I know everything about them--how cruel they are--their different mind--their
materialistic
way to see things--their logic.
Lifton-Robert-Jay-Thought-Reform-and-the-Psychology-of-Totalism
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.
? 88 THOUGHT REFORM
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:
? 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)
? 90 THOUGHT REFORM
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.
? 92 THOUGHT REFORM
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
? 94 THOUGHT REFORM
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,
? 96 THOUGHT REFORM
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.
He received affection and solace from his mother, but he was troubled by her "nervousness"--and he sometimes felt that both of his parents neglected him in favor of their own cultural and intel- lectual interests. Despite these problems he deeply missed his parents when, on medical advice, he was sent to live with relatives in Europe because of the discovery of what was then diagnosed as a kidney ailment. Put on a closely-supervised medical and dietary regime, and beset by emotional conflicts, he at first felt weak and worthless: "I was little, had no strength, and the other boys despised me. " But these feelings were soon overshadowed by a new pattern which quickly became a major concern--his "badness. "
? 98 THOUGHT REFORM
As a child in Africa, Anthony had an occasional show of temper and was considered to be a bit reckless, sometimes self-destructively so: he would experiment with his environment by putting dirt in his mouth "to see what it tasted like/' or by running across the street just in front of an automobile "to see if I could run quickly enough. " But later in Europe, feeling lonely and persecuted, he became more generally ill-tempered and disobedient; and a con- tinuing struggle with his aunt and uncle developed (or with his father during visits). The conflicts began with Anthony's mis- behavior, and ended either with his being sent to bed without din- ner, or, more frequently, with his being placed in the "black cellar/' despite all his infuriated cries and kicks.
This pattern diminished somewhat when he returned to Africa; but when he was in Europe during his teens--he had entered boarding school there at the age of eleven--his "badness" took another form, a disturbing new sexual awareness. He experienced anguished feelings of guilt and shame about his masturbation and his sexual interest in girls, and also in connection with a physical approach made to him by another young boy.
After a while, he did begin to earn some respect in school be- cause of his fine grades, his rapid body growth, and his developing ability in sports; he made more friends and felt more accepted by others. But he was aware of a "contradiction" in his character, one which always remained with him: in his relations with other people he alternated between shyness and fear on the one hand, and overly assertive and dogmatic attitudes on the other.
This "bad" (and sexually aware), "weak" (but athletically com- petent), able and intelligent, shy-domineering, "white Negro" adolescent sought some way to integrate these painfully unmeshed aspects of himself and become a person whom he and others could respect. He found it through religion, and specifically through the clerical ideology of the Catholic Church.
He was embracing a doctrine which had always been available to him. As a son of "good" (although not fervent) Catholics, he had begun to attend Mass in Africa when still an infant and had been instructed there by missionary fathers. He had not, however, demonstrated a particularly strong interest in religion until the time of his troubled adolescence, when he began to seek comfort through long periods of prayer in the chapel of the dormitory (run by
? THE OBVIOUSL Y CONFUSED 99
Catholic fathers) where he was living. During the course of this inner search, he developed the conviction that his mother and father had not been sufficiently pious or serious in their lives. His resolve to follow a more purposeful existence carried him closer to an ideological solution of his identity crisis.
It was something of thinking that there must be some great interest in life to help others--to have a lasting aim--a broader point of view that embraced the whole of things which could help people who under- went unpleasantness.
At the age of fourteen he participated in a Catholic retreat supervised by one of the fathers--three-and-one-half days devoted to prayer and meditation, while completely withdrawn from worldly activities--which he considered a crucial interlude in his life. During the retreat, he thought a great deal about what he considered to be his two main faults--his sexual ideas (especially the guilt accompanying masturbation) and his bad temper; he sought ways to overcome these and to "correct myself. " His plans became more specific and affirmative: "I emerged with the resolve to be good, to be active in the world, to have an aim for religion. " He dates his urge to enter the priesthood from this retreat; but at the time he told himself it would not be possible because he was too unworthy. At the age of sixteen he made his definite decision, strongly influenced by a young priest whom he greatly admired and who planned to do missionary work in China.
