In some ways that idiom was silenced at the end of the twentieth century. Shirley Mason’s identity and the name of her hometown had been unearthed in late 1998, after investigators Borch-Jacobsen and Swales discovered a letter to her from her childhood friend Anita that had been misfiled in the section of Flora’s archive that was open to the public.1 It was too late then to talk to Shirley, but the media found plenty of debunkers from Minnesota who dismissed her claims that Mattie had abused her, and skepticism reached as far as Newsweek and The New York Times. 2 Shirley’s diagnosis was generally dismissed, and Connie’s and Flora’s names were besmirched.
The idea of multiple personalities went into hibernation, at least among psychiatrists. One of them, a professor at Harvard University’s school of medicine, surveyed a sample of his American colleagues in 1999, asking what they thought of dissociative identity disorder. Most responded that there was insufficient scientific evidence to justify listing it in the DSM, and many suggested that it be deleted.3 The controversy persists today, even as Sybil remains in print. In fact, a new edition came out in 2009 with a three-page advisory for readers; it warns that questions exist about Shirley Mason’s diagnosis and the truthfulness of her life story.4
Nonetheless, Sybil still has readers, many of them high school students assigned the book in their English and psychology classes. The first thing they see is the cover, still blaring in bright letters that the following pages tell “The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities.”5 After that they hit the caveat. The takeaway message is that Sybil is beautiful and spooky in the same way that angels and ESP are beautiful and spooky. When it comes to science, she is not to be taken seriously. Still, the takeaway continues, maybe we could take her seriously if the scientists would only come up with better research.
New books and films for the lay public have also appeared with a similar message, featuring multiple-personality-disordered women, and men, too.6 There is a television remake of Sybil, with Jessica Lange as Dr. Wilbur, and featuring a warning similar to the book’s. The series United States of Tara—which was billed as a comedy about MPD—won Emmy awards. A 2010 Hollywood film, Frankie and Alice, starred Halle Berry as a dancer split into two alter personalities: an African American and a white racist. Berry was helped to prepare for her roles by a psychiatrist who early on worked with Connie Wilbur to get MPD recognized by psychiatry. And scriptwriters for United States of Tara were advised by Dr. Richard Kluft, another pioneer and a founder of what is today the ISSTD, or International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.7
I attended the ISSTD’s 2009 annual convention and spoke with leaders a few minutes after they had wrapped up their luncheon to recognize outstanding researchers and clinicians in the field of dissociation. Plaques had been presented to people who were still trying to objectively prove that DID/MPD exists. Others were diagnosing new cases, including in distant countries which had barely heard of these disorders until the ISSTD doctors set up shop. One woman I talked with had just received the Cornelia B. Wilbur Award.
I told her and the others about the extensive evidence of Connie’s ignorance, arrogance, and ethical misconduct that I had discovered during my research for this book. Her work with the patient who became Sybil might have started out as well intentioned, I pointed out. But its end product was largely a performance based on fiction.
“So what?” replied psychotherapist and ISSTD president Kathy Steele. “I don’t know what difference it makes.” She urged me to look at recent studies conducted to scientifically demonstrate the existence of dissociative identity disorder and its relationship to child abuse. That research, Steele insisted, “has got nothing to do with Sybil.” I looked at the studies and they turned out to suffer from the same limitations as the older work.
Down the hall from my meeting with ISSTD’s directors, Dr. Kluft was conducting a very stale workshop about Margaret, a patient he’d been seeing for years. Margaret’s parents, Kluft said, were secret Ku Klux Klan members who routinely slaughtered infants and delivered electric shocks to Margaret’s vagina until she escaped by joining the U.S. military, but then she got kidnapped and tortured by high-ranking generals and she only remembered all this during years of therapy for multiple personality disorder. Kluft expressed no doubt that her story was true. Not a hint of audience skepticism surfaced during the question and answer period.
