The notion of repressed and recovered memories was being widely promoted by many psychologists and psychiatrists by the late 1980s, as well as by a bestselling self-help book for women with emotional problems, The Courage to Heal. But Freyd’s parents insisted their daughter’s memories were bogus. They began looking for other parents claiming to be falsely accused of abuse by their grown children in therapy.
After Peter and Pamela Freyd located dozens of these parents, they decided they were dealing with a false memory epidemic. They recruited an advisory board of experts, many of them older psychiatrists who had trained and started practicing in the pre-Sybil generation. They had researched the pitfalls of hypnosis and memory, and they had grave reservations about recovered memories, including those elicited under treatment for MPD. The Freyds unveiled the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to the press, and reporters requested interviews with aggrieved mothers and fathers. They were increasingly easy to find, because with every news article that came out about the FMSF, the new organization heard from more people saying they, too, had been falsely accused.6 One out of seven of these callers added that the diagnosis which had led to false memories was MPD.7
As skepticism about MPD spread, the FMSF began hearing from another group: women who called themselves retractors. They had been in therapy, developed chilling memories of childhood abuse, then realized the memories were false. This change of mind typically occurred after patients were terminated from therapy because their insurance had run out or when they developed a modicum of independence from their doctors. That happened to Jeanette Bartha, a former activist in NOW, the National Organization for Women, and a champion fencer in college. In the late 1980s she developed depression and visited a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with MPD. By 1992 Bartha had spent six years in and out of hospitals, almost constantly wearing pajamas and lying in bed. Then her psychiatrist took a summer vacation. While he was gone, Bartha decided to put on street clothes and start exercising every day.
“The more I exercised,” Bartha would later recall, “the more I didn’t need medication … my mind started to clear.” But when she told her doctor about her improvement, “He said it was just another personality that probably wouldn’t last long.” Later, she told the psychiatrist, “Look, this uncle I told you had abused me wasn’t even in the United States at that time. It couldn’t have happened.” The psychiatrist ignored her. “Oh my God,” Bartha told herself. “He doesn’t believe what I can prove to be true! Why?” She quit therapy. Later she filed a lawsuit.8
Bartha’s civil complaint was settled out of court and the details were never reported on by the press. But other cases received plenty of publicity, including a massive lawsuit filed against Judith Peterson, a Texas psychologist known as an expert at using hypnosis and other methods to help clients recover hidden memories of trauma. The lawsuit against Peterson was brought by a longtime patient, Kathryn Schwiderski, whose husband was an oil-company executive in Houston. Kathryn had originally sought treatment from Peterson in 1985 because she felt depressed, but during their four years of therapy, Peterson had diagnosed her with MPD. The lawsuit claimed that Peterson and three other therapists had wrongly decided Kathryn was a longtime member of a Satanic cult who had participated in rapes, torture, electroshock, drugging, human sacrifice, cult programming, cannibalism, kidnapping, and murder. After this assessment was made, Schwiderski was placed in a dissociative disorders unit managed by Peterson.9
Psychologist Peterson had reported Kathryn Schwiderski and her husband to Child Protection Services because of her statements during MPD therapy that they had hurt their children. Detectives investigated, no evidence turned up, and the case was dropped. Even so, the accusations—and confessions—tore the family apart. The Schwiderskis ended up divorcing.
The state of Texas closed Peterson’s dissociative disorders unit in 1993 after determining it had overused physical restraints, censored patients’ mail and phone calls (supposedly to protect them from “the cult”), and, in one case, refused a request for discharge from the hospital until the patient could prove “the cult” was not a safety risk. The Schwiderskis, meanwhile, launched a lawsuit demanding $35 million in damages, and not just from Judith Peterson. They sued two dozen other people, including several MPD heroes.
The defendants all denied the charges, but the litigation received substantial press coverage. Many therapists, especially those who treated MPD, were frightened. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association expressed doubt that hypnosis and drugs could help elicit dissociated or repressed memories, and cautioned that memories produced using these treatments were often not true.
