and partial "death/' If anything like a whole man is to walk out of prison, a good deal of the prisoner's old self will have to be resurrected. This resurrection, however, can be permitted only when the imposed thought reform elements are strong enough to dominate the new combination. For it is just this confluence of identities--the bringing together of evil criminal, repentant sinner, student of Communist doctrine, and the man originally imprisoned--which constitutes the rebirth. Heralded by all of the identity shifts of previous steps, this con- fluence is likely to occur only after prolonged re-education. And since even the prison identities must be carved out of the prisoner's own emotions (albeit with a powerful knife), rebirth means a basic modification, but not a total replacement, of the former self.
It is a modification strong enough, as in the case of Dr. Vincent, to create a profound change in the prisoner's view of the world, and in his personal relationship to the world. He reinterprets his thought and behavior, shifts his values, recedes his sense of
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reality. 12 The Communist world, formerly considered aggressive and totalitarian, is now seen as peace-loving and democratic. He identifies with his captors, and is happy in his faith.
12. RELEASE: TRANSITION ANDLIMBO
At this point, the prisoner is ready for release, although the actual timing of a Westerner's release has been determined more by international political considerations than by his progress in reform. In recent cases, a public trial, replete with prosecuting and defense attorneys, has formalized both the conviction and the re- birth. Before an outside audience, the prisoner once more admits his crimes and expresses his new point of view, while the defense attorney makes a plea for additional "leniency. " More frequently, the prisoner is simply read his charge and sentence while still within the prison, as happened to both Vincent and Luca. On rare oc- casions, a Westerner is sentenced to serve additional time in a new setting (considered a true prison) where he undergoes "reform by labor," a procedure of much less emotional involvement. Whether publicly or privately sentenced, the great majority of Western prisoners have been immediately expelled from China,
But release and expulsion, as Vincent in particular discovered, do not put an end to one's troubles. Instead they thrust the Westerner into an environment which immediately questions all that has been so painstakingly built up during the years of imprisonment; and they precipitate a new identity crisis just as severe as the one ex- perienced during incarceration. Although this crisis occurs outside the thought reform milieu, it must be regarded as the final "step" in reform; it cannot be separated from what has gone before. The presence of this post-release identity crisis in virtually all of my Western subjects during the time of our interviews was what enabled them to describe so vividly the identity conflicts of their thought reform experiences.
Upon arriving in Hong Kong, Dr. Vincent discovered that what he had become in prison was of absolutely no use to him in his new milieu. Alone with his emotions, he found himself in a dev- astating predicament: he had internalized enough of his prison environment to feel a severe distrust of the non-Communist world, but was sufficiently receptive to the evidence around him to be highly suspicious of the Communist point of view as well. The
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security he had known during the latter part of imprisonment sud- denly vanished, and his identity was shaken to its foundations. Should he still be the "Communist physician" of his rebirth and seek employment through a European Communist party? or should he return to his freelance medical work in underdeveloped countries? In his personal limbo he was unable to feel "safe" (or whole) in either world; instead he felt deceived by both.
He longed nostalgically for the relatively simple, ordered, and meaningful prison experience, now glorified in his memory. He could relinquish this longing only as he began to be able to trust his new environment; this trust in turn depended upon the capacity to trust himself. Once more he underwent a painful identity shift, encompassing what he had been before, what he had become in prison, and what he was in the process of becoming after release.
Father Luca experienced a similar crisis, in some ways attenuated by his immediate welcome into the motherly embrace of the Church. He knew clearly that he was still the dedicated Catholic priest (although it was not easy for him to give up being a "Chinese" Catholic priest). But he retained profound doubts about his own integrity, and especially about the morality of his mis- sionary work. The dishonoring had struck deep chords in him, and had stirred strong anxieties. His problem was not so much whether or not to continue being a Catholic priest--he could conceive of no alternative to this--but rather one of regaining respect for the clerical missionary life to which he was committed.
Nor were Dr. Vincent and Father Luca alone in these conflicts; immediately following release, all prisoners experienced profound struggles about their integrity, their ability to trust, and their search for wholeness. None escaped the personal crisis of this transitional period any more than he could avoid involvement in the other steps; but each man's crisis was his own.
? CHAPTER 6
VARIETIES OF RESPONSE:
THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED
In discussing in Chapter 5 the twelve psychological
steps of prison thought reform, I emphasized the similarities in the emotional responses of the people who were put through it. These similarities were due both to consistent pressures and to universal human characteristics. In this chapter, I shall turn to the equally important individual variations which I was able to observe. Each subject, during and immediately after his reform, demonstrated his own special combination of emotion and belief, his particular pattern of strengths and susceptibilities. The quality of this personal response depended largely upon the character traits of the man who was imprisoned, upon the configurations of emo- tions and identities developed within him during the course of his entire previous life.
Since no two men are the same, we could delineate as many types of response as there were subjects interviewed. It is convenient, however, to distinguish three general categories, based upon the beliefs these men expressed and the emotions which underlay those beliefs at the time of our interviews. These categories--the ob- viously confused, the apparent converts, and the apparent resisters --each describe a broad style of response characteristic for the time of imprisonment as well as for the post-release period. Despite the
86
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complexities involved, and the inevitable overlapping, these three categories allow us a deeper appreciation of both the inner effects of thought reform, and the relationship of these effects to already existing patterns of behavior.
Dr. Vincent and Father Luca, as different as their reactions were, both exhibited the first and most frequent variety of response. Both felt confused and said so. Each could recognize that he had been affected by some of the Communist message, and each felt a need to reconsider the problems of who he was and what he believed. This combination of admitted confusion and conscious search was characteristic for fifteen of the twenty-five Westerners.
Although I have said much about Dr. Vincent and Father Luca, I have included very little about the man behind the response or the child and youth behind the man. The following examinationof their preprison life patterns makes obvious what psychiatrists and psychologists have learned to expect--that all men have a hidden history of struggle and conflict, whether they are patients or "normal" research subjects.
Dr. Charles Vincent: The Mystical Healer
Born and brought up in southern France in a pious, middle- class family (his father was a painter who limited his creations to Catholic religious art), Charles Vincent began to express during his earliest years an antagonistic urge to cut himself off from people around him:
My father looked at me as a wild child. , . , He was telling me all the time I didn't have any relationship with him. . . . We were in the same house but not in fusion. . . . He didn't succeed to have my in- side. . . . I thought, no matter what--you are wrong and I am right,
Charles sought always to escape the confinement of his house: "I didn't like to sleep in a bed. I wanted to sleep in a tree/' He re- members his father, on one occasion, chaining him to the house, but to no avail: "I succeeded in escaping and I was happy. "
His father felt that the best cure would be a strict boarding school. Charles attended four of these schools, most of which were run by Catholic authorities, between the ages of ten and seventeen. In each case he did well enough in his studies, but he recognized no rules, and kept himself emotionally aloof.
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It was difficult for me. . . . my temperament was to go against every- body, to keep me tight with no external manifestations. . . , I was not interested in people around me, you understand--just looking only my way--just wanting to be out because I thought that way I could be more independent--to put a distance between persons who might still influence my goings on.
Vincent (with a certain pride) remembers school authorities complaining to his father: "Your son has been here for four years and we don't even know him. " After a period of time, he was usually expelled.
But through all this combat, he felt deep within him that he was bad and guilty and that they--his father and other strict authorities --were justified in punishing and seeking to reform him.
