Sybil Exposed

by Nathan, Debbie

  Connie decided that she would have to psychoanalyze not just Shirley but Peggy Ann, Peggy Lou, and Vicky—yet no one had ever used psychoanalysis to dig into the mind of a multiple. No one had trawled for the dark traumas that must have caused such an extreme dissociation of memories and identity. Even Eve’s doctor had touched only lightly on his patient’s childhood history. The worst experiences he’d found were a time when Eve saw a man whose body had been cut into pieces in an accident, and a funeral she attended in which she had to touch her dead grandmother’s face. Much worse things must have happened to Shirley, Connie surmised. Things as awful as the horrors of war that shattered soldiers. Things so bad that they fractured a child’s mind into many pieces, many personalities.

  Connie vowed to cure her patient no matter how much time it took. She would do it in her office, because Shirley deserved personalized, loving care, not warehousing in a crowded mental hospital.10 She decided to see Shirley for three therapy sessions a week. Money was irrelevant. If need be, the treatment would be given on credit.11

  At Shirley’s next appointment she showed up as Shirley, and Connie broke the news that she had multiple personalities. Connie expected her patient to be horrified and frightened; instead, Shirley seemed curious, and even relieved to have “a bona fide condition.” She rushed out to the library to read Morton Prince’s 1905 book on multiple personality again.12

  Within weeks of receiving her new diagnosis, Shirley was regularly presenting herself at Connie’s office as Vicky or one of the Peggys. Then, one day, she appeared as a fifth person: a young boy named Mike. He talked about using carpentry tools to make things with his dad, Walter Mason.13

  By now, Connie had noticed the difference between Shirley’s multiple personalities and those of notables Miss Christine Beauchamp and Eve. Those women’s alters had also been women—adults. But Shirley’s were all children. Even Vicky, with her beautiful manners, told Connie she was only thirteen years old. Talking about her family, Vicky described having brothers and sisters in England, and loving parents there who one day would cross the Atlantic to rescue her from Minnesota. When Connie asked why she lived there, Vicky described herself as a caretaker for Shirley and the children, and she hinted at terrible secrets in the Mason family. She would not elaborate.14

  Connie decided to use World War II–era narcosynthesis therapy to extract details. But before she went back to Shirley’s childhood, she wanted to know what happened during the “fugues”—particularly a recent trip to Philadelphia. She asked Shirley’s permission to inject her with Pentothal. As an Adventist, Shirley was frightened of mind-bending drugs, but by the end of 1955 she reluctantly agreed to the treatment.

  The first Pentothal session occurred in her apartment. As Shirley lay in her bed, Connie tied Shirley’s upper arm with a tourniquet to make her veins pop out. Then she filled a large syringe with the chemical and plunged the needle into one of the veins. Shirley groggily became Peggy. In a little girl’s voice, she talked of traveling to Philadelphia, checking into a hotel near Center City, and getting a yen for some new pajamas. She found a children’s clothing store and bought a brightly colored pair. She put them on in the hotel, curled up in bed, slept well, and later awoke and did some sightseeing. Then she turned back into Shirley and didn’t know where she was.15

  Connie turned on a tape recorder to capture the story. For years thereafter, she would inject Shirley, then push the “on” button of her reel-to-reel machine.

  Almost all the tapes have since been destroyed. But some transcripts remain, together with the transcriptionists’ accounts of how Shirley sounded while she was talking. One record of an early Pentothal therapy session suggests that Shirley produced torrents of what the old military psychiatrists had recognized as dreamlike, false-memory garble.

  The transcript, from a recording made in 1955, indicates that Shirley had received prior Pentothal injections. Earlier, Peggy had told Connie she first appeared to Shirley at the age of seven, when Shirley was playing in a hayloft with a boy named John Greenwald. He had jumped onto an old cash register with a gun in it, Peggy added. The gun went off, shooting John and killing him. The horror of witnessing his death caused Shirley to dissociate. She disappeared mentally, and Peggy took over her body.16

  Peggy’s story was chilling, but it was fantasy. Dodge Center newspapers from the early 1940s and state death records in Minnesota indicate that John died when Shirley was seventeen years old, not a young child, and that she was not present at the gun accident which killed him. But Connie didn’t know about these records. She assumed that Shirley’s Pentothal-induced story was a real memory.17

  Now, in the session memorialized in the transcript, Shirley trembled and screamed. “The people, the people!” she wailed.18

  Who were “the people”? Had they abused her when she was a child? In earlier Pentothal sessions Connie had pressed for details but gotten none. Now she hoped Vicky would talk. She called for her, and Vicky’s well-bred voice responded from the couch.

