Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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...

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 ...