I never fought with my father. He was a good man. He gave me a frofession. If he used a strong way with me, I think he was right. . . . felt, "My father is my father, and I cannot go against him. " The fault was with my character, but I couldn't by myself correct myself.
This pattern continued through his teens, with his father still his main antagonist. His mother was apparently also on the side of authority, but Vincent's evasiveness about her suggests that what- ever else they shared was either too intimate or too painful to be easily recalled or revealed.
At the age of nineteen, his distorted emotional patterns reached a bizarre climax in his first encounter with love. Feeling enamored of a fourteen-year-old girl, he decided that "she must fall in love with me," but he neither made physical advances nor even spoke of his feelings. Instead, he studied an anatomy book to find out where on his body he could shoot himself without causing perma- nent damage, took his father's pistol, and put a bullet through his shoulder. In telling me about this, he showed me his scan Just be- fore shooting himself, he sent the girl a one-sentence note, telling her what he was about to do, and ending with the phrase, "only you cut my youth. " He told me that he had done all of this "be- cause I wanted this girl to know I was in love with her--to be moved. " Vincent spent two months in a hospital recovering; and the incident appeared to have more effect upon his parents than upon the girl: "My father said it was a surprise for him, a surprise to my mother also, to everybody. " He looked upon his actions as a necessity, the only possible course for a man of his character:
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THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 89
I realized I was foolish, but I had to go through my experience. If someone had said "You are foolish/' I never would have agreed. I was sure that in this way she would have to have love for me. . . , From this example you can see how straight I was going through to my aim through my personal experience. I never had a thought to touch the girl--to let her know I was interested in her. But only through myself, you see, I did it. I am the master of myself, and do what I want to myself.
With this deed, Vincent was acting out his conflicts on many levels: he was getting even with his father and mother, and with all other authorities whom he "surprised"; he was substituting de- structiveness (actually self-destructiveness) for love or affection; and through this act of self-punishment, he was atoning for his guilt. But what is most remarkable is his need to experience--and to manipulate--all thought, feelings, and actions through the medium of his own body. Such extreme narcissism, and such bizarrely symbolic behavior are usually found only in people so cut off from other human beings as to be considered psychotic. Indeed, one might well have expected such a youth to become a psychiatric casualty, if not a ne'er-do-well or a criminal. Certainly his extreme self-absorption, his disregard of all social rules, and his destructive behavior toward others and toward himself did not seem to offer much promise for his assuming a place or a function in any society.
Vincent had, during this stage of late adolescence, experienced a crisis precipitated by the conflict between his asocial style of re- maining the "master" of his own "insides," and a sudden urge toward intimacy with another human being. At this age, some form of identity crisis--of a struggle to achieve direction while suspended between the child of the past and the adult of the future--occurs in everyone;l but in Charles Vincent, it assumed dangerously pathological proportions.
Yet a solution appeared, a means of directing his energies into constructive channels and finding a socially possible way of life. Charles embarked on the study of medicine, with a passion for his subject which almost totally consumed his intellect and his emo- tions. He worked night and day, first on the theoretical and then on the practical aspects of medical study; he devoted all his spare time to extra work in clinics, and he graduated at the top of his class at the age of twenty-six. This vocational (and nonideological)
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solution to his identity crisis supplied the anchor for a life threat- ened by dangerously disruptive emotions. He had undergone a personal "death and rebirth"; but in his mystical view, he saw it as a continuation rather than an interruption of his previous life:
I always wanted to be a doctor. I thought, it is the best profession. To talk to me about engineering, law, means nothing--but to be a doctor --I liked it by instinct.
Charles remained in Europe only long enough to take his licensure examinations and acquire a wife; on their wedding day they embarked for China. Again acting both intuitively and de- cisively, he had responded to the lure which China held for Europeans and Americans during the first decades of the twentieth century. He had spoken to many returning missionaries, and had read many articles; he was excited by the challenge of the difficulties, and by the absence of hospitals, physicians, and even rudimentary sanitary conditions. This opportunity for lonely accomplishment and exaggerated autonomy was probably the strongest attraction for him:
In my training I always liked to do things for myself, to do what is necessary. For a doctor to be master of himself is what the patient needs. . . . I took to China my microscope, all of my books and equip- ment, and a small microtome so I could do everything for myself and be completely independent.
China more than lived up to his expectations. As a much-needed physician in an alien setting, he was able to do useful work and at the same time live in his own idiosyncratic fashion. He worked with other doctors only at the beginning in order to learn some- thing about local conditions and about Chinese medical vocabulary. Then he developed a self-sufficient pattern of private practice and part-time employment with European governmental representatives; he had daily clinic hours and also made broad bacteriological sur- veys. For a while he did research at a large medical center, but he discontinued this when a paper of his was criticized and at the same time a distinguished scientist arrived from Europe: "The competition started, so I left. " Once he considered accepting a tempting offer to head a large missionary hospital, but abruptly backed out of the arrangement as soon as he discovered a clause in
? THE OBVIOUSLY CONTUSED 91
the contract saying that he would not be permitted to leave the hospital area without the permission of the Mother Superior.
He maintained throughout his years in China an intensive absorp- tion' in, his medical work, treating Chinese and foreigners of all walks of life. But he scrupulously avoided intimate personal rela- tionships with anyone, as he considered these a threat to his free- dom. "If I have a friend I have to invite him, and I don't like to be a slave to convenience. " He much preferred such individual pursuits as writing, painting, and hunting. "Instead of going to a dinner party, I can go to the country. I was a man who knew a better place. " As might be expected, other Westerners in Shanghai dis- liked Dr. Vincent, viewing him as strange and somehow evil.
After the war he decided, because of past political affiliations (al- though never interested in politics, he had joined a French rightist party in his country for the practical advantages this then afforded him) to move his practice almost entirely into the country. He began to care for patients over a wide area--traveling by motor- cycle, horsecart, mule, small boat, or on foot. He kept three separate clinics in the country, always choosing the sites so that they would be near hunting areas. He ignored real danger from troops of both sides during the Chinese Civil War, and pursued with impersonal mystical enthusiasm both his healing art and his communion with nature:
I lost myself completely living this kind of life. In the early morning and in the evening I would fish and hunt, I would work all day, some- times traveling three hours to get to a patient, sometimes sleeping at his home. . . . I enjoyed living with the patient because to me he was not just a case. . . , There was no other doctor, and I was giving life to plenty of patients. . . . It was a necessity to see life in contact with poor people and with nature in order to have emotions--emotions which I can translate into writing and painting. . . . There was no man as happy as I.
Dr. Vincent maintained a similar personal distance in his rela- tionships with his wife and children. He spent little time with them, referring to his wife as "a very nice woman" because "she never gave me any trouble and always respected my freedom. " He arranged for his family to leave for Europe just before the Communist take- over in 1948. He had virtually lost contact with his mother and father.
