Acclaim for SYBILEXPOSED
“Debbie Nathan’s fine, insistent mind will stop at nothing to get to the truth behind Sybil, no matter how many walls are put up.… Her research is beyond compare.”
—SUSIE BRIGHT, author of Big Sex Little Death
“I’ve long considered Debbie Nathan to be the most important and unsung writer working in America today. Sybil Exposed affirms her brilliance. Using a fierce blend of investigative journalism and cultural criticism, she exposes multiple personality disorder as yet another lurid myth cooked up by the collective unconscious of our popular culture. The book is an astonishing achievement.”
—STEVE ALMOND, author of Candyfreak and God Bless America
“Journalist Debbie Nathan has found a delicious, hiding–in–plain–sight historical saga to tell: the making of the most famous ‘multiple personality’ case and book. A troubled, impressionable young girl from a Sinclair Lewis–type small town; a brilliant, bullying female neuropsychiatrist in 1950s Manhattan; and a glamorous, frustrated feminist magazine writer who’d had an affair with Eugene O’Neill, Jr.; how these three disparate American women’s fates, fantasies, and ambitions came together to create a fiction that rocked the culture and continues to affect us today makes compelling and sobering reading. It’s as compulsively readable as it is cautionary–two traits rarely shared in one book.”
—SHEILA WELLER, award–winning magazine journalist and author
of the New York Times bestseller Girls Like Us: Carole King,
Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon–and the Journey of a Generation
“What forces cause a diagnosis like multiple personality disorder to rise and fall within less than a generation? Debbie Nathan broke the story twenty years ago and now, in Sybil Exposed, she’s finally putting all the puzzle pieces together. Unless we learn the lessons in this journalistic masterwork, we are doomed to fall victim to the next fad and the next caring healer who claims to have our best interest at heart.”
—ETHAN WATTERS, author of Crazy Like Us
“Debbie Nathan’s Sybil Exposed is a first–rate historical detective story re–creating the lives of the three protagonists of one of the most popular accounts of a psychiatric patient in American history. Nathan shows how the subject of the study, her psychiatrist, as well as the author of the book invented a biography to explain something that never existed: the multiple personalities of the patient. Anyone captivated by our contemporary ‘firsthand’ accounts of mental illness should read this story that illustrates how the demands of any historical moment shape such accounts and make them seem truer than true.”
— SANDER L. GILMAN, author of Seeing the Insane,
Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences;
Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University
SYBIL: a name that conjures up enduring fascination for legions of obsessed fans who followed the nonfiction blockbuster from 1973 and the TV movie based on it—starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward—about a woman named Sybil with sixteen different personalities. Sybil became both a pop phenomenon and a revolutionary force in the psychotherapy industry. The book rocketed multiple personality disorder (MPD) into public consciousness and played a major role in having the diagnosis added to the psychiatric bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
But what do we really know about how Sybil came to be? In her news-breaking book Sybil Exposed, journalist Debbie Nathan gives proof that the allegedly true story was largely fabricated. The actual identity of Sybil (Shirley Mason) has been available for some years, as has the idea that the book might have been exaggerated. But in Sybil Exposed, Nathan reveals what really powered the legend: a trio of women—the willing patient, her ambitious shrink, and the imaginative journalist who spun their story into bestseller gold.
From horrendously irresponsible therapeutic practices—Sybil’s psychiatrist often brought an electroshock machine to Sybil’s apartment and climbed into bed with her while administering the treatment— to calculated business decisions (under an entity they named Sybil, Inc., the women signed a contract designating a three-way split of profits from the book and its spin-offs, including board games, tee shirts, and dolls), the story Nathan unfurls is full of over-the-top behavior. Sybil’s psychiatrist, driven by undisciplined idealism and galloping professional ambition, subjected the young woman to years of antipsychotics, psychedelics, uppers, and downers, including an untold number of injections with Pentothal, once known as “truth serum” but now widely recognized to provoke fantasies. It was during these “treatments” that Sybil produced rambling, garbled, and probably “false-memory”–based narratives of the hideous child abuse that her psychiatrist said caused her MPD.
Sybil Exposed uses investigative journalism to tell a fascinating tale that reads like fiction but is fact. Nathan has followed an enormous trail of papers, records, photos, and tapes to unearth the lives and passions of these three women. The Sybil archive became available to the public only recently, and Nathan is the first person to have examined all of it and to provide proof that the story was an elaborate fraud—albeit one that the perpetrators may have half-believed.