Anthony was then certain that he too wished to become a mis- sionary, either in Africa or China. A schoolmate's interest in China and his friendship with Chinese Christian students played a part here. Like many European Christians of this period, he viewed China as the great missionary challenge: "I thought that what I could do best was to be a missionary in China . . . the biggest country . . . the most people . . . to be a parish priest was not so necessary. "
His family was not pleased with his decision. His father, whose aspirations for the boy included a brilliant and conventional career, particularly objected to his choosing a small, unknown missionary order rather than a famous society like the Jesuits. But Anthony succeeded in winning over his mother, who in turn combined forces with the seminary Superior to obtain reluctant agreement from her
? 1OO THOUGHT REFORM
husband.
During his six years of seminary training and theological study,
the emphasis was upon "self-examination" and "internal dis- cipline/' Anthony found it quite demanding, particularly since "I always had difficulty in exactly stating my feeling/' but he felt that he profited from the training and had "good memories" of these years. He went on to take advanced theological studies, com- pleting a doctoral dissertation relating to the psychological aspects of faith; and he also did work in medicine and Buddhist philosophy to prepare him for his Asian missionary assignment.
His departure was delayed by the war, and he remained in Europe for three additional years. He became involved with anti-Fascist underground activities, and worked closely with guerrilla forces. During this time he demonstrated unusual bravery, volunteering for dangerous missions, and on one occasion approaching unarmed a group of enemy deserters to convince them to give up their weapons. He attributed his lack of fear to his firm conviction that what he was doing was right; and he was widely praised for his courage.
When he was finally sent to China, Father Luca was quickly enthusiastic and successful in his missionary work. He responded strongly to the country, the language, and the people. He developed particular affection for the young Chinese he guided and taught, and they in turn regarded him with great respect and affection. But he was still troubled by the emotional problems which had plagued him since early adolescence. His sexual conflicts emerged in his experiencing "great affection" and "intimate feelings," on two occasions, for young secondary school girls with whom he was working; and his difficulties with authority came out in his frequent resistance to those above him, and his fluctuation between over- bearing and self-effacing attitudes. He continued, as in the past, to overcome these problems through meditation, prayer, and especially religious confession.
But after the Communists took power, Father Luca found him- self in conflict with both the representatives of the new govern- ment and with many of his own colleagues. Much of his activity was devoted to organizing Chinese youth into the faith-propagat- ing Legion of Mary. The Legion, as well as all other religious organizations, was soon required to register with the new regime,
? THE OBVIOUSL Y CONFUSED 1O1
and it was bitterly criticized and constantly harassed because of its opposition to the regime's triple autonomy movement. At Com- munist mass meetings, the Legion of Mary was denounced as a "reactionary" organization devoted to "espionage/' and Father Luca heard that on one such occasion he was publicly accused of incit- ing young boys in his youth groups to "sabotage" and to various forms of vandalism.
Father Luca favored moderate behavior on the part of the Church in meeting this crisis. He especially opposed arbitrary attitudes of individual Catholic officials and was critical of those who indulged in political--and in some cases military--action against the Com- munists. He argued against the thesis that all Communists were evil per se, expressing the Christian point of view that they were human beings after all, sometimes guilty of wrongs, but capable of redemption. Father Luca felt strongly about the Church's need to find a means of surviving in China, and about his own personal desire to remain there and continue his missionary work. He re- peatedly ignored his colleagues' advice to leave despite what they considered to be his precarious personal position.
The man who was imprisoned, then, was an effective and in- tegrated human being, one able to work and to love. Crucial to his identity was his sense of being a man of God, a representative of the Faith and of the Truth, a responsible official of the Catholic Church, a friend of the oppressed, a searching and open-minded scholar, a brother and father of Chinese youth, a lover of China and of the Chinese, and a foreign member of Chinese culture. But ever lurking in the background was another much more derogatory self-image, a view of himself as impure (sexually) and unhumble
(in his dealings with superiors). Also part of this negative identity, we suspect, were old feelings of weakness, as well as the fear of alienation from friends and colleagues. These negative and posi- tive elements were both included in his over-all identity of the liberal "Chinese" father confessor.