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In 1949, with the new regime installed, he found his services more in demand in the city, where he again began to conduct most of his practice. He established what he considered to be good relations with a few Communist officials, treating them at his private clinic, and he thought that with so few foreign doctors re- maining, his future was "bright/' He disregarded numerous warn- ings from his embassy advising him to leave because the situation was becoming dangerous. On one occasion, he did make reserva- tions to go; but he decided to cancel them, because "I felt that to stay was more in keeping with my character. "
An important feature of Dr. Vincent's pre-thought reform char- acter was his manner of combining extreme and potentially dis- ruptive emotional patterns from early childhood with techniques learned during young adult training to shape a highly personal and unusual style of life. It is true that a psychiatrist might well have noted prominent schizoid and paranoid character trends; to put it more simply, he was a man unable to love. Yet he had de- veloped a stable and workable identity as a mystical healer--a lonely adventurer, ever courting new dangers; an isolated seeker of high aesthetic values, ever replenishing his store of sensations; a magical manipulator who could master his environment only through maintaining his distance from other people.
Incorporated in this self-image were three convictions which he had been seeking to prove to himself almost from the day of his birth: I need no one. No one can have my insides. I transcend other mortals. To maintain these personal myths required ever-strenuous but ever-exhilarating efforts. He was always on guard against his own inner urges in the opposite direction: his tendencies to seek intimacy, work co-operatively, and rely upon other people. These social and co-operative urges were, ironically enough, his negative identity. He had to keep warding them off as dangers to his personal myths, and to his exaggerated sense of individual mastery which held together the entire configuration.
Like anyone who rebels strongly, he carried with him, through identification, much of those people from whom he sought to free himself. He had become, like his father, an artist and some- thing of a tyrant. (What he took from his mother is less clear. ) The powerful emotions he had expressed in his early defiance of authority also left him with strong feelings of guilt. His guilt feel-
? THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 93
ings were not obvious, and he may even have appeared to some as a man without a conscience. Instead, he suffered from a more repressed and potentially malignant sense of evil and need for punishment, which revealed itself only in disguised form: in his self-injury at nineteen, his courting of danger, and his remaining in China long after he had been warned to leave. But the life pattern of the mystical healer could, under most circumstances, keep these emotions under control.
When Dr. Vincent was imprisoned, however, everything was sud- denly overturned: the manipulator was now being manipulated, the healer was considered "ill" and in need of "treatment," the aesthetic wanderer was thrown into a crowded dingy cell, the isolate was forced to lay himself bare before strangers. Nothing in his former identity seemed to fit the new circumstances.
In making his wild confession, he did attempt to maintain his emotional distance and call his manipulative powers into play. A man without binding group loyalties or devotion to any shared set of truths, he cared little for the pros and cons of Communist ideology; his concern was to survive. But thought reform assaults very quickly undermined his efforts to maintain control and stay uninvolved; he was drawn--as all had to be--into an intimate world of personal relationships and of ceaseless self-probing.
Under these circumstances, his personal myth of absolute in- dependence and superhuman self-mastery was exploded. He had no choice but to become emotionally engaged in a human society, perhaps for the first time in his life. This reversal of such a basic identity pattern was a mark of thought reform's power; but it was achieved only through the reformers' success in bringing out Vincent's long-buried strivings toward human involvement, strivings which he had until then successfully denied. They had also made contact with his concealed guilt susceptibilities: as he was made to feel more and more guilty, he could surrender his precious isola- tion (indeed, he had to, as his flight from people had been one of the original sources of his guilt), and become more and more what the environment wished him to be.
When this began to happen, he could call upon no broad beliefs and no social self to protect him. Dazzled by the sudden filling of a long-standing emotional void, he took on much of the coloring of his new milieu. He accepted, and by no means superficially, much
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of the ideology and many of the visions of Chinese Communism. For he was a man no less vulnerable to human influence than others; behind his lifelong avoidance of people was both a fear of and a desire for such influence.
In his process of rebirth, much of his old identity could be drawn upon. He was able to find a new focus for his mysticism in the Communist version of "the people"; he could resume his manipula- tive healing in "helping" his cellmates ("the Communists, too, bind body and spirit/7 he told me); and he could make use of a "scientific methodology" which appealed to the more concrete and logical side of his character. His rebirth culminated in his re- emergence at the end of his reform as the teaching physician. He gave the impression that during the last part of imprisonment he had brought his new identity configuration into good working order; at the moment of release, he was in a fairly integrated state.
When he was thrust into the Hong Kong environment, however, his new identity was in turn shattered. I have already described the identity crisis precipitated within him through his inability to trust himself in relationship to either the Communist or non-Com- munist world; this information about his background reveals why his crisis of trust was so extreme. What was most devastating to Vincent was his loss of the exaggerated sense of mastery, which he had always been able to call forth in a non-Communist environ- ment. Having functioned for so long on the assumption that he could trust nothing and no one outside of himself, the absence of this self-trust was crucial, and the paranoid psychosis which this personal faith had always warded off threatened to engulf him.
He was, in fact, closer to psychosis after release than he had been during the worst assaults of imprisonment. True, it was during thought reform itself that he had been deprived of his self-mastery; but then he had been offered a workable identity configuration in return, along with a strong sense of order and a series of pressures so involving that his emotions were absorbed by the constant struggle to keep in step. In Hong Kong he faced a milieu which offered neither controls nor support; instead it presented a peculiar combination of freedom, colonial flavor, inequalities, artificiality, and a certain tentativeness. To be deprived in such a place of his only dependable identity mechanism meant facing for the first time the full consequences of his loss--facing both outer chaos and
? THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 95
inner confusion.
Consequently, Dr. Vincent showed a tendency to relapse into
the identity of the repentant criminal, as, for instance, when he reacted to the Chinese businessman as an accusing judge. He also had the--to him--novel experience of suffering from, rather than thriving upon, loneliness. In his encounters with friends, casual acquaintances, and with me as well, he sought help in the struggle to regain his lost sense of integration and mastery. But he was ill- equipped for close relationships, both because of his oldest life patterns and because of his newly-magnified suspiciousness. He quickly sensed that hope lay, not in the imposed emotional patterns of thought reform, but rather in a reversion to what he was best equipped to be--the mystical healer.
Once he was permanently removed from external thought reform pressures, this reversion was inevitable. The clearest evidence of his return to his old pattern of experiencing all of life through his own mind and body is expressed in the following extraordinary statement made during our final interview:
What happens is strange--this experience is useful to me--because I proved everything in China . . . to be in jail and to be accused is part of myself. . . . It is difficult to explain. . . . Now I have had the experience of the reality of that world. I know what they do. . . . My mind is more enlarged.
I know everything about them--how cruel they are--their different mind--their materialistic way to see things--their logic. . . . You cannot know--you cannot understand what the chains and the tou- cheng [struggle] mean--about the compulsion they use. . . . I know everything about the step-by-step method . . . it is the difference be- tween a man who studies anatomy in a book and a man who studies anatomy on the body.
I can see the situation through my experience, a personal experience-- physical and spiritual. Now if somebody said to go back to China, I would say no; without my experience, I would say I have to go back.
Here are echoes of the youth who put a bullet through his own shoulder to express his love for a young girl: the experience must be his, or it is no experience at all. This basic core of character had survived parental criticism, strict Catholic schools, medical study, twenty years of life in China, and even thought reform itself.
Dr. Vincent's confusion and search was, on the whole, non- ideological. Communist and non-Communist beliefs were, as always,
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important to him only as they affected his immediate life experi- ence. Even his confusion about ideas, manifested in the jump from one side to the other, was mainly an involuntary emotional experi- ment, a form of identity testing. His search led inevitably back to that part of him he knew best. But the effect of the Communist view of the world and the thought reform identities which he had absorbed during his imprisonment cannot be completely dismissed. These remained within him as an alternative self, ready again to emerge--as they did during our interviews together--should he feel wronged or neglected during his future life in the non-Communist world.