Before Sybil was published, there had been fewer than 200 known cases of MPD; within just a few years after, more than 40,000 people would be diagnosed with it. Set across the twentieth century and rooted in a time when few professional roles were available to women, this is a story of corrosive sexism, unchecked ambition, and shaky theories of psychoanalysis exuberantly and drastically practiced. It is the story of how one modest young woman’s life turned psychiatry on its head and radically changed the course of therapy, and our culture, as well.
DEBBIE NATHAN was born and raised in Houston, Texas. An award-winning journalist, editor, and translator, she specializes in writing about immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border, and sexual politics and sex panics, particularly in relation to women and children. Debbie is the author or coauthor of four books .She currently lives in New York City with her husband and has two grown children.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Control No.: 2011009164
ISBN 978-1-4391-6827-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-6829-5 (ebook)
To my own blessed sisterhood:
Anita Nathan Beckenstein
Barbara Nathan Katz
Miriam Nathan Lerner
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I—SYMPTOMS
CHAPTER 1: SHIRLEY
CHAPTER 2: CONNIE
CHAPTER 3: FLORA
PART II—DIAGNOSIS
CHAPTER 4: DR. WILBUR
CHAPTER 5: MISS MASON
CHAPTER 6: PROFESSOR SCHREIBER
PART III—TREATMENT
CHAPTER 7: MANHATTAN
CHAPTER 8: THE COUCH
CHAPTER 9: ADDICTION
CHAPTER 10: CLINICAL TALES
CHAPTER 11: CONVALESCENCE
CHAPTER 12: CURE
CHAPTER 13: IMPATIENCE
PART IV—CASE STUDY
CHAPTER 14: THE EDIT
CHAPTER 15: THE BOOK
CHAPTER 16: THE FILM
PART V—RELAPSE
CHAPTER 17: COMMITMENT
CHAPTER 18: EXPOSURE
CHAPTER 19: BREAKDOWN
CHAPTER 20: CONTAGION
CHAPTER 21: CONTAINMENT
CHAPTER 22: DEMISE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
I felt a clearing in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
—Emily Dickinson
INTRODUCTION
WHAT ABOUT MAMMA?” THE WOMAN psychiatrist asks her patient, another woman, who is lying on a divan in the early 1960s. “What’s mamma been doing to you, dear? I know she’s given you the enemas,” the psychiatrist continues. “And filled your bladder up with cold water, and I know she used the flashlight on you, and I know she stuck the washcloth in your mouth, cotton in your nose so you couldn’t breathe… . What else did she do to you? It’s all right to talk about it now.”
“My mommy,” the patient answers groggily. She is in a hypnotic trance, induced with the help of the psychiatrist.
“Yes.”
“My mommy said I was bad, and … my lips were too big like a nigger’s … she slapped me … with her knuckles … she said don’t tell Daddy. She said to keep my mouth shut.”
“Mommy isn’t going to ever hurt you again,” the psychiatrist answers. “Do you want to know something, Sweety? I’m stronger than mother.”1
The transcript of this long ago conversation is stored at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City. The college’s library houses a cramped room called Special Collections, whose walls are adorned with lithographs of a gangster jumping to his death from a window on Coney Island, and prisoners rotting in cells at Sing Sing. Not far from the lithographs hangs a black-and-white photograph of John Jay’s staff in the 1960s, peopled by over two dozen men and five women. One of the women wears a serious expression and a plain, woolen coat. “Interesting, that coat,” comments a librarian. “It’s from before she got rich. Afterward, it was nothing but mink for her. Full-length mink.”
The woman who got rich was Flora Rheta Schreiber, author of Sybil, the blockbuster book from the 1970s about the woman with sixteen personalities. Sybil first went on sale in 1973, and soon it was moving off the shelves as briskly as the Bible. Within four years it had sold over six million copies in the United States and hundreds of thousands more worldwide. A television adaptation was broadcast in 1976 and seen then by a fifth of the American population. The book is still in print and the TV drama has become a classic. Both versions were instrumental in creating a new psychiatric diagnosis: multiple personality disorder, or MPD. Sybil also created a new way for millions of people—most of them women—to think about their memories, their families, and their capabilities, even when they were psychologically normal, without a hint of MPD.
To create the book which caused this phenomenon, Schreiber collaborated with Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the psychiatrist in the transcript who asks, “What about mamma?”—and with Wilbur’s patient, whose real name Schreiber changed in her book to the pseudonym Sybil Dorsett. The two women helped Schreiber by giving her records of Sybil’s therapy, including thousands of pages of treatment notes, patient diaries, and transcripts of sessions that had been tape-recorded over a period of eleven years. Schreiber was a pack rat who never threw away a scrap. After she died in the late 1980s, her papers, including the Sybil therapy material, were archived at John Jay.