  “Tell me about Peggy,” Connie asked.

  “She’s always mad,” answered Vicky. “She’s mad at her dog because he won’t listen to her, and he doesn’t love her.”

  Unaffectionate terriers revealed nothing about mind-shattering trauma. Connie pushed on. Vicky offered another angle.

  “Peggy thinks that she’s a boy. She gets mad because she knows she isn’t. She wants to get married when she grows up and she wants to be the boy … the man.”

  Connie changed the subject, still looking for abuse. During previous Penthothal sessions Shirley had said she was afraid of music. She said she hated her childhood piano recitals because when she made a mistake the audience laughed, humiliating her. Connie wondered if something much worse was involved. She asked Vicky why Shirley had such animus toward music.

  “Because music is beautiful … and it’s sad and nobody cares.”

  “Why should something beautiful hurt?” Connie asked.

  Inadvertently or not, she had cued her patient she was looking for trauma.

  “It’s like love and love hurts,” Vicki answered. “When people love you they hit you this way and this way with the knuckles and they slap you.”

  Trauma. Finally. But Vicky had more. Her voice began chugging like a locomotive, clacking faster and faster down a track of terrible injury.

  “And they put flashlights in you and bottles out of little silver boxes and they put a blanket over your face and hold a light over. You can’t breathe and it hurts and you kick and you can’t move.”

  Connie was unaware that when Shirley was seven years old she had been terribly frightened by a tonsillectomy. She’d gotten the surgery in the home office of family doctor Otoniel Flores, and she’d been tricked into it. Walter and Mattie had lured her into the surgery room by telling her she was going to the Floreses’ to visit their daughter Virginia. When Shirley arrived, Mrs. Flores, who was a registered nurse, beckoned her upstairs and told her to put on what she called “Dr. Flores’s white shirt” so she could play. This strange demand made Shirley uneasy. Before she had time to think, she was grabbed and forced onto a table. She screamed. Bottles of liquids lay nearby, and an old man, the town pharmacist, loomed over her. Other people held her down and looked in her throat with a light. The pharmacist slapped a cloth over her nose and mouth. She kicked and flailed, then she couldn’t breathe—the cloth was soaked in ether. She thought she was dying. When she awoke her throat ached and she was still terrified, as well as enraged. She never forgot the experience.19

  It would take years after the Pentothal session before Shirley, in her right mind and not dosed with mind-bending drugs, would tell Connie about her tonsillectomy. Now, when Connie heard about the flashlight, the silver bottles, the overpowering people, and the suffocating cloth, she assumed her patient had been raped as a child.

  Who had done it? Probably Mattie Mason—after all, people with emotional problems had almost always been hurt by their mothers. But why would thi
s mother commit such extreme horrors? Connie began to suspect that Mattie Mason was a paranoid schizophrenic.20

  Connie tried to get more information from Vicky. But suddenly Vicky was gone and Peggy was lying on the couch with the Pentothal coursing through her veins. She screamed so loudly that Connie could not understand what she was saying, except for some repetitive phrases:

  “The people! The people! The people! The door! The door right here!”

  Peggy sprang up and lurched through the office, crashing into furniture and walls. She ran to the window and pounded. The glass broke. Her hand trickled blood.

  “Wake up!” yelled Connie. “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

  Peggy kept screaming.

  “Come on … wake up. Wake up.”

  She finally did. “Oh, oh, oh, what did I do?” she whimpered. “I was over by your window, wasn’t I? Oh, I’m sorry. Did I do that?” Still high from the Pentothal, Shirley had bizarre sensations. The walls were laughing and moving. She sobbed hysterically.

  Connie reassured her. Then she probed for additional crimes committed by the lunatic Mattie Mason. She told Shirley she wanted to speak with Vicky.