His liberalism was related to his past identity struggle: torn apart as a child by the conflict between his African and European selves, deeply attached and yet a bit unsteady in his family identifications, experimental and inquisitive since earliest childhood (even to the point of swallowing dirt), he had early learned to be receptive to
? 1O2 THOUGHT REFORM
the other person's convictions and way of life. With him, as with anyone truly receptive, this meant not just standing by with tol- erance, but actually becoming each of the things which challenged his sense of identity--whether African child, European schoolboy, or Catholic priest and missionary. Thus he became more "Chinese" than his colleagues, closer to and better loved by those whom he guided and instructed. At the same time, his capacity to under- stand and sympathetically enter into the other person's point of view made him more prone to moral conflict and indecisiveness. Such is likely to be the identity constellation and the dilemma of any "liberal," no matter what his cause.
Priests have been called "father-confessor" since the Church's early days. For each priest this title has a shared as well as a special meaning; in Father Luca's case, it symbolizes much of his character. He was even more the "father" than the average priest, since almost all of his professional career had been devoted to work with young- sters, and he liked to do this work best. He was a "confessor"-- as a priest, novice, naughty child (and later as a prisoner)--in all three meanings of the term: he made confessions, he heard con- fessions, and he also "avowed and adhered to his faith under perse- cution and torture without suffering martyrdom. "
Confession, then, had long been for him a personal style, even a way of life. It was not without its difficulties: the small boy was not always clear about what wrong he was expected to "confess"; the novice could not easily express his exact feelings. Whatever in- articulate and repressive forces worked against it, however, con- fession had served him well. Through it he had been able to face, and share with sympathetic colleagues, the disturbing feelings which had fed his negative identity. It had been especially important in subduing (although never fully conquering) his sexual urges and aggressive tendencies.
Nonetheless, the sense of evil which accompanied these sexual and aggressive urges could not easily be stilled. Confession helped to keep these feelings conscious and manageable (rather than in- accessible and more dangerous, as with Dr. Vincent); but it also required him to search out his own evil, to look constantly upon himself as one who is guilty. His susceptibility to guilt, present from early life, was thus ever stimulated anew. Managed reasonably effectively by his tie to the Catholic Church, his guilt was a point
? THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 103
of vulnerability for any new authority which might seek to manipu- late his loyalties; it was, in fact, the royal road to his negative identity.
Father Luca's complex adult configuration was largely the product of emotional compromise. In dealing with his father and all later authorities, he had alternated between submission and rebellion. He had, in a sense, defied his father in becoming a priest, and es- pecially in a small missionary order; but he was remaining within a Catholic ideology which his family held sacred. Moreover, he became, like his father, at the same time both a champion of the rights of "natives" and a loyal servant of a European institution. He also possessed a tenderness which--as his prison memories sug- gest--must have been derived from a relationship of love and in- timacy with his mother; a relationship which may have been responsible for much of his submissiveness, receptivity, and pen- chant for suffering.
In his ideological solution to his identity crisis, Father Luca (unlike Dr. Vincent) acquired a comprehensive if constricting view of the world, and a strict code of conduct for relations with other people; he took on a sense of loyalty and near-total submission to
an institution greater than himself. His concern was no longer simply, "Where do I stand? " and, "What can I do about my bad- ness? " Badness and commitment still had to be dealt with, but not on an individual basis. Instead, he asked himself, "How can I purify and humble myself in order to better serve the Church? How can I be more consistent in my life, and mean what I say and do? How can I, as a Catholic priest, be fully sincere? "
It is therefore not surprising that Father Luca objected strenuously to the judge's impugning his sincerity. He stated his position at the beginning--"a mistake or a matter of religion"--which made him, as he stood before the judge, both a man defending truth and a representative of a sacred institution. The fact that he had doubts about his own sincerity, at whatever level of consciousness, made him fight all the harder; one does not reveal inner weakness before the enemy. Moreover, by this same initial statement, he had de- clared his imprisonment a test of his sincerity; he assumed the posture of the confessor who is the defender of his faith against those who would persecute it.
