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Sybil Exposed III




In January I wrote two posts here summarizing the book Sybil Exposed, by Debbie Nathan.

Here is one link, and here is the other.

Today I'd like to go back to that book, and to the question of the truth about "Sybil," the multiple personalities case immortalized in a 1973 book and 1976 movie.

I've given the gist of Nathan's take on this story in the earlier two entries. What I'd like to ask today is this: how did the world come to know that the real 'Sybil' was Shirley Mason of  Dodge Center, Minnesota. Nathan doesn't claim to any originality in this.

As I noted in one of those earlier posts, "anyone who had been in the Mason family's social circles during Shirley's childhood and who read the book ... could make a fairly confident guess about who the book was about, and it seems at least a few did so."

But for the broader world, the disclosure came due to work by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Peter Swales in the 1990s. Here's a story from the Detroit Free Press, dated December 23, 1998, quoting Swales.

I don't see anything contemporary with that about Borch-Jacobsen's work, although Nathan gives him credit along with Swales for that discovery. Here though is something that he wrote on a related subject, a review he wrote for the London Review of Books of a 1999 work on "transient mental illnesses." Borch-Jacobsen's skepticism about what counts as a "mental illness" comes through.

Also in 1998, Dr. Robert Rieber spoke on this matter to the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. He said of Mason, or her psychologist, and of the reporter who made them both famous, "[T]hey wished to believe it [their MPD story], no matter what. I would prefer to believe that there was an much self-deception as deception of others They were not malicious people."

Only four years ago Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen published a scholarly work on the history of psychiatry called MAKING MINDS AND MADNESS. Here is the Amazon page.  Chapter 3 is devoted entirely to the Sybil case.



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