The same year, reflecting widespread concerns that MPD had become a dangerous fad, experts working on the new edition of the APA’s diagnostic manual, the DSM-IV, gave the condition a new name so it would sound less alluring to the public. Now it was called DID, dissociative identity disorder. The new manual suggested that DID might be “overdiagnosed in individuals who are highly suggestible,” and warned about “overzealous therapists” promoting dissociation rather than curing it.10
Further, the DSM-IV commented, the high number of cases reported recently in the United States indicated DID could be a “culture-bound” syndrome—just like “falling out,” the term used when African Americans in the South suddenly become paralyzed for no organic reason and cannot see, though their eyes are open; or “spell” (also Southern), when individuals “communicate” with deceased relatives or with spirits, and sometimes show changes in personality. These terms and other idioms of distress made it into the DSM.11 But unlike MPD, they were shunted into a section describing the problems of marginalized people and immigrants. Some wondered if DID should be sidelined into that section, too.
Despite these reforms, the therapists were still under siege. In 1995, PBS Frontline aired a documentary about two other former MPD patients who were suing their therapists for misconduct similar to that which the Schwiderskis, in Texas, had described. A bemused New York Times TV critic compared the therapists, all of them ISSMP&D leaders, to “a coven.”12 A later Times article noted that as a result of her MPD therapy, one plaintiff, a woman from Iowa born in the late 1950s, had remembered having sex with President John F. Kennedy (the woman was seven years old when Kennedy was assassinated).13
By the late 1990s, more therapists were sued, and some were indicted on criminal charges for misdiagnosing multiple personality disorder and satanic cult involvement in order to generate huge billings and defraud insurance companies. Therapists started refusing to treat dissociative identity disorder. They abandoned the ISSMP&D, too. The organization lost half its membership.14
Thus MPD came to be seen as some bizarre subculture and was snickered at in the press. “Devil Doc a Crock?” the New York Daily News head-lined an article about a therapist who performed an exorcism on a patient, complete with a fire extinguisher (“Sometimes Satan leaves a ring of fire, he explained”).15 Even Geraldo took it on the chin. He apologized for all those years of bringing multiples and therapists on his show to fuel the Satanic ritual abuse epidemic.16
With multiple personality disorder abolished from the DSM, the ISSMP&D dropped “MP” from its name, turning itself into ISSD, the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. At the same time, the group’s leaders revised their old advice to clinicians about how to treat the newly renamed condition. Previously they had urged their fellow healers to do anything necessary to help patients remember and relive their childhood trauma, no matter how much medication and hypnosis was required. New protocols were developed, specifying that no patient should be put into trance before signing a consent form which explained the risk of developing false memories. Therapists were also advised to stop glorifying alters. They were told to treat their patients as “whole persons” rather than collections of selves.17
Amid the withering skepticism, there remained some diehard faithful. MPD was real, they insisted. They pointed to research, initiated in the earl
y 1970s by Dr. Cornelia Wilbur and her colleagues at the University of Kentucky, purporting to show that alters could be detected using medical tests such as EEGs. Further, MPD proponents noted, some brain imaging tests on people diagnosed with MPD showed features not visible in the brains of normal subjects.