What about his statement that he had never "talked so frankly" as he had to me, and that this was an effect of his re-education? I think he answered this question in his last sentence: "I have a feeling I left part of myself in Hong Kong. " This remark can be interpreted in more than one way. It contains the suggestion that through thought reform, he had learned to surrender his "insides," and had therefore been able to reveal more of himself to me than he had to anyone before. But it implies also, and perhaps more im- portantly, that in leaving part of himself in Hong Kong, he was shedding one of his skins in order to free himself for what lay ahead. He was leaving behind the newest, least comfortable, and most expendable part of himself, the reformed man. He was aware that thought reform had taught him to "open" himself to others; but having done so, first in prison, and then with me in Hong Kong, he was bent upon unlearning his lesson.
Anthony Luca: Liberal Father Confessor
Father Luca's confusion and search took a very different form, influenced by his own special background and character. Born in East Africa, son of a prominent Italian colonial official, Anthony grew up with a dual allegiance. He was very much a European boy --living among "natives" he was made especially aware of this; but he was also a child of Africa. He spent nine of his first eleven years there; and when he was sent to live in Europe from the ages of seven to nine, he had longed for the freedom of "the land . . . the river . . . a whole little world of our own" in Africa. An excel- lent student during his early years, his work suffered in Europe. But
? THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 97
more disturbing to him were his social difficulties there among the "rough and rather unpleasant" boys in his class, who spoke a kind of slang he could not understand. And when Anthony, without thinking, used the common language of Europeans in Africa-- African words mixed with-his own language--he was laughed at and teased. His companions, with the merciless psychological accuracy of schoolboys, summed up his conflict when they tauntingly dubbed him "the white Negro. "
His family relationships perpetuated this conflict, and also pre- sented him with an additional emotional duality. The family had in many ways a classical European constellation: a stern, strongly opinionated, "authoritarian" father; a less talked about, but more intimate mother; a "very reliable" older brother and a more erratic and attention-getting younger brother among Anthony's five siblings.
His feelings toward his father alternated between fear and love, meeting in a common denominator of respect. He happily recalled the long walks which they took together in the open African countryside, during which his father would tell him informative and interesting stories and teach him the alphabet to prepare him for school. But his father also had a more frightening side, so that Anthony had a "double idea about him"; he was demanding and critical, and would frequently beat the boy for misbehaving. An- thony resented his father's tendency to "say what was wrong but not use many words of explanation or justification. " Despite this conflict, he was deeply impressed with his father's "great sympathy for the black man," and his energetic defense of Africans in their conflict with Europeans.
Why call this process logical dishonoring? Surely it is not logical to have one's identity so disparaged--unless one sees this disparage- ment as a small but necessary part of a greater system of events. And this is precisely the kind of systematic rationale which the Communists--through their ideology--supply. A prisoner's incon- sistencies and evildoings are related to historical forces, political hap- penings, and economic trends. Thus, his acceptance of his negative identity and the learning of Communist doctrine become insepa- rable, one completely dependent upon the other. The realignment of affirmation and negation within one's identity requires an end- less repetition, a continuous application of self to the doctrine-- and indeed, this is the essence of re-education. The prisoner must, like a man under special psychological treatment, analyze the causes of his deficiencies, work through his resistances (or "thought prob- lems") until he thinks and feels in terms of the doctrinal truths to which all of life is reduced. In the process, he may be guided
? PSYCHOLOGICAL STEPS 79
by a particular "instructor" (sometimes referred to as "analyst" or "case analyst") who has special charge of his case, keeps all personal records, and conducts many individual interviews with him. The prisoner's psychological strengths and weaknesses become well known to his personal instructor, then to other officials as well, and are effectively utilized in the undermining process.
What we have said so far of "re-education" hardly lives up to the name: we have talked more of breakdown than of remaking. In actuality, the remaking is also well under way. Even during the earlier stages of identity assault and compulsion to confess, the prisoner experiences stirrings of restitution. The buildup of his negative identity, along with his developing acceptance of Com- munist doctrine, provide the first contours of something new. He continues, during the years of imprisonment, to loudly proclaim his own demise; but as his re-education proceeds, he finds himself first announcing, and then experiencing, the refashioned identity which is emerging. His sense of nakedness and vulnerability nourishes the growth of the "new man. "
9. PROGRESS AND HARMONY
The prisoner's new self requires emotional nutriment if it is to continue to develop. This nutriment is supplied by the prisoner's achieving a sense of harmony with his no-longer-strange surround- ings. Harmony is partly a matter of gradual adaptation, as both Dr. Vincent and Father Luca made clear. Adaptation in turn is contingent upon progress in reform; and only when this progress has been demonstrated does the prisoner begin to receive the rec- ognition and acceptance which is so precious in such an environ- ment.
Then, as Dr. Vincent described, the prisoner can experience the deep satisfactions of solving all problems; of group intimacy in living, working, and suffering; of surrendering himself to an all- powerful force, and sharing its strength; of laying himself bare in the catharsis of personal confession; of sharing the moral righteous- ness of a great crusade of mass redemption.
Toward the end of their imprisonment, both Dr. Vincent and Father Luca were living under quite comfortable circumstances. The improvement in their physical surroundings was important enough; the atmosphere of frankness and of being met halfway was
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exhilarating. Both had regained the status of being human. Talks with judges were man-to-man encounters between people who un- derstood each other and considered one another's feelings. Indeed, Father Luca felt free enough to voice doubts and criticisms; and although he did this partially as a tactic, he was at the same time accepting therapeutic assistance from his captors.
To appreciate the emotional appeal of harmony, one must--as the prisoner invariably does--contrast it with the basic fear and estrangement of the earlier phases of imprisonment. Instead of an- tagonism and total conflict, he feels in step with a milieu which ap- preciates him. Identified as a "progressive," he is permitted (and grasps at) a more direct form of self-expression. To be sure, he is still partly the actor; but performance and life have moved closer together, and he is not acting as much as he thinks he is. As he achieves a more intimate communication with his reformers, his entire experience takes on a much greater feeling of reality. Officials in turn show a beginning willingness to accept the prisoner as he is --by no means perfect in his reform, but at least more genuine in his partial reform.
10. FINAL CONFESSION: THE SUMMING UP
In this atmosphere of harmony and reality, the prisoner is ready
to make a conclusive statement of what he is and what he has been. The confession has long been developing, of course, but it is likely to take its final shape only after he has achieved sufficient "progress" to produce and believe in a "correct" version.
In Father Luca's case--which is especially illustrative for the entire confession process--the two short paragraphs of his final confession seem almost anticlimactic after the millions of self- accusatory words he had already poured out. Yet this briefest of confessions was both a symbol and a summation of all that had gone before. For the officials, it was the confession, the statement for the record. For Father Luca, it was the last of an arduous series of confession identities. To understand this, we must review the sequence of his confession responses and his existential involve- ments, since any confession, whether true or false, contains an in- terpretation of one's present and past relationship to the world.