The irony of his situation was that his reformers meant some-
? 104 THOUGHT REFORM
thing a little different by "sincerity": for Chinese Communist of- ficials, both in prison and out, to be sincere is to yield to them as representatives of the Way and the Truth, "Insincerity" or resist- ance is the one attitude which they will not tolerate, and they re- garded Luca's behavior as provocative. This, plus their prior identifi- cation of him as an enemy--he was not only a Catholic priest, but a leader of a militant Catholic organization--led to their use of force and brutality to a degree unusual even for a Chinese Communist prison. As on earlier occasions in his life, Luca could not grasp or articulate what he was expected to confess; and although the re- former's contradictory demands may have been mainly responsible for this, it is very likely that Luca's lifelong resistances to confes- sion also played a part, as he seemed to have much more difficulty than most other prisoners in reaching an understanding of the situa- tion. In any case, he experienced a more profound physical and psychological breakdown than did Dr. Vincent.
Father Luca's false confession reflected both a disintegration of his sense of reality and identity, and an outpouring of his sense of evil. His experience was like that of a man, who, troubled by feelings of guilt, dreams that he is a criminal being punished. Luca was a "criminal" being punished in jail, "dreaming" of having com- mitted the kind of crime of which he was accused--his dream work much assisted by his surroundings, and closely supervised by judge and cellmates. In a twilight state of fatigue, pain, and al- tered consciousness, he was both responding to the prison message and at the same time reverting to his own familiar confession idiom.
No other prisoner I encountered confessed more extensively than did Father Luca; nor did anyone else sustain for as long a period such a grossly false story. He could do this and even believe in his confession, not only because the environment encouraged this belief, but also because his confession had for him the ring of psychological truth. That is, it expressed "subversive" things about himself, albeit in the language of the Communist police system rather than that of the Catholic Church. It was an extreme version--a caricature--of his own negative identity. As an expe- rienced confessor (and a man who had done some writing) Father Luca could be creative, prolific, and convincing in using this carica- ture to develop his confession-novel.
The direct physical assault, coming at the height of the false con-
? THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 1 0 5
fession, showed a loss of control on the part of the Communist of- ficials. They had begun to check Father Luca's false confession, ap- parently after having believed a good deal of it, and had found it to be "insincere" beyond words--in both the conventional and their own special meaning of the term.
Luca himself, once injured (and physically punished), rose to impressive heights of courage and strength. He had given indica- tions of his will to survive even before the injury. His delusions had included fantasies of self-affirmation--of recovery, rescue, and return to priestly activities--along with elements of guilt. At that time, too, he could summon faith in the religious purpose of his suffering ("penance for my sins"). Crippled and helpless, he was able to reach more profoundly into his emotional being and remind himself of the most basic forms of trust he had known in the past: religious comradeship, earthly places, both beautiful and permanent, and most of all, sad songs which took him back to maternal love and tenderness. His identity collapse had been temporary; now he sought always to reaffirm that in himself which he most valued and could depend upon. And at the same time, he kept his inner ex- perience within his own religious idiom. His imprisonment was a continuation of his lifelong self-purification. His faith was a power- ful ally, one he would under no condition surrender: hence his dra- matic assertion that "to take off my religion it is necessary to take out my heart and to kill me"--both a statement of creed and a quashing of self-doubt.
This very creed and his devotion to the Church behind it led to his greatest pain during reform. As a "liberal" he had already been in conflict with "illiberal" (and militaristic) colleagues, with whom he was now accused of conspiring. As a "liberal," he could also "feel" the validity of some Communist objections to official and nonofficial Church activity. He was especially vulnerable to accusations that the Church did such apparently "good" things as helping the sick and poor for its own selfish reasons: this would be "insincerity" at its worst. But he was susceptible not only be- cause he was liberal; it was precisely in this issue that he found his guilt, both personal and existential, most exploited. A negative image here--of self and Church--was both intolerable and unavoidable.
Luca's quest for "sincerity," as well as his "Chineseness," served, toward the end of his imprisonment, to bring him into a position
? 106 THOUGHT REFORM
of harmony with the officials: all became increasingly "frank" and "sincere. " But it was sincerity at a price, and led him to the in- congruous position of "helping" a fellow-priest make a criminal "confession"--his furthest venture into "betrayal. " He was, to be sure, still "hearing confessions"'; but now "sincerely" in harmony with the opposition.
Yet this too was only partial and transient. Immediately upon release, he was identified by his religious colleagues once more as the dedicated Catholic priest, which he had never really ceased to be. He also faced the delicate problem of restoring his identity as a liberal confessor, deeply committed to an authoritarian Church. His identity flexibility required that he scrutinize the Communists, the Church, and himself.