But the studies they cited were thrown into question as investigation continued. Old research claiming that one alter personality could learn things without the other alters knowing it, was shown to be faulty. And the earlier EEG data, suggesting that alters had different brain waves, fell flat when new studies demonstrated that brain waves vary significantly even in a normal person; the differences simply show mood changes.18
And while it’s true that MPD sufferers’ brains look different from those of people without the condition, one study has found that veteran taxi drivers in England show similar differences in their brains when compared to people who haven’t driven taxis. Another study indicates that professional musicians’ brains appear distinct from those of amateurs. Doing the same thing, repeatedly, and for a very long time, apparently changes cerebral structures. And by the time people with MPD have shown up in labs to be tested, virtually all have spent years presenting their alters to the world, over and over and over. They seem as accustomed to behaving like multiples as the jazz maestros are to playing Coltrane, or London cabbies to navigating Fleet Street.19
The science no longer measured up, but there was still Sybil. Before she walked into Dr. Wilbur’s office, the faithful pointed out, the doctor had never heard of MPD. So how could she have suggested it to the patient? And what about the family physician, believers added, quoting from one of Sybil the telemovie’s major plotlines. Dr. Wilbur had fact-checked the clinical history by going to the little town where Sybil grew up and finding her doctor. He had pulled out Sybil’s old records containing solid evidence that she’d been battered and raped.
The problem was, no one knew if any of this had really happened, because no one knew who Sybil was. So in the late 1990s, a man known for digging up any dirt in psychiatry that he was interested in finding set his mind to learning Sybil’s identity, then uncovering the facts of her psychotherapy with Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur.
He was Peter Swales, a Welshman and a high school dropout who’d once been a manager for the Rolling Stones. A “punk historian,” Swales called himself, and while researching the life of Sigmund Freud, he’d become convinced that the founder of psychoanalysis was self-serving and dishonest. Examining old archives and letters, he had concluded that Freud had carried on a love affair with his wife’s sister, impregnated her, and arranged for an abortion under the guise of taking her to a health spa. Swales also uncovered the true identities of two of the women Freud had treated for hysteria, and he had demonstrated that Freud had greatly exaggerated when he claimed he cured these patients.20
Swales was joined in his Sybil search by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington. As a longtime critic of psychoanalysis, Borch-Jacobsen had interviewed Sybil’s old backup psychiatrist, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, for The New York Review of Books. The title of the piece, published in 1997, made clear what Spiegel and Borch-Jacobsen thought of MPD. “Sybil,” the article was called. “The Making of a Disease.”21
But Swales and Borch-Jacobsen’s sleuthing was stymied. Sybil was assumed to be alive somewhere, and to protect her privacy, John Jay College librarians had sealed a container in the Flora Rheta Schreiber archives marked “Box 37.” It held Connie’s therapy records with “Sybil” and many other materials displaying the patient’s real name.
Undaunted, Swales plotted other investigative strategies. One was based on the fact that Dodge Center’s family physician in the 1930s had been assigned the pseudonym “Dr. Quinoness” in Sybil. Of course, Swales didn’t know that the real doctor was Otoniel Flores, but he correctly guessed that he had a Hispanic surname. Swales planned to check old state and county medical society records to find small, Depression-era Midwestern towns with Latino doctors. He intended to ask old-timers in these towns if a strange, artistic girl had once lived among them.22 So famous was Swales as the Sherlock Holmes of psychoanalysis that everyone figured he would solve the mystery soon.
CHAPTER 22
DEMISE
SHIRLEY WAS PROBABLY UNAWARE THAT Sybil’s veracity was being questioned and that someone was tracking her down. But with Connie gone, her life was getting harder. She could barely force herself to step out onto her own front lawn, much less visit libraries to read magazines and newspapers. And though ISSMP&D conferences were a mecca for laypeople diagnosed with MPD—one regular attendee was Chris Sizemore, the real “Eve” of The Three Faces of Eve—Shirley had never showed her face at meetings and didn’t intend to start.1
She had very little money to live on, much less to enjoy herself. Her royalties from Sybil had dropped steadily as the years passed, and by the early 1990s she was receiving only about $5,000 a year. That was virtually her only steady income, apart from Social Security payments that must have been miniscule given that during four decades after entering therapy with Connie in New York City, she had managed to work full time for only eight years. Connie had supported Shirley for most of her life, but her will gave most of her money to her nieces and to a university fund to encourage women to study medicine. To Shirley Connie bequeathed only $25,000, plus her own dwindling share of royalties.2
By the mid-1990s Shirley was scrambling to pay the taxes on her house and to buy the basic necessities. She kept trying to market her doll products with help from a nurse named Roberta Guy, who had cared for Connie during her final days.3 Shirley had confided to Guy then that she was Sybil, and after Connie’s death had hired Guy to be her companion.