For a decade after Schreiber’s death, Sybil’s real name and whereabouts were unknown to the public, and to protect her privacy, librarians sealed her therapy records. But in 1998, two researchers accidentally discovered a piece of paper that revealed her real identity and, following up on that information, they learned that she was dead. The John Jay papers were unsealed, and today researchers can find disturbing conversations in them, such as the hypnotherapy session just cited. Many describe how Sybil’s mother perpetrated sexual assaults and other atrocities on her when she was as young as three years old—traumas so horrible that the little girl was said to have pushed them out of her consciousness for decades, until she saw a psychiatrist. “Mamma was a bad mamma,” Dr. Wilbur declares in the transcripts. “I can help you remember.”
But countless other records suggest that the outrages Sybil recalled never happened at all. Dr. Wilbur had helped her patient do something, these records suggest, and for a very long period of time. But whatever that behavior was, it can hardly be called remembering. What was it, then? And why did it enthrall not just psychiatrists in charge of creating new diagnoses, but ordinary people all over the world—and especially women?
Is there anyone in America who does not remember what started it all? Just in case, here is the abridged version of Sybil.
One cold day in winter 1956, a shy and painfully anorexic graduate student in the pre-med department at Columbia University stands outside her chemistry classroom waiting for the elevator. The next thing she knows, she is on a freezing, snow-swept street in a city she doesn’t recognize. Eventually she figures out it’s Philadelphia, and that between the elevator and the snow five days have passed, days which for the young woman—whose name is Sybil Dorsett—are an utter blank. Sybil catches a train back to New York to see Dr. Wilbur, her steely but superbly kind and caring Park Avenue psychoanalyst. Dr. Wilbur mothers, medicates, and hypnotizes her patient, tirelessly attempting to dredge up memories of the forgotten childhood trauma which she assumes provokes Sybil’s flights to other cities.
The Philadelphia trip is not the first time Sybil’s mind has shattered. Though she doesn’t realize it, she is possessed by so many inner personalities that they need a family tree to keep themselves straight. There are a whimpering toddler, a depressed grandmother, a pair of unruly, prepubes-cent boys, and two saucy grade school girls named Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann. With unpredictable frequency, these “alters” take turns suppressing Sybil’s main personality as they emerge to control her behavior in chilling ways. A young female personality keeps trying to commit suicide—which would, of course, kill Sybil. The toddler cowers under furniture, sobbing with incoherent terror.
This psychic splitting has been going on since Sybil was three, but no one around her realized it, though the little girl’s behavior was often puzzling. In fifth grade she suddenly forgot how to do arithmetic. She doesn’t know it, but she forgot her multiplication tables because an alter personality named Peggy Lou took over her body at age nine and attended school in Sybil’s place. Then, two grades later, Peggy Lou suddenly vanished, leaving Sybil ignorant of everything her alter had learned.
At the time the book begins, Sybil has no idea she has alters. All she knows is that she dissociates—or “loses time,” as she puts it. She ends up in strange places without the slightest idea how she got there. She discovers dresses in her closet that are not her style and which she does not remember buying. She finds herself chatting intimately with people she has no recollection of ever having met.
Dr. Wilbur decides that the cause of this
puzzling illness is some terrible thing done to Sybil during childhood, the memory of which she walled off into other personalities so that she would not have to deal with the pain. But what, exactly, happened? That’s what, together, they need to figure out so that Sybil can “integrate” her personalities and be whole again. The only way to do that is for Sybil to remember the trauma, and Dr. Wilbur must help.
Dr. Wilbur puts Sybil into drug-induced and hypnotic trances that finally cause her to remember. The trauma she suffered as a young child turns out to have been abuse—barbaric, gothic, grotesque beyond imagination—inflicted by her psychotic mother, Hattie Dorsett. Hattie once tried to suffocate four-year-old Sybil by locking her into a box filled with grain. Other times, she made her daughter watch as she defecated on neighbors’ lawns, held lesbian orgies in the woods with teenagers, and fondled the genitals of babies. If all this weren’t enough to destroy a child’s psyche, Hattie regularly hung preschooler Sybil by the ankles above a kitchen table, raped her with household utensils, gave her ice-water enemas, and tied her under the piano while banging out crazed versions of Beethoven and Chopin.
Could these nightmare memories, recovered so many years after the crimes supposedly happened, really be true? Yes, says the book—undoubtedly. One chapter has Dr. Wilbur interrogating Sybil’s quiet, colorless father about the family’s past. Mr. Dorsett admits that his wife—by now long dead—was a “nervous” woman. Hemming and hawing, he allows that Hattie could have tortured her daughter without his or anyone else’s noticing.
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