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.
? 88 THOUGHT REFORM
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:
? 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)
? 90 THOUGHT REFORM
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.
? 92 THOUGHT REFORM
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
? 94 THOUGHT REFORM
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,
? 96 THOUGHT REFORM
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.
He received affection and solace from his mother, but he was troubled by her "nervousness"--and he sometimes felt that both of his parents neglected him in favor of their own cultural and intel- lectual interests. Despite these problems he deeply missed his parents when, on medical advice, he was sent to live with relatives in Europe because of the discovery of what was then diagnosed as a kidney ailment. Put on a closely-supervised medical and dietary regime, and beset by emotional conflicts, he at first felt weak and worthless: "I was little, had no strength, and the other boys despised me. " But these feelings were soon overshadowed by a new pattern which quickly became a major concern--his "badness. "
? 98 THOUGHT REFORM
As a child in Africa, Anthony had an occasional show of temper and was considered to be a bit reckless, sometimes self-destructively so: he would experiment with his environment by putting dirt in his mouth "to see what it tasted like/' or by running across the street just in front of an automobile "to see if I could run quickly enough. " But later in Europe, feeling lonely and persecuted, he became more generally ill-tempered and disobedient; and a con- tinuing struggle with his aunt and uncle developed (or with his father during visits). The conflicts began with Anthony's mis- behavior, and ended either with his being sent to bed without din- ner, or, more frequently, with his being placed in the "black cellar/' despite all his infuriated cries and kicks.
This pattern diminished somewhat when he returned to Africa; but when he was in Europe during his teens--he had entered boarding school there at the age of eleven--his "badness" took another form, a disturbing new sexual awareness. He experienced anguished feelings of guilt and shame about his masturbation and his sexual interest in girls, and also in connection with a physical approach made to him by another young boy.
After a while, he did begin to earn some respect in school be- cause of his fine grades, his rapid body growth, and his developing ability in sports; he made more friends and felt more accepted by others. But he was aware of a "contradiction" in his character, one which always remained with him: in his relations with other people he alternated between shyness and fear on the one hand, and overly assertive and dogmatic attitudes on the other.
This "bad" (and sexually aware), "weak" (but athletically com- petent), able and intelligent, shy-domineering, "white Negro" adolescent sought some way to integrate these painfully unmeshed aspects of himself and become a person whom he and others could respect. He found it through religion, and specifically through the clerical ideology of the Catholic Church.
He was embracing a doctrine which had always been available to him. As a son of "good" (although not fervent) Catholics, he had begun to attend Mass in Africa when still an infant and had been instructed there by missionary fathers. He had not, however, demonstrated a particularly strong interest in religion until the time of his troubled adolescence, when he began to seek comfort through long periods of prayer in the chapel of the dormitory (run by
? THE OBVIOUSL Y CONFUSED 99
Catholic fathers) where he was living. During the course of this inner search, he developed the conviction that his mother and father had not been sufficiently pious or serious in their lives. His resolve to follow a more purposeful existence carried him closer to an ideological solution of his identity crisis.
It was something of thinking that there must be some great interest in life to help others--to have a lasting aim--a broader point of view that embraced the whole of things which could help people who under- went unpleasantness.
At the age of fourteen he participated in a Catholic retreat supervised by one of the fathers--three-and-one-half days devoted to prayer and meditation, while completely withdrawn from worldly activities--which he considered a crucial interlude in his life. During the retreat, he thought a great deal about what he considered to be his two main faults--his sexual ideas (especially the guilt accompanying masturbation) and his bad temper; he sought ways to overcome these and to "correct myself. " His plans became more specific and affirmative: "I emerged with the resolve to be good, to be active in the world, to have an aim for religion. " He dates his urge to enter the priesthood from this retreat; but at the time he told himself it would not be possible because he was too unworthy. At the age of sixteen he made his definite decision, strongly influenced by a young priest whom he greatly admired and who planned to do missionary work in China.