Perhaps no one had questions because Margaret was described as being as pretty as the late Grace Kelly and just as rich—implying that she was paying out of her own pocket for Kluft’s work on her. During the rise of managed health care in the 1990s, insurance companies stopped reimbursing therapists for the years, even decades, of treatment deemed necessary to cure a multiple. That policy change relegated MPD and DID to the medical sidelines, along with stem-cell facelifts and high colonics. As a result, the ISSTD had become so marginalized that its members could say anything they wanted to and few outside the organization would care, because few were listening anymore. In the desiccated little world of dissociation studies and treatment, Sybil was a dead issue.
But beyond that world she survives, at least in spirit.
As psychologist Antonio Martinez-Taboas has noted, people in modern Western culture are socialized to nurture complex selves, rich interior lives, and individualistic experiences apart from their communities. In times of crisis, Martinez-Taboas speculates, the idea of having multiple selves, complete with lavish role playing and feelings of separation from the world—dissociation—may be the perfect psychic container for people’s troubles.8
And they do have troubles, the vast majority of which are not invented but sincerely experienced—in ways strictly predetermined by culture. Shirley’s vitamin B12 deficiency made her sick in the 1930s and early 1940s, with very real neurological and physical symptoms. Sadly, medical ignorance was also very real; doctors knew little about vitamins. But they did know about Freud, and they gave a name to Shirley’s aches, numbness, lurching, weight loss, sadness, moodiness, and faints: hysteria. And later another, more heroic name, MPD.
With each new diagnosis came rules about how to feel and speak her suffering. She did as she was told and then some—and within a few years, a girl who’d started out with low blood counts became a woman with countless selves. It was Dr. Wilbur’s fault that this happened, and it was not her fault. All of her professional life she had made extraordinary efforts to assist women in healing and fulfilling their dreams. She wanted to help and she did the best she knew how, all the while lauding her work as “pure science.”
Being MPD made Shirley Mason an invalid and a recluse, but it also made her feel important. University of Pennsylvania social work professor Lina Hartocollis has thought about what a person like Shirley could gain from adopting and enacting MPD. For some people in our modern, secular culture, Hartocollis speculates, forgetting one’s identity and playing with another may replace religious experience as an escape from the problems of everyday life.9 If that’s how it was for Shirley, perhaps she really did have the happy ending that Flora wanted for her, and which we can assume Connie did, too, if we give her even the slightest benefit of the doubt.
Still, Shirley’s happy ending came freighted with terrible contradictions, and not just for her. The book that resulted from her having been diagnosed with MPD tapped into the public’s fears of danger, threat, and insidiousness under the surface of American life. The millions and millions of Sybil fans who came to think of themselves as empowered to do great things also felt so damaged by the cruelties of traditional family life that they could not trust their own mothers, much less their memories. As in the case of Jeanette Bartha, the college athlete and activist who ended up in bed all day, women and their social struggles were reduced to a bizarre illness. The cure was not critical inquiry or protest marches or efforts at the polls. Instead, the cure was drugs, hypnosis, and pajamas.
Could a mistake like this happen again? If so, it might voice itself through a ne
w psychological idiom of distress, something more attuned to the times than multiple personality disorder, yet equally garbled and unable to clearly express people’s true needs. That would be a tragic replay, but perhaps it could be avoided. Connie Wilbur called herself a scientist, but science warns against professing certainty, especially about something as subjective as the study of human behavior. If Sybil teaches us anything, it is that we should never accept easy answers or quick explanations. Knowledge in medicine changes constantly, and anyone unprepared to welcome the changes and test them is not to be trusted.
Psychotherapy can do enormous good when it is cautious about delving into the mind, skeptical of anyone offering definitive answers, wary of the overly confident, critical about the political and social milieu in which it operates, and accepting of the enormity of what we do not know. When healers and the public ignore these tenets, however, what emerges—on the couch and in the culture—can be as powerful yet pernicious as Sybil unexposed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DOZENS OF PEOPLE HELPED ME to create this book, but without the pioneering efforts of two of them, I could never have started my work. Beginning in the early 1990s, scholar Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and historian Peter Swales spent years trying to uncover the identity of the woman with the pseudonym “Sybil.” During the time this sleuthing was going on, records of Shirley Mason’s life languished in a library archive, tightly sealed from researchers. Mikkel and Peter eventually were successful in naming Shirley, and as a result, the archives were opened to people like me.