Luca's first confession statement (so unacceptable as a confession that it might better be called his pre-confession statement) was his
? PSYCHOLOGICAL STEPS 8 l
defiance. In claiming that his arrest was either a mistake or a con- sequence of his faith, he was clinging to the identity of the priest with integrity. But as he began to surrender more and more of this part of himself, and became lost in the labyrinth of his own false confessions, he took on two additional identities: the secret con- spirator and the "novelist/' or creative confabulator. His belief in his own falsehoods indicated both the degree to which his identity had broken down and the strength of the image created within him of this conspiratorial self. When he consented to speak about his clerical colleagues, and give details about Catholic groups, he was assuming the imposed identity of the betrayer, and especially the self-betrayer. Then, when the "novel" was abandoned, and he began for the first time to confess everything--to lay before his reformers all that came to his mind--he became the ignorant supplicant, groping for acceptance. Next, in organizing specific points in an acceptably self-damning fashion, he was simultaneously the re- pentant sinner (he could be repentant because he knew better what his sins were) and the relatively advanced confessor (one who had learned the techniques of his environment). In the two para- graphs of his final confession--in which he referred to his "espi- onage" relationship with another priest, and to his "illegal" church activities--he took on (although hardly completely) the final identity of the "confirmed" criminal.
The reformers thus ended precisely where they had begun. From the beginning they had labelled Luca a criminal; and these two "crimes" were clearly the ones they had originally selected for him to "recognize. " Why, then, did they put everyone to so much trouble?
They did so because confession is as much a part of re-education as re-education is of confession. The officials demanded that their accusations become the prisoner's seZ/-accusations, and that the confession be made with inner conviction. They required that he present himself in the evil image they had constructed for him--and their reasons for requiring this, as we shall later discuss, are by no means completely rational.
Father Luca's sequence of confession was neither unique nor accidental; the sequence was essentially the same for Dr. Vincent also, and for almost all other prisoners. There is first the at- tempt at accuracy, then the wild confession, then the return to
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real events in distorted focus, and finally, the brief "criminal" con- fession. Since the development of the wild confession usually occurs during the first few days or weeks (Father Luca's lasted for an exceptionally long time), the main trend is a shift from the im- aginary to the concrete. Although fantasy and falsehood are by no means eliminated, this shift does give the prisoner the sense that he is moving in the direction of truth. His confession changes from an uncontrolled dream-like (or nightmarish) vision to a more re- sponsible reinterpretation of his own life. Thus he becomes more "engaged" in the confession process, more closely bound to his own words. At the same time, the effect of his wild confession has not been entirely lost upon him; he is apt to retain feelings of guilt over it, as if he had really done the things he described.
While each step in the confession is the result of changes in the strength and tone of the environmental pressures, the prisoner experiences many of his responses as personal discoveries. Both Luca and Vincent, in shifting from falsehood to exaggeration, thought they had hit upon a useful and ingenious technique; only later did each realize that the officials' manipulations had made this reaction inevitable. Each step in the confession, then, is a means of adaptation; and it is also, for both prisoner and reformer, a compromise: he wishes to say less, and they demand more.
In this confession sequence, there is a good deal of structuring and planning on the part of prison officials. But they too can be victimized by their impulses, and by the contagious paranoid tones of the environment; their confusion over what is true and what is false--so evident in their treatment of Father Luca--can add to this general emotional turmoil.
The confession thus embodies demand and response, molded creativity, adaptation, compromise, working through, and a good deal of confusion on all sides. Its final version is the prisoner's subjective perception of the environment's message, guided by his reformers, but also including his own guilty re-evaluation of his past actions. Its beginnings in real events, the "logic" of its distor- tions, and its documented flavor may make it quite believable-- both to the outside world and to its creator as well,
1 1 . REBIRTH
Just before his release Dr. Vincent became once more the physician and teacher, and at the same time he became the ad-
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vanced and sympathetic student of Chinese Communism. At the end, reformers made it clear he should combine these two aspects of himself. He was expected to bring the scientific and technical emphasis of his profession to his study of Communism, and to carry over a "progressive" approach (pedagogical shortcuts geared to the needs of "the people") to his medical teaching.
The same principle was applied to Father Luca. Toward the end of his imprisonment he was more and more recognized as a priest with the right to hold his religious views, even if the officials would not go so far as to allow him to practice his religion--an enemy ideology--in the prison. Simultaneously he reached a stage of maximum participation in the Communist movement. This com- bination is best symbolized in his assuming the role of the re- former, working on a Chinese Catholic priest to bring him to con- fession. The foreign European missionary who had helped to train Chinese colleagues was once more taking the role of the spiritual mentor, but this time under the imposed sponsorship of the Chinese Communist movement which now encompassed them both.
They did not cease to be priest or physician; rather each became a priest or physician sympathetic to, or at least in a working relationship with, Chinese Communism. Although much of their former identities had been dishonored during imprisonment, they had suffered only a temporary, controlled, and partial "death/' If anything like a whole man is to walk out of prison, a good deal of the prisoner's old self will have to be resurrected. This resurrection, however, can be permitted only when the imposed thought reform elements are strong enough to dominate the new combination. For it is just this confluence of identities--the bringing together of evil criminal, repentant sinner, student of Communist doctrine, and the man originally imprisoned--which constitutes the rebirth. Heralded by all of the identity shifts of previous steps, this con- fluence is likely to occur only after prolonged re-education. And since even the prison identities must be carved out of the prisoner's own emotions (albeit with a powerful knife), rebirth means a basic modification, but not a total replacement, of the former self.
It is a modification strong enough, as in the case of Dr. Vincent, to create a profound change in the prisoner's view of the world, and in his personal relationship to the world. He reinterprets his thought and behavior, shifts his values, recedes his sense of
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reality. 12 The Communist world, formerly considered aggressive and totalitarian, is now seen as peace-loving and democratic. He identifies with his captors, and is happy in his faith.
12. RELEASE: TRANSITION ANDLIMBO
At this point, the prisoner is ready for release, although the actual timing of a Westerner's release has been determined more by international political considerations than by his progress in reform. In recent cases, a public trial, replete with prosecuting and defense attorneys, has formalized both the conviction and the re- birth. Before an outside audience, the prisoner once more admits his crimes and expresses his new point of view, while the defense attorney makes a plea for additional "leniency. " More frequently, the prisoner is simply read his charge and sentence while still within the prison, as happened to both Vincent and Luca. On rare oc- casions, a Westerner is sentenced to serve additional time in a new setting (considered a true prison) where he undergoes "reform by labor," a procedure of much less emotional involvement. Whether publicly or privately sentenced, the great majority of Western prisoners have been immediately expelled from China,
But release and expulsion, as Vincent in particular discovered, do not put an end to one's troubles. Instead they thrust the Westerner into an environment which immediately questions all that has been so painstakingly built up during the years of imprisonment; and they precipitate a new identity crisis just as severe as the one ex- perienced during incarceration. Although this crisis occurs outside the thought reform milieu, it must be regarded as the final "step" in reform; it cannot be separated from what has gone before. The presence of this post-release identity crisis in virtually all of my Western subjects during the time of our interviews was what enabled them to describe so vividly the identity conflicts of their thought reform experiences.