Anthony was then certain that he too wished to become a mis- sionary, either in Africa or China. A schoolmate's interest in China and his friendship with Chinese Christian students played a part here. Like many European Christians of this period, he viewed China as the great missionary challenge: "I thought that what I could do best was to be a missionary in China . . . the biggest country . . . the most people . . . to be a parish priest was not so necessary. "
His family was not pleased with his decision. His father, whose aspirations for the boy included a brilliant and conventional career, particularly objected to his choosing a small, unknown missionary order rather than a famous society like the Jesuits. But Anthony succeeded in winning over his mother, who in turn combined forces with the seminary Superior to obtain reluctant agreement from her
? 1OO THOUGHT REFORM
husband.
During his six years of seminary training and theological study,
the emphasis was upon "self-examination" and "internal dis- cipline/' Anthony found it quite demanding, particularly since "I always had difficulty in exactly stating my feeling/' but he felt that he profited from the training and had "good memories" of these years. He went on to take advanced theological studies, com- pleting a doctoral dissertation relating to the psychological aspects of faith; and he also did work in medicine and Buddhist philosophy to prepare him for his Asian missionary assignment.
His departure was delayed by the war, and he remained in Europe for three additional years. He became involved with anti-Fascist underground activities, and worked closely with guerrilla forces. During this time he demonstrated unusual bravery, volunteering for dangerous missions, and on one occasion approaching unarmed a group of enemy deserters to convince them to give up their weapons. He attributed his lack of fear to his firm conviction that what he was doing was right; and he was widely praised for his courage.
When he was finally sent to China, Father Luca was quickly enthusiastic and successful in his missionary work. He responded strongly to the country, the language, and the people. He developed particular affection for the young Chinese he guided and taught, and they in turn regarded him with great respect and affection. But he was still troubled by the emotional problems which had plagued him since early adolescence. His sexual conflicts emerged in his experiencing "great affection" and "intimate feelings," on two occasions, for young secondary school girls with whom he was working; and his difficulties with authority came out in his frequent resistance to those above him, and his fluctuation between over- bearing and self-effacing attitudes. He continued, as in the past, to overcome these problems through meditation, prayer, and especially religious confession.
But after the Communists took power, Father Luca found him- self in conflict with both the representatives of the new govern- ment and with many of his own colleagues. Much of his activity was devoted to organizing Chinese youth into the faith-propagat- ing Legion of Mary. The Legion, as well as all other religious organizations, was soon required to register with the new regime,
? THE OBVIOUSL Y CONFUSED 1O1
and it was bitterly criticized and constantly harassed because of its opposition to the regime's triple autonomy movement. At Com- munist mass meetings, the Legion of Mary was denounced as a "reactionary" organization devoted to "espionage/' and Father Luca heard that on one such occasion he was publicly accused of incit- ing young boys in his youth groups to "sabotage" and to various forms of vandalism.
Father Luca favored moderate behavior on the part of the Church in meeting this crisis. He especially opposed arbitrary attitudes of individual Catholic officials and was critical of those who indulged in political--and in some cases military--action against the Com- munists. He argued against the thesis that all Communists were evil per se, expressing the Christian point of view that they were human beings after all, sometimes guilty of wrongs, but capable of redemption. Father Luca felt strongly about the Church's need to find a means of surviving in China, and about his own personal desire to remain there and continue his missionary work. He re- peatedly ignored his colleagues' advice to leave despite what they considered to be his precarious personal position.
The man who was imprisoned, then, was an effective and in- tegrated human being, one able to work and to love. Crucial to his identity was his sense of being a man of God, a representative of the Faith and of the Truth, a responsible official of the Catholic Church, a friend of the oppressed, a searching and open-minded scholar, a brother and father of Chinese youth, a lover of China and of the Chinese, and a foreign member of Chinese culture. But ever lurking in the background was another much more derogatory self-image, a view of himself as impure (sexually) and unhumble
(in his dealings with superiors). Also part of this negative identity, we suspect, were old feelings of weakness, as well as the fear of alienation from friends and colleagues. These negative and posi- tive elements were both included in his over-all identity of the liberal "Chinese" father confessor.
