Sybil Exposed I

My recent reading includes SYBIL EXPOSED: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case (2011) by Debbie Nathan.




The gist of the book is that psychotherapy is the disease it affects to cure.

Here's a key passage, describing the condition of Shirley Mason, the real life analog to the woman we all think we know as 'Sybil,' as of 1958.

 "Almost four years had passed since Shirley first walked into Connie's office as an upbeat graduate student with nagging but bearable emotional problems. Now, after hundreds of hours of therapy and countless pills, shots, and machine-induced convulsions, she was a thirty-five-year-old junkie who spent most of her time in bed and who, when she did get up, checked her mail box for money from her father, or walked the streets muttering to herself."

The Connie in question is Cornelia Wilbur, a psychiatrist whose training was steeped in a very strict Freudian orthodoxy, including a firm belief in "schizophrenogenic" mothers; that is, mothers whose cruel or cold parenting dooms their children to serious mental illness.

In 1962, Wilbur would be one of the authors of a book called Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Stiudy of Male Homosexuality, that also gives evidence of that old-timey Freudian religion.  Homosexuality is itself an illness, the authors of this book agreed, and is closely correlated with many other psychoanalytic illnesses. Further, it is an illness caused by a domineering mother, and one that can be cured if the analysts help the afflicted men overcome Mom's bad influence.

This book is about the interaction of three women who together created the myth of Sybil, and the vogue of "multiple personalities" as a diagnosis. Besides Mason and Wilbur there was Flora Rheta Schreiber, a journalist and English instructor who wrote the book.

The three women launched the book project in 1962 over dinner at a fancy restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It took a long time for the project to come to fruition, in part because Schreiber cautioned Wilbur she couldn't sell such a book unless it included a happy ending; that is, a cure. Wilbur pronounced Mason cured three years later, and Schreiber began work in earnest.

Still it took a long time. Regnery published Sybil in 1973. Part of that delay came about because most publishers were quite wary -- The Three Faces of Eve had been a hit on 1957, and to many publishers with a long enough memory this proposal sounded like a warmed-over version of that one.

Well ... was it? Not really. Eve had been regarded as a curiosity -- one of only a small number of such cases. Further, the manageable number "three" suggested an easily mappable psychological split -- a demure side, a wild side, and a more balanced woman into whom the other two could naturally hope to integrate.

"Sybil" would not be regarded as a curiosity. She would hit a very different zeitgeist and she'd come to be regarded as a role model -- as one of many, many people, mostly women, and as someone who was (though anonymously) showing others the way. Also, "Sybil"'s case as presented in the 1973 book involved far more personalities than Eve's, a chaotic profusion of 16 (reduced a bit to 13 for the movie).

"Sybil" would help redefine psychoanalysis. Soon after she/they became famous, thereafter, multiple personality disorder for the first time got its own space in the profession's standard diagnostic compendium, the DSM.

Nathan's book is largely aimed not only at discrediting the idea of MPD, or its re-working more recently as DID [dissociative identity disorder] but at linking it in its discredit to "recovered memory" and other ideas that Nathan believes have caused a good deal of harm to our judicial system and unfortunate defendants.

On a lighter note, this book may have inspired the South Park episode dealing with MPD. Certainly the way the psychiatrist character in that book reifies Butters' innocent childhood adoption of various personae bears some relationship to this book's treatment of the relationship between Connie and Shirley.

Another purpose of this book is to warn us against the sort of journalist who popularizes faddish psychological ideas. That brings us to the Schreiber thread of this rope. I'll say a bit more about that tomorrow.