Upon arriving in Hong Kong, Dr. Vincent discovered that what he had become in prison was of absolutely no use to him in his new milieu. Alone with his emotions, he found himself in a dev- astating predicament: he had internalized enough of his prison environment to feel a severe distrust of the non-Communist world, but was sufficiently receptive to the evidence around him to be highly suspicious of the Communist point of view as well. The
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security he had known during the latter part of imprisonment sud- denly vanished, and his identity was shaken to its foundations. Should he still be the "Communist physician" of his rebirth and seek employment through a European Communist party? or should he return to his freelance medical work in underdeveloped countries? In his personal limbo he was unable to feel "safe" (or whole) in either world; instead he felt deceived by both.
He longed nostalgically for the relatively simple, ordered, and meaningful prison experience, now glorified in his memory. He could relinquish this longing only as he began to be able to trust his new environment; this trust in turn depended upon the capacity to trust himself. Once more he underwent a painful identity shift, encompassing what he had been before, what he had become in prison, and what he was in the process of becoming after release.
Father Luca experienced a similar crisis, in some ways attenuated by his immediate welcome into the motherly embrace of the Church. He knew clearly that he was still the dedicated Catholic priest (although it was not easy for him to give up being a "Chinese" Catholic priest). But he retained profound doubts about his own integrity, and especially about the morality of his mis- sionary work. The dishonoring had struck deep chords in him, and had stirred strong anxieties. His problem was not so much whether or not to continue being a Catholic priest--he could conceive of no alternative to this--but rather one of regaining respect for the clerical missionary life to which he was committed.
Nor were Dr. Vincent and Father Luca alone in these conflicts; immediately following release, all prisoners experienced profound struggles about their integrity, their ability to trust, and their search for wholeness. None escaped the personal crisis of this transitional period any more than he could avoid involvement in the other steps; but each man's crisis was his own.
? CHAPTER 6
VARIETIES OF RESPONSE:
THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED
In discussing in Chapter 5 the twelve psychological
steps of prison thought reform, I emphasized the similarities in the emotional responses of the people who were put through it. These similarities were due both to consistent pressures and to universal human characteristics. In this chapter, I shall turn to the equally important individual variations which I was able to observe. Each subject, during and immediately after his reform, demonstrated his own special combination of emotion and belief, his particular pattern of strengths and susceptibilities. The quality of this personal response depended largely upon the character traits of the man who was imprisoned, upon the configurations of emo- tions and identities developed within him during the course of his entire previous life.
Since no two men are the same, we could delineate as many types of response as there were subjects interviewed. It is convenient, however, to distinguish three general categories, based upon the beliefs these men expressed and the emotions which underlay those beliefs at the time of our interviews. These categories--the ob- viously confused, the apparent converts, and the apparent resisters --each describe a broad style of response characteristic for the time of imprisonment as well as for the post-release period. Despite the
86
? THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 87
complexities involved, and the inevitable overlapping, these three categories allow us a deeper appreciation of both the inner effects of thought reform, and the relationship of these effects to already existing patterns of behavior.
Dr. Vincent and Father Luca, as different as their reactions were, both exhibited the first and most frequent variety of response. Both felt confused and said so. Each could recognize that he had been affected by some of the Communist message, and each felt a need to reconsider the problems of who he was and what he believed. This combination of admitted confusion and conscious search was characteristic for fifteen of the twenty-five Westerners.
Although I have said much about Dr. Vincent and Father Luca, I have included very little about the man behind the response or the child and youth behind the man. The following examinationof their preprison life patterns makes obvious what psychiatrists and psychologists have learned to expect--that all men have a hidden history of struggle and conflict, whether they are patients or "normal" research subjects.
Dr. Charles Vincent: The Mystical Healer
Born and brought up in southern France in a pious, middle- class family (his father was a painter who limited his creations to Catholic religious art), Charles Vincent began to express during his earliest years an antagonistic urge to cut himself off from people around him:
My father looked at me as a wild child. , . , He was telling me all the time I didn't have any relationship with him. . . . We were in the same house but not in fusion. . . . He didn't succeed to have my in- side. . . . I thought, no matter what--you are wrong and I am right,
Charles sought always to escape the confinement of his house: "I didn't like to sleep in a bed. I wanted to sleep in a tree/' He re- members his father, on one occasion, chaining him to the house, but to no avail: "I succeeded in escaping and I was happy. "
His father felt that the best cure would be a strict boarding school. Charles attended four of these schools, most of which were run by Catholic authorities, between the ages of ten and seventeen. In each case he did well enough in his studies, but he recognized no rules, and kept himself emotionally aloof.
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It was difficult for me. . . . my temperament was to go against every- body, to keep me tight with no external manifestations. . . , I was not interested in people around me, you understand--just looking only my way--just wanting to be out because I thought that way I could be more independent--to put a distance between persons who might still influence my goings on.
Vincent (with a certain pride) remembers school authorities complaining to his father: "Your son has been here for four years and we don't even know him. " After a period of time, he was usually expelled.
But through all this combat, he felt deep within him that he was bad and guilty and that they--his father and other strict authorities --were justified in punishing and seeking to reform him.
I never fought with my father. He was a good man. He gave me a frofession. If he used a strong way with me, I think he was right. . . . felt, "My father is my father, and I cannot go against him. " The fault was with my character, but I couldn't by myself correct myself.
This pattern continued through his teens, with his father still his main antagonist. His mother was apparently also on the side of authority, but Vincent's evasiveness about her suggests that what- ever else they shared was either too intimate or too painful to be easily recalled or revealed.
At the age of nineteen, his distorted emotional patterns reached a bizarre climax in his first encounter with love. Feeling enamored of a fourteen-year-old girl, he decided that "she must fall in love with me," but he neither made physical advances nor even spoke of his feelings. Instead, he studied an anatomy book to find out where on his body he could shoot himself without causing perma- nent damage, took his father's pistol, and put a bullet through his shoulder. In telling me about this, he showed me his scan Just be- fore shooting himself, he sent the girl a one-sentence note, telling her what he was about to do, and ending with the phrase, "only you cut my youth. " He told me that he had done all of this "be- cause I wanted this girl to know I was in love with her--to be moved. " Vincent spent two months in a hospital recovering; and the incident appeared to have more effect upon his parents than upon the girl: "My father said it was a surprise for him, a surprise to my mother also, to everybody. " He looked upon his actions as a necessity, the only possible course for a man of his character:
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THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 89
I realized I was foolish, but I had to go through my experience. If someone had said "You are foolish/' I never would have agreed. I was sure that in this way she would have to have love for me. . . , From this example you can see how straight I was going through to my aim through my personal experience. I never had a thought to touch the girl--to let her know I was interested in her. But only through myself, you see, I did it. I am the master of myself, and do what I want to myself.
With this deed, Vincent was acting out his conflicts on many levels: he was getting even with his father and mother, and with all other authorities whom he "surprised"; he was substituting de- structiveness (actually self-destructiveness) for love or affection; and through this act of self-punishment, he was atoning for his guilt. But what is most remarkable is his need to experience--and to manipulate--all thought, feelings, and actions through the medium of his own body. Such extreme narcissism, and such bizarrely symbolic behavior are usually found only in people so cut off from other human beings as to be considered psychotic. Indeed, one might well have expected such a youth to become a psychiatric casualty, if not a ne'er-do-well or a criminal. Certainly his extreme self-absorption, his disregard of all social rules, and his destructive behavior toward others and toward himself did not seem to offer much promise for his assuming a place or a function in any society.