His liberalism was related to his past identity struggle: torn apart as a child by the conflict between his African and European selves, deeply attached and yet a bit unsteady in his family identifications, experimental and inquisitive since earliest childhood (even to the point of swallowing dirt), he had early learned to be receptive to
? 1O2 THOUGHT REFORM
the other person's convictions and way of life. With him, as with anyone truly receptive, this meant not just standing by with tol- erance, but actually becoming each of the things which challenged his sense of identity--whether African child, European schoolboy, or Catholic priest and missionary. Thus he became more "Chinese" than his colleagues, closer to and better loved by those whom he guided and instructed. At the same time, his capacity to under- stand and sympathetically enter into the other person's point of view made him more prone to moral conflict and indecisiveness. Such is likely to be the identity constellation and the dilemma of any "liberal," no matter what his cause.
Priests have been called "father-confessor" since the Church's early days. For each priest this title has a shared as well as a special meaning; in Father Luca's case, it symbolizes much of his character. He was even more the "father" than the average priest, since almost all of his professional career had been devoted to work with young- sters, and he liked to do this work best. He was a "confessor"-- as a priest, novice, naughty child (and later as a prisoner)--in all three meanings of the term: he made confessions, he heard con- fessions, and he also "avowed and adhered to his faith under perse- cution and torture without suffering martyrdom. "
Confession, then, had long been for him a personal style, even a way of life. It was not without its difficulties: the small boy was not always clear about what wrong he was expected to "confess"; the novice could not easily express his exact feelings. Whatever in- articulate and repressive forces worked against it, however, con- fession had served him well. Through it he had been able to face, and share with sympathetic colleagues, the disturbing feelings which had fed his negative identity. It had been especially important in subduing (although never fully conquering) his sexual urges and aggressive tendencies.
Nonetheless, the sense of evil which accompanied these sexual and aggressive urges could not easily be stilled. Confession helped to keep these feelings conscious and manageable (rather than in- accessible and more dangerous, as with Dr. Vincent); but it also required him to search out his own evil, to look constantly upon himself as one who is guilty. His susceptibility to guilt, present from early life, was thus ever stimulated anew. Managed reasonably effectively by his tie to the Catholic Church, his guilt was a point
? THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 103
of vulnerability for any new authority which might seek to manipu- late his loyalties; it was, in fact, the royal road to his negative identity.
Father Luca's complex adult configuration was largely the product of emotional compromise. In dealing with his father and all later authorities, he had alternated between submission and rebellion. He had, in a sense, defied his father in becoming a priest, and es- pecially in a small missionary order; but he was remaining within a Catholic ideology which his family held sacred. Moreover, he became, like his father, at the same time both a champion of the rights of "natives" and a loyal servant of a European institution. He also possessed a tenderness which--as his prison memories sug- gest--must have been derived from a relationship of love and in- timacy with his mother; a relationship which may have been responsible for much of his submissiveness, receptivity, and pen- chant for suffering.
In his ideological solution to his identity crisis, Father Luca (unlike Dr. Vincent) acquired a comprehensive if constricting view of the world, and a strict code of conduct for relations with other people; he took on a sense of loyalty and near-total submission to
an institution greater than himself. His concern was no longer simply, "Where do I stand? " and, "What can I do about my bad- ness? " Badness and commitment still had to be dealt with, but not on an individual basis. Instead, he asked himself, "How can I purify and humble myself in order to better serve the Church? How can I be more consistent in my life, and mean what I say and do? How can I, as a Catholic priest, be fully sincere? "
It is therefore not surprising that Father Luca objected strenuously to the judge's impugning his sincerity. He stated his position at the beginning--"a mistake or a matter of religion"--which made him, as he stood before the judge, both a man defending truth and a representative of a sacred institution. The fact that he had doubts about his own sincerity, at whatever level of consciousness, made him fight all the harder; one does not reveal inner weakness before the enemy. Moreover, by this same initial statement, he had de- clared his imprisonment a test of his sincerity; he assumed the posture of the confessor who is the defender of his faith against those who would persecute it.
The irony of his situation was that his reformers meant some-
? 104 THOUGHT REFORM
thing a little different by "sincerity": for Chinese Communist of- ficials, both in prison and out, to be sincere is to yield to them as representatives of the Way and the Truth, "Insincerity" or resist- ance is the one attitude which they will not tolerate, and they re- garded Luca's behavior as provocative. This, plus their prior identifi- cation of him as an enemy--he was not only a Catholic priest, but a leader of a militant Catholic organization--led to their use of force and brutality to a degree unusual even for a Chinese Communist prison. As on earlier occasions in his life, Luca could not grasp or articulate what he was expected to confess; and although the re- former's contradictory demands may have been mainly responsible for this, it is very likely that Luca's lifelong resistances to confes- sion also played a part, as he seemed to have much more difficulty than most other prisoners in reaching an understanding of the situa- tion. In any case, he experienced a more profound physical and psychological breakdown than did Dr. Vincent.