Guy treated the dolls like an Avon business, hawking the merchandise to friends and family. Her efforts didn’t go very far, so Shirley also tried to sell her artwork. Guy had a friend whose brother was an antiques dealer, and she told him she knew an elderly, indigent artist who needed help making ends meet. Wishing to be a good Samaritan, the dealer bought a few pieces and put them in his shop.4
After a couple of the paintings sold and Guy came back with more, the dealer and his partner threw a party where they announced that a reclusive local artist named Shirley Mason was starving—which was almost literally the case—and asked their guests to buy her paintings. Looking at them, people could see that she was trained; still, the work was uneven. Some of it was passably professional, done in a cubist style popular in the 1950s and early 1960s. But much was amateurish, especially her paintings that included people; she could barely render the human figure. A few more pieces were sold, thanks mainly to the impulse of charity.
Regardless of her artistic ability, of course, all of Shirley’s paintings would have been snatched up if her dealers had known she was Sybil and advertised that connection. They didn’t know, but she constantly worried that they would find out. She never went to the antiques shop and instead had Guy handle business. Guy tried to reassure her. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’m with you and I’ll never let anyone come close to you.” That calmed Shirley some.
But Shirley’s major comfort was her religious devotion. From Friday at sundown until Saturday twenty-four hours later, she listened to Seventh-Day Adventist inspirational tapes and read from the Bible. Sundays she enjoyed an Adventist television program, It Is Written, with dramatizations of Gospel stories and the lives of Christ’s Apostles. For years she’d had to downplay her faith in front of the irreligious woman who had defined her life for her. Now that woman was gone. On her living room mantel she kept a large, black-and-white photograph of Connie in a buttoned-down suit jacket. But on weekends the portrait did not matter. On those days her living room was her church.
Then she discovered she was sick again. Tests revealed her cancer was back, and it had spread past her breasts into her liver and pancreas. Left untreated, she would not have long to live. What did she want, the doctors asked. Radiat
ion? Chemo?
Neither, Shirley told them. No more of what she’d had in 1990: the hospitals, the drugs, the pain. At least Connie had helped doctor her then. That had made things bearable, but Connie was gone now, and no one could replace her. Nature would take its course this time. She was ready for death.5
Psychoanalysis sleuth Peter Swales never did speak with Shirley. It took him until the fall of 1998 to discover her name—which was several months too late. She died quietly in her home, surrounded by nurses, on February 26 of that year. She was seventy-five years old. It was early evening when she died.
Most of her house had always been gloomy at dusk, requiring that lamps be turned on. But the sunroom was different. Light poured in even late in the day, warming things in winter just as, seven decades earlier, it had warmed a Minnesota room built for just the same purpose. In childhood Shirley’s sunroom had housed her dolls—dozens of them, bedecked in hand-stitched clothes, their hair curled and plaited, gazing into the brightness as though beckoning their owner to make up secret tales about them. Now, in 1998, the same dolls, worn and cracked with age, stared from toy cribs and high chairs in their special room in Kentucky.
After Shirley’s body was taken away the nurses packed their things and left. Only the dolls remained.
EPILOGUE
IF THE STORY OF SYBIL shows us anything, it’s that our collective fears and yearnings sometimes push us toward progress but impel us to reactionary behavior as well—behavior we might manage to avoid if only we knew ourselves better. The Sybil craze erupted during a fractured moment in history, when women pushed to go forward, even as the culture pulled back in fear. Sybil, with her brilliant and traumatized multiplicity, became a language of our conflict, our idiom of distress.
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