When I got hold of Mikkel and told him that I, too, was investigating Shirley’s life, he shared a trove of knowledge and even mailed me an audiotape. It was a long interview that he and Peter had done years earlier with Virginia Flores Cravens, a childhood neighbor of Shirley’s. Cravens possessed firsthand knowledge of Shirley’s early emotional problems, but by the time I started my research she was suffering from dementia and could no longer remember or talk. Mikkel’s generosity resurrected Craven’s memories.
Mikkel and Peter also led me to David Eichman, a grandson of Shirley’s stepmother, Florence Eichman Mason. David had inherited and saved piles of old correspondence between Shirley and her father and Shirley and Florence, as well as many pieces of Shirley’s artwork, and photographs of her as a young woman. David and his wife, Bonnie, made this material available, and helped me to organize and interpret it.
I also found Dan Houlihan. A psychology professor at the University of Minnesota at Mankato—the same school Shirley attended as an undergraduate—Dan had heard the local gossip for years, so he knew who she really was even back in the 1970s. He, himself, was a student at Mankato then, and spent his spare time poking around to learn more. Dan was unstintingly helpful to me, donating old correspondence he’d collected between Shirley and her former teachers, legal documents about her father’s business affairs, old college yearbooks and registrar’s office material, and even the names and whereabouts of Shirley’s dorm mates from the 1940s.
Dan directed me to Muriel Odden Coulter, the daughter of one of those dorm mates. Muriel, too, shared an enormous collection of letters that Shirley had written to her mother and her when she was a child.
Stanley Giesel, Vadah Purtell, Frank Weeks, Vivian Beaver, Roy Langworthy, and Joan Larson grew up in or around Dodge Center, Shirley’s little hometown in Minnesota. Most knew Shirley, and they supplied me with reminiscences and photographs. Dennae Ness Wilson was living in the Mason’s old house when I knocked on her door in in 2009 and asked for a tour. She graciously waved me in.
Janet Kolstadt Johnson, Roger Langworthy, and Melanie Wheeler Lang-worthy spoke to me by phone about growing up in Dodge Center decades ago. Miranda Marland, daughter of Shirley’s best childhood friend, Robert Moulton, recalled what Robert had told his own children about his pal. Shirley’s cousins Patricia Alcott, Lorna Gilbert, Arlene Christensen, and Marcia Schmidt sorted through family keepsakes and found beautiful pictures of their relative, some of which you see in this book.
Shirley’s life-long experience as a Seventh-Day Adventist was crucial to making her the person she was, and I want to thank several people for helping me to understand this fascinating American religion. In Dodge Center, Adventist church pastor Thomas Bentley and his wife, Julie, welcomed me to Sabbath services when I visited in 2009, then showed me yellowing, leather-bound church records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I got goose bumps viewing Shirley’s parents’ handwriting on the fragile pages, and the penciled-in baptism date of their daughter.
I also got help from Dr. Ronald Numbers, a historian at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on Seventh-Day Adventism who, himself, was raised in the faith. Ron introduced me to fellow scholar T. Joe Willey. T. Joe also had an Adventist childhood, like Shirley’s in the rural Midwest, and he plied me with conversation and his own writings.
Jean Lane also comes from Adventist stock. She was Shirley’s best friend during college, and I first visited her in 2008 she was in her late eighties, still producing beautiful art and possessed of a fine memory for events from seven decades earlier. Jean has since chatted with me for hours and always responded quickly when I’ve written or called with more questions about her old friend. Her energy and intelligence are inspiring.