Father Luca's false confession reflected both a disintegration of his sense of reality and identity, and an outpouring of his sense of evil. His experience was like that of a man, who, troubled by feelings of guilt, dreams that he is a criminal being punished. Luca was a "criminal" being punished in jail, "dreaming" of having com- mitted the kind of crime of which he was accused--his dream work much assisted by his surroundings, and closely supervised by judge and cellmates. In a twilight state of fatigue, pain, and al- tered consciousness, he was both responding to the prison message and at the same time reverting to his own familiar confession idiom.
No other prisoner I encountered confessed more extensively than did Father Luca; nor did anyone else sustain for as long a period such a grossly false story. He could do this and even believe in his confession, not only because the environment encouraged this belief, but also because his confession had for him the ring of psychological truth. That is, it expressed "subversive" things about himself, albeit in the language of the Communist police system rather than that of the Catholic Church. It was an extreme version--a caricature--of his own negative identity. As an expe- rienced confessor (and a man who had done some writing) Father Luca could be creative, prolific, and convincing in using this carica- ture to develop his confession-novel.
The direct physical assault, coming at the height of the false con-
? THE OBVIOUSLY CONFUSED 1 0 5
fession, showed a loss of control on the part of the Communist of- ficials. They had begun to check Father Luca's false confession, ap- parently after having believed a good deal of it, and had found it to be "insincere" beyond words--in both the conventional and their own special meaning of the term.
Luca himself, once injured (and physically punished), rose to impressive heights of courage and strength. He had given indica- tions of his will to survive even before the injury. His delusions had included fantasies of self-affirmation--of recovery, rescue, and return to priestly activities--along with elements of guilt. At that time, too, he could summon faith in the religious purpose of his suffering ("penance for my sins"). Crippled and helpless, he was able to reach more profoundly into his emotional being and remind himself of the most basic forms of trust he had known in the past: religious comradeship, earthly places, both beautiful and permanent, and most of all, sad songs which took him back to maternal love and tenderness. His identity collapse had been temporary; now he sought always to reaffirm that in himself which he most valued and could depend upon. And at the same time, he kept his inner ex- perience within his own religious idiom. His imprisonment was a continuation of his lifelong self-purification. His faith was a power- ful ally, one he would under no condition surrender: hence his dra- matic assertion that "to take off my religion it is necessary to take out my heart and to kill me"--both a statement of creed and a quashing of self-doubt.
This very creed and his devotion to the Church behind it led to his greatest pain during reform. As a "liberal" he had already been in conflict with "illiberal" (and militaristic) colleagues, with whom he was now accused of conspiring. As a "liberal," he could also "feel" the validity of some Communist objections to official and nonofficial Church activity. He was especially vulnerable to accusations that the Church did such apparently "good" things as helping the sick and poor for its own selfish reasons: this would be "insincerity" at its worst. But he was susceptible not only be- cause he was liberal; it was precisely in this issue that he found his guilt, both personal and existential, most exploited. A negative image here--of self and Church--was both intolerable and unavoidable.
Luca's quest for "sincerity," as well as his "Chineseness," served, toward the end of his imprisonment, to bring him into a position
? 106 THOUGHT REFORM
of harmony with the officials: all became increasingly "frank" and "sincere. " But it was sincerity at a price, and led him to the in- congruous position of "helping" a fellow-priest make a criminal "confession"--his furthest venture into "betrayal. " He was, to be sure, still "hearing confessions"'; but now "sincerely" in harmony with the opposition.
Yet this too was only partial and transient. Immediately upon release, he was identified by his religious colleagues once more as the dedicated Catholic priest, which he had never really ceased to be. He also faced the delicate problem of restoring his identity as a liberal confessor, deeply committed to an authoritarian Church. His identity flexibility required that he scrutinize the Communists, the Church, and himself.