Vincent had, during this stage of late adolescence, experienced a crisis precipitated by the conflict between his asocial style of re- maining the "master" of his own "insides," and a sudden urge toward intimacy with another human being. At this age, some form of identity crisis--of a struggle to achieve direction while suspended between the child of the past and the adult of the future--occurs in everyone;l but in Charles Vincent, it assumed dangerously pathological proportions.
Yet a solution appeared, a means of directing his energies into constructive channels and finding a socially possible way of life. Charles embarked on the study of medicine, with a passion for his subject which almost totally consumed his intellect and his emo- tions. He worked night and day, first on the theoretical and then on the practical aspects of medical study; he devoted all his spare time to extra work in clinics, and he graduated at the top of his class at the age of twenty-six. This vocational (and nonideological)
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solution to his identity crisis supplied the anchor for a life threat- ened by dangerously disruptive emotions. He had undergone a personal "death and rebirth"; but in his mystical view, he saw it as a continuation rather than an interruption of his previous life:
I always wanted to be a doctor. I thought, it is the best profession. To talk to me about engineering, law, means nothing--but to be a doctor --I liked it by instinct.
Charles remained in Europe only long enough to take his licensure examinations and acquire a wife; on their wedding day they embarked for China. Again acting both intuitively and de- cisively, he had responded to the lure which China held for Europeans and Americans during the first decades of the twentieth century. He had spoken to many returning missionaries, and had read many articles; he was excited by the challenge of the difficulties, and by the absence of hospitals, physicians, and even rudimentary sanitary conditions. This opportunity for lonely accomplishment and exaggerated autonomy was probably the strongest attraction for him:
In my training I always liked to do things for myself, to do what is necessary. For a doctor to be master of himself is what the patient needs. . . . I took to China my microscope, all of my books and equip- ment, and a small microtome so I could do everything for myself and be completely independent.
China more than lived up to his expectations. As a much-needed physician in an alien setting, he was able to do useful work and at the same time live in his own idiosyncratic fashion. He worked with other doctors only at the beginning in order to learn some- thing about local conditions and about Chinese medical vocabulary. Then he developed a self-sufficient pattern of private practice and part-time employment with European governmental representatives; he had daily clinic hours and also made broad bacteriological sur- veys. For a while he did research at a large medical center, but he discontinued this when a paper of his was criticized and at the same time a distinguished scientist arrived from Europe: "The competition started, so I left. " Once he considered accepting a tempting offer to head a large missionary hospital, but abruptly backed out of the arrangement as soon as he discovered a clause in
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the contract saying that he would not be permitted to leave the hospital area without the permission of the Mother Superior.
He maintained throughout his years in China an intensive absorp- tion' in, his medical work, treating Chinese and foreigners of all walks of life. But he scrupulously avoided intimate personal rela- tionships with anyone, as he considered these a threat to his free- dom. "If I have a friend I have to invite him, and I don't like to be a slave to convenience. " He much preferred such individual pursuits as writing, painting, and hunting. "Instead of going to a dinner party, I can go to the country. I was a man who knew a better place. " As might be expected, other Westerners in Shanghai dis- liked Dr. Vincent, viewing him as strange and somehow evil.
After the war he decided, because of past political affiliations (al- though never interested in politics, he had joined a French rightist party in his country for the practical advantages this then afforded him) to move his practice almost entirely into the country. He began to care for patients over a wide area--traveling by motor- cycle, horsecart, mule, small boat, or on foot. He kept three separate clinics in the country, always choosing the sites so that they would be near hunting areas. He ignored real danger from troops of both sides during the Chinese Civil War, and pursued with impersonal mystical enthusiasm both his healing art and his communion with nature:
I lost myself completely living this kind of life. In the early morning and in the evening I would fish and hunt, I would work all day, some- times traveling three hours to get to a patient, sometimes sleeping at his home. . . . I enjoyed living with the patient because to me he was not just a case. . . , There was no other doctor, and I was giving life to plenty of patients. . . . It was a necessity to see life in contact with poor people and with nature in order to have emotions--emotions which I can translate into writing and painting. . . . There was no man as happy as I.
Dr. Vincent maintained a similar personal distance in his rela- tionships with his wife and children. He spent little time with them, referring to his wife as "a very nice woman" because "she never gave me any trouble and always respected my freedom. " He arranged for his family to leave for Europe just before the Communist take- over in 1948. He had virtually lost contact with his mother and father.
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In 1949, with the new regime installed, he found his services more in demand in the city, where he again began to conduct most of his practice. He established what he considered to be good relations with a few Communist officials, treating them at his private clinic, and he thought that with so few foreign doctors re- maining, his future was "bright/' He disregarded numerous warn- ings from his embassy advising him to leave because the situation was becoming dangerous. On one occasion, he did make reserva- tions to go; but he decided to cancel them, because "I felt that to stay was more in keeping with my character. "
An important feature of Dr. Vincent's pre-thought reform char- acter was his manner of combining extreme and potentially dis- ruptive emotional patterns from early childhood with techniques learned during young adult training to shape a highly personal and unusual style of life. It is true that a psychiatrist might well have noted prominent schizoid and paranoid character trends; to put it more simply, he was a man unable to love. Yet he had de- veloped a stable and workable identity as a mystical healer--a lonely adventurer, ever courting new dangers; an isolated seeker of high aesthetic values, ever replenishing his store of sensations; a magical manipulator who could master his environment only through maintaining his distance from other people.
Incorporated in this self-image were three convictions which he had been seeking to prove to himself almost from the day of his birth: I need no one. No one can have my insides. I transcend other mortals. To maintain these personal myths required ever-strenuous but ever-exhilarating efforts. He was always on guard against his own inner urges in the opposite direction: his tendencies to seek intimacy, work co-operatively, and rely upon other people. These social and co-operative urges were, ironically enough, his negative identity. He had to keep warding them off as dangers to his personal myths, and to his exaggerated sense of individual mastery which held together the entire configuration.
Like anyone who rebels strongly, he carried with him, through identification, much of those people from whom he sought to free himself. He had become, like his father, an artist and some- thing of a tyrant. (What he took from his mother is less clear. ) The powerful emotions he had expressed in his early defiance of authority also left him with strong feelings of guilt. His guilt feel-
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ings were not obvious, and he may even have appeared to some as a man without a conscience. Instead, he suffered from a more repressed and potentially malignant sense of evil and need for punishment, which revealed itself only in disguised form: in his self-injury at nineteen, his courting of danger, and his remaining in China long after he had been warned to leave. But the life pattern of the mystical healer could, under most circumstances, keep these emotions under control.
When Dr. Vincent was imprisoned, however, everything was sud- denly overturned: the manipulator was now being manipulated, the healer was considered "ill" and in need of "treatment," the aesthetic wanderer was thrown into a crowded dingy cell, the isolate was forced to lay himself bare before strangers. Nothing in his former identity seemed to fit the new circumstances.
In making his wild confession, he did attempt to maintain his emotional distance and call his manipulative powers into play. A man without binding group loyalties or devotion to any shared set of truths, he cared little for the pros and cons of Communist ideology; his concern was to survive. But thought reform assaults very quickly undermined his efforts to maintain control and stay uninvolved; he was drawn--as all had to be--into an intimate world of personal relationships and of ceaseless self-probing.