Robert Rieber, an emeritus psychology professor at John Jay College in New York City, taught at John Jay along with Flora Schreiber. He once received a gift from her: a set of audiotapes that—as he discovered years later when he finally listened to them—included one of Shirley undergoing a therapy session with her psychoanalyst. Professor Rieber donated this material to the college’s library, where I was able to listen to it as part of my research. In addition, he introduced me to Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a preeminent psychiatrist and hypnotherapist who briefly worked with Shirley in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
When I met Herb Spiegel, in 2008, he was ninety-four years old and still walking to his office every day to see patients. I interviewed him several times; he was unfailingly enthusiastic, patient, and thorough in explaining his treatment of Shirley and his views about the nature of her problems. His wife, the psychologist Marcia Greenleaf, assisted with the interviews. Herb died in his sleep in 2009. I feel very lucky to have been able to work with him and Marcia, and to have seen his treatment records of Shirley.
Other elderly New Yorkers or former New Yorkers—many of them psychiatrists and most still working—spoke with me about what it was like to be a therapist or mental health researcher in Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s, when Sybil’s full-time psychoanalyst, Dr. Connie Wilbur, was working there. Thanks to Dr. Ann Ruth Turkel, Dr. Sylvia Brecher Marer in Rhode Island, Dr. Nathaniel Lehrman, and Dr. Arthur Zitrin for their reminiscences.
Several people helped me trace Connie Wilbur’s life to her formative years. Her cousin on her mother’s side, Robert Schade, recounted family lore and sent me a photograph of Connie and her brother. Deborah Brown Kovac, a niece of Connie’s second husband, reminisced about her aunt’s and Shirley’s family visits in the 1960s and 1970s. In Canada, Connie’s nephew Neil Burwell and her great-nephews Warner and Douglas Burwell provided photographs and rich anecdotes, as did great-niece Brenda Burwell Canning, who lived with Connie in the 1970s. A cousin well into her nineties, Ruth Barstow Dixon, also shared memories and hand-me-down family stories, some dating to the 1800s.
I was especially fortunate to find Dr. Richard Dieterle in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and his sister, Caroline Dieterle, in Iowa City. Their psychiatrist father, Dr. Robert Dieterle, was Connie’s professor and mentor when she was in medical school in the 1930s. Richard was kind enough to root around in a cold, drafty barn, where he dug out an extraordinary film about multiple personalities that his father made during the years he was teaching Connie. Until Richard found the film for me, no one had laid eyes on it for almost seventy years.
My brilliant assistant Annie Slemrod helped locate and digitize the Dieterle film, and she ferreted out records about C
onnie in Michigan that I never imagined existed. Other young people also made my work easier. Michael Galvin helped with translation. Merryl Reichbach did records gathering in New York City. My daughter, Sophy Naess, helped organize my files as they burgeoned out of control.
Documentary filmmaker Deborah S. Esquinazi taught me how to make quality audio and video recording of my interviews. Suzan Kern, in Silver Spring, Maryland, hosted me at her home when I came to that area to do research. Kathy Eubanks helped in Texas. My sister Miriam Lerner and cousin Annette Pinder traveled to Canada with me to see Connie’s family.
Exposing Sybil became even more of a family affair as my husband, Morten Naess, explored rural Minnesota with me while I did interviews there. Morten is a physician, and he also helped interpret medical records pertaining to Shirley and her kin. My son Willy Naess, who was in college in Minnesota majoring in history, helped with archival research at the State Historical Society in St. Paul. My father-in-law, Harald Naess, did similar work years ago in the Upper Midwest as a historian of Scandinavian immigration, and he was a constant inspiration as I studied the same population. Willy accompanied me on a road trip to West Virginia and Lexington, Kentucky, to research Shirley’s and Connie Wilbur’s long-time tenure in that region.
Many people with ties to that area gave me invaluable assistance.
Dr. Arnold Ludwig, now living in Rhode Island, described his work with Connie when he was chairman of the University of Kentucky medical school’s psychiatry department in the early 1970s. Dr. Lon Hays, who held the same position when I was working on this book, organized a meeting between me and several psychiatrists who once worked with Connie or studied under her. One, Dr. Robert Aug, hosted me for lunch at his country house, and psychologist Billie Ables not only had me over, she followed up with phone calls and letters. Dr. Rosa K. Riggs told me about working with Connie at her short-lived private hospital. Dr. German Gutierrez described being a resident and learning from her how to use hypnosis to evoke multiple personalities.
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