  “Hi,” Vicky said. Connie asked what Mattie had done to little Shirley. Vicky tried to help but was incoherent. “First it’s one thing, then another. All the old feelings she used to crow about before.”

  And that garble was the end of the Pentothal session, at least as recorded in the transcript.

  Connie was not discouraged. To get to the bottom of the atrocities committed against her patient, she would just have to do more work.

  By summer 1955 Shirley had earned her masters degree despite being heavily drugged most of the year. Now, feeling both very sick and very ambitious, she dropped her earlier plans to get an art education doctorate and decided to work on becoming a psychoanalyst. She moved from her dormitory to a rooming house. To gain a foundation for medical school, she enrolled in a chemistry class at Teachers College. She was unemployed but picked up odd jobs painting posters for university events.21 Otherwise she was a full-time “analysand,” as patients in psychoanalysis are called by their doctors.

  She confided to her friend Willie Price that she was in therapy, and Willie didn’t laugh when she learned Shirley had multiple personality disorder. Not only did she accept the claim, but she asked if she, too, could see Dr. Wilbur as a patient. Soon she was in therapy, and she and Connie often discussed Shirley’s amazing case. Willie moved into Shirley’s rooming house and volunteered to observe Shirley and report on her alter personalities. She encouraged Shirley to eat, take her medicines, and dress warmly in cold weather.22 When the Peggys appeared, Willie took notes.23

  “Oh, the noise and the pain,” read one of Willie’s transcriptions of a day when “Peggy” lay on Shirley’s bed, quaking and screaming for hours.

  Take the pain away … the pain in my head and the music and the hands … Can’t tell anyone about the music just remember and remember and remember … The people—all the people. I’m afraid … Take the knife and put it away! … All the people are dancing in the hall—all white—and the music … all the black boxes and all the white boxes—Take them away … my head hurts, it hurts, it hurts … I’ll read what I want to read, I’ll paint the way I want to paint … Got to find Dr. Wilbur. Mother won’t let me … Don’t want to get shot … the guns … I’m afraid of white—I’m afraid of nurses … All the nurses, all in white, stood around the table.

  Amid the raving, “Peggy” jumped out of bed and crawled under the furniture. Once she cowered under a dresser for two days. Willie tried to coax her out but couldn’t. She called Connie, who came to the apartment and got Peggy to come out.24

  Shirley never acted like Peggy or the other alter personalities in front of anyone but her analyst and her roommate. Both doted on her. She loved only one, though: Connie.

  Connie loved her back, without reservation. Besides the office therapy, she made regular house calls, even during evenings and weekends. Her colleagues probably did not know about her unorthodox visits. And they almost certainly were unaware she was injecting Shirley with Pentothal. She continued to give the shots in Shirley’s own bedroom, with no medical backup if Shirley were to suffer a reaction from this potent barbiturate—if she stopped breathing, for instance.25

  As rogue as all this treatment was, Connie felt justified. Shirley’s disorder was so serious, and so little studied, that radical approaches were called for. The alternate personalities each required therapy, so Shirley needed many more hours on the couch than other patients did. And she needed to remember the horrors inflicted on her by her terrible mother. Pentothal and other barbiturates would relax her, softening the resistance. Benzadrine and amphetamines would also lift her spirits, bucking her up to recall Mattie’s crimes.

  Shirley did not argue with this regimen. Connie spent hours every week listening raptly to her problems, doling out encouragement, and offering to pay Shirley’s tuition for pre-med courses. She asked Shirley for childhood photographs, and when she looked at them she saw Peggy’s face in some and Mike’s in others.26 She read Shirley’s teenage diaries, and she suggested that Shirley write daily, even hourly accounts of her feelings between therapy sessions.

  Shirley had other reasons for doing as Connie said. For one, she burned with desire for her doctor to pat and hug her, and every time Connie did so, Shirley happily reported on it in her diary. “[C]ame up behind me and put hands on my shoulders with a little shake, and drew me close,” she reported on November 4. And on November 18: “Reached over. ‘Let me have your hand.’”27

  Connie was also encouraging Shirley’s artistic endeavors by acting as a dealer for her work. The walls in her Park Avenue home were hung with her patient’s paintings. A visiting friend liked one and wondered if Shirley could do another. Connie negotiated the price: $85. She relayed the order to Shirley.28

  Shirley was terribly grateful, and within a few days after the painting deal was executed, she walked into therapy as yet another alter personality. This one said she was tall and had brown eyes. Her name was Helen.29 Connie recorded Helen on reel-to-reel tape. The next day, when Shirley showed up, Connie had a proposition:

  “Would you like to earn some money?”