Under these circumstances, his personal myth of absolute in- dependence and superhuman self-mastery was exploded. He had no choice but to become emotionally engaged in a human society, perhaps for the first time in his life. This reversal of such a basic identity pattern was a mark of thought reform's power; but it was achieved only through the reformers' success in bringing out Vincent's long-buried strivings toward human involvement, strivings which he had until then successfully denied. They had also made contact with his concealed guilt susceptibilities: as he was made to feel more and more guilty, he could surrender his precious isola- tion (indeed, he had to, as his flight from people had been one of the original sources of his guilt), and become more and more what the environment wished him to be.
When this began to happen, he could call upon no broad beliefs and no social self to protect him. Dazzled by the sudden filling of a long-standing emotional void, he took on much of the coloring of his new milieu. He accepted, and by no means superficially, much
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of the ideology and many of the visions of Chinese Communism. For he was a man no less vulnerable to human influence than others; behind his lifelong avoidance of people was both a fear of and a desire for such influence.
In his process of rebirth, much of his old identity could be drawn upon. He was able to find a new focus for his mysticism in the Communist version of "the people"; he could resume his manipula- tive healing in "helping" his cellmates ("the Communists, too, bind body and spirit/7 he told me); and he could make use of a "scientific methodology" which appealed to the more concrete and logical side of his character. His rebirth culminated in his re- emergence at the end of his reform as the teaching physician. He gave the impression that during the last part of imprisonment he had brought his new identity configuration into good working order; at the moment of release, he was in a fairly integrated state.
When he was thrust into the Hong Kong environment, however, his new identity was in turn shattered. I have already described the identity crisis precipitated within him through his inability to trust himself in relationship to either the Communist or non-Com- munist world; this information about his background reveals why his crisis of trust was so extreme. What was most devastating to Vincent was his loss of the exaggerated sense of mastery, which he had always been able to call forth in a non-Communist environ- ment. Having functioned for so long on the assumption that he could trust nothing and no one outside of himself, the absence of this self-trust was crucial, and the paranoid psychosis which this personal faith had always warded off threatened to engulf him.
He was, in fact, closer to psychosis after release than he had been during the worst assaults of imprisonment. True, it was during thought reform itself that he had been deprived of his self-mastery; but then he had been offered a workable identity configuration in return, along with a strong sense of order and a series of pressures so involving that his emotions were absorbed by the constant struggle to keep in step. In Hong Kong he faced a milieu which offered neither controls nor support; instead it presented a peculiar combination of freedom, colonial flavor, inequalities, artificiality, and a certain tentativeness. To be deprived in such a place of his only dependable identity mechanism meant facing for the first time the full consequences of his loss--facing both outer chaos and
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inner confusion.
Consequently, Dr. Vincent showed a tendency to relapse into
the identity of the repentant criminal, as, for instance, when he reacted to the Chinese businessman as an accusing judge. He also had the--to him--novel experience of suffering from, rather than thriving upon, loneliness. In his encounters with friends, casual acquaintances, and with me as well, he sought help in the struggle to regain his lost sense of integration and mastery. But he was ill- equipped for close relationships, both because of his oldest life patterns and because of his newly-magnified suspiciousness. He quickly sensed that hope lay, not in the imposed emotional patterns of thought reform, but rather in a reversion to what he was best equipped to be--the mystical healer.
Once he was permanently removed from external thought reform pressures, this reversion was inevitable. The clearest evidence of his return to his old pattern of experiencing all of life through his own mind and body is expressed in the following extraordinary statement made during our final interview:
What happens is strange--this experience is useful to me--because I proved everything in China . . . to be in jail and to be accused is part of myself. . . . It is difficult to explain. . . . Now I have had the experience of the reality of that world. I know what they do. . . . My mind is more enlarged.
I know everything about them--how cruel they are--their different mind--their materialistic way to see things--their logic. . . . You cannot know--you cannot understand what the chains and the tou- cheng [struggle] mean--about the compulsion they use. . . . I know everything about the step-by-step method . . . it is the difference be- tween a man who studies anatomy in a book and a man who studies anatomy on the body.
I can see the situation through my experience, a personal experience-- physical and spiritual. Now if somebody said to go back to China, I would say no; without my experience, I would say I have to go back.
Here are echoes of the youth who put a bullet through his own shoulder to express his love for a young girl: the experience must be his, or it is no experience at all. This basic core of character had survived parental criticism, strict Catholic schools, medical study, twenty years of life in China, and even thought reform itself.
Dr. Vincent's confusion and search was, on the whole, non- ideological. Communist and non-Communist beliefs were, as always,
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important to him only as they affected his immediate life experi- ence. Even his confusion about ideas, manifested in the jump from one side to the other, was mainly an involuntary emotional experi- ment, a form of identity testing. His search led inevitably back to that part of him he knew best. But the effect of the Communist view of the world and the thought reform identities which he had absorbed during his imprisonment cannot be completely dismissed. These remained within him as an alternative self, ready again to emerge--as they did during our interviews together--should he feel wronged or neglected during his future life in the non-Communist world.
What about his statement that he had never "talked so frankly" as he had to me, and that this was an effect of his re-education? I think he answered this question in his last sentence: "I have a feeling I left part of myself in Hong Kong. " This remark can be interpreted in more than one way. It contains the suggestion that through thought reform, he had learned to surrender his "insides," and had therefore been able to reveal more of himself to me than he had to anyone before. But it implies also, and perhaps more im- portantly, that in leaving part of himself in Hong Kong, he was shedding one of his skins in order to free himself for what lay ahead. He was leaving behind the newest, least comfortable, and most expendable part of himself, the reformed man. He was aware that thought reform had taught him to "open" himself to others; but having done so, first in prison, and then with me in Hong Kong, he was bent upon unlearning his lesson.
Anthony Luca: Liberal Father Confessor
Father Luca's confusion and search took a very different form, influenced by his own special background and character. Born in East Africa, son of a prominent Italian colonial official, Anthony grew up with a dual allegiance. He was very much a European boy --living among "natives" he was made especially aware of this; but he was also a child of Africa. He spent nine of his first eleven years there; and when he was sent to live in Europe from the ages of seven to nine, he had longed for the freedom of "the land . . . the river . . . a whole little world of our own" in Africa. An excel- lent student during his early years, his work suffered in Europe. But
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more disturbing to him were his social difficulties there among the "rough and rather unpleasant" boys in his class, who spoke a kind of slang he could not understand. And when Anthony, without thinking, used the common language of Europeans in Africa-- African words mixed with-his own language--he was laughed at and teased. His companions, with the merciless psychological accuracy of schoolboys, summed up his conflict when they tauntingly dubbed him "the white Negro. "
His family relationships perpetuated this conflict, and also pre- sented him with an additional emotional duality. The family had in many ways a classical European constellation: a stern, strongly opinionated, "authoritarian" father; a less talked about, but more intimate mother; a "very reliable" older brother and a more erratic and attention-getting younger brother among Anthony's five siblings.
His feelings toward his father alternated between fear and love, meeting in a common denominator of respect. He happily recalled the long walks which they took together in the open African countryside, during which his father would tell him informative and interesting stories and teach him the alphabet to prepare him for school. But his father also had a more frightening side, so that Anthony had a "double idea about him"; he was demanding and critical, and would frequently beat the boy for misbehaving. An- thony resented his father's tendency to "say what was wrong but not use many words of explanation or justification. " Despite this conflict, he was deeply impressed with his father's "great sympathy for the black man," and his energetic defense of Africans in their conflict with Europeans.