  “That’s a question?” Shirley joked rhetorically.

  “I would like to have you collaborate with me on something,” Connie answered. “I want to write a book about your difficulties and I would like you to help with it.”30

  Shirley was skittish at first. But Connie encouraged her by telling her she was talking to other psychoanalysts about her special patient.

  One of these other doctors, Dr. Sandor Lorand, was an international leader in psychoanalysis and ran the psychoanalysis program at the State University of New York’s medical school in Brooklyn. Connie had told him she was treating a brilliant young woman with multiple personalities who wanted to be a psychoanalyst. Dr. Lorand said the patient could attend his medical school. Connie told Shirley, adding that after she got her MD degree, Dr. William V. Silverberg—Connie’s probable former analyst—would do Shirley’s training analysis.31

  In exchange for agreeing to do a book about her case, Connie said, she would pay for Shirley’s medical school tuition and living expenses.32 Shirley agreed to the deal; now she was a professional multiple personality patient. Later, she figured, she would get well and have new work, as a medical student, then a psychoanalyst. She was ecstatic.

  She lay on her back and Connie pushed a needle into a glass vial of Pentathol. She pulled the plunger up. Shirley held out her arm.

  By late winter 1956 Shirley had been in therapy for a year and a half. But instead of getting better, she was as sick as she’d ever been. She felt so depressed that she often couldn’t finish her chemistry homework or make it to class. She told Connie about more fugue states. Once, after taking Willie to the bus station to go back to Arkansas for Christmas, she walked all night in the cold. Other times she traveled by herself t
o Altoona, Pennsylvania; White Plains, New York; and again to Philadelphia.33

  It is hard to know how much these disturbing feelings and behaviors were Shirley’s way of seeking more attention from Connie, and how much they resulted from the confusion she must have been suffering from being dosed with an ever burgeoning variety of medicines—apparently as part of Connie’s research into the effects of new drugs on mental illness. Connie had recently added Dexamyl, another barbiturate-amphetamine combination, to Shirley’s pharmacopeia.34 As well, she gave her Equanil, an anti-anxiety pill more popularly known as Miltown. It had been put on the market in 1955, accompanied by great fanfare from pop media like Newsweek, Time, and even Cosmopolitan, which suggested that the decade’s new crop of psychotropic pills could even cure female “frigidity,” and help career women who were nervous about matrimony to make the decision to marry.35

  When Shirley felt particularly depressed or anxious, she frequently doubled, even quintupled, her prescribed dosages of Daprisal, Demerol, Dexamyl, Edrisal, Equanil, and Seconal. And Connie added Serpatilin, a combination of a tranquilizer and the stimulant Ritalin, as well as Thorazine, a medicine originally prescribed to relieve nausea and the kind of pain Shirley experienced with her periods. Thorazine would later be recognized as a potent antipsychotic whose side effects, particularly at high doses, include restlessness, confusion, blackouts, and unusual thoughts and behavior.36 With this powerful drug and all the uppers and downers, Connie also gave Shirley phenobarbital, another barbiturate, on top of her regular, intravenous doses of Pentothal.37

  Connie’s colleagues probably never learned of her extravagant medicating. Nor did they hear about another irregular treatment she gave Shirley. For house calls she carried a machine of the kind that many psychiatrists had used back in the 1940s. It came in a sturdy box the shape and size of a briefcase, with snaps and a handle. On the front were dials, meters, and on-off buttons, and one side had a hole for attaching a wire connected to two paddles. Connie would carry her apparatus to Shirley’s apartment and climb in bed with her. She would clamp the paddles to Shirley’s temples, twirl the dials, and press the buttons. Shirley’s body would arch and crash with convulsions. Connie’s gadget was an old electro-convulsive therapy machine she had retired years earlier. But she felt Shirley was becoming suicidally depressed, and Connie thought electroshock would help.38