We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  Freud came to think that the stories of abuse he had encountered in therapy, in many instances—not all, but many—were not true memories but instead fantasies. Because he hadn’t yet invented psychoanalysis, Freud couldn’t say exactly where these fantasies had come from. He wondered whether his patients had made them up for some obscure reason; he hoped that he hadn’t suggested the idea of abuse to his patients or unconsciously forced them to accept these memories as true. Whatever their source, Freud believed that although these fantasies of abuse might not have much to say about the truth of the outside world, they had the potential to reveal important truths about the workings of each individual’s inner world. It was this belief, this turn from the outer environment to the depths of mental experience, that provided the foundation upon which the entire theory of Oedipal conflict—everything people came to understand as “Freudian”—was built.

  Rush and other critics had a very different reading of Freud’s intellectual development. They believed Freud had been right the first time—that with the Seduction Theory he had unveiled the secret festering at the heart of the most elaborately patriarchal society in Western history. They further believed that Freud had changed his theory not out of intellectual conviction but out of cowardice. Perhaps the most outspoken critic of Freud’s abandonment of the Seduction Theory during this period was a young and charismatic Sanskritist-turned-psychoanalyst named Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Masson had conducted important original research at the Freud Archives in Munich, and in 1980 he began offering incendiary interpretations of Freud’s decision to leave the Seduction Theory behind. Following the presentation of “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” Masson argued, Freud had been ostracized by the very people he depended on for professional advancement. Freud had essentially accused everyone in his professional world of committing child abuse, and Masson believed that Freud “suffered emotional and intellectual isolation as long as he held to the reality of seduction.”46

  The critique advanced by Masson and many feminists was straightforward and damning: after making a truly important and disturbing discovery about the extent of childhood sexual abuse in Victorian society, Freud had been ostracized by his peers and forced to confront the shortcomings of those closest to him. Rather than make a hopeless intellectual stand, Freud adjusted his theory so as to cover up child sex abuse once more. Worst of all, by making an elaborate theoretical fiction out of the lie that children really had not been abused, Freud provided psychiatry and society at large with the only excuse they would ever need to keep ignoring child sex abuse for another seventy-five years. Speaking to the New York Times, Masson said his discoveries were sure to have dire consequences for psychoanalysis: “They would have to recall every patient since 1901. It would be like the Pinto.”47

  The crux of these arguments, the one issue around which everything else was organized, was belief. These dissident feminists and psychoanalysts argued that Freud’s belief in the literal, historical truth of his patients’ stories of abuse had led him directly to one of the era’s most important psychological discoveries. “Freud was the first psychiatrist who believed his patients were telling the truth,” Masson wrote.48 When Freud abandoned that belief, then, he had betrayed not only his patients but also his own conscience and intellectual history. “Freud began a trend away from the real world,” Masson wrote, “that, it seems to me, is at the root of the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis and psychiatry throughout the world.”49 Accordingly, if psychiatric therapy wanted to be able to say with a straight face that its aim, as a profession, was to help people, it would need to learn to hear and believe the stories that patients wanted so desperately to tell.

  For some, this injunction took on the qualities of a dare. While Masson researched and wrote his book, therapists began to conduct analyses that might be described as experiments in radical belief. In 1973 the results of one of these experiments were published under the title Sybil: The True and Extraordinary Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities. Written by a magazine journalist named Flora Rheta Schreiber, the book purported to tell the story of Sybil Dorsett, a shy and lonely woman who, in 1953, had “embarked on one of the most complex and most bizarre cases in the history of psychiatry.”50 The book reconstructed the therapeutic encounters between Sybil and her heroic, Upper East Side psychoanalyst, and it laid out the awful discoveries brought to light during Sybil’s time on the couch.

  “Sybil Dorsett’s” real name was Shirley Mason, and her psychoanalyst was Cornelia Wilbur. The two first encountered one another in 1945, when Mason, then a college student, went into psychotherapy with Dr. Wilbur. The two saw one another, with good results for Mason, for six months, and then doctor and patient went their separate ways. By 1953, however, Mason felt that her nerves were acting up again, and as it happened, both she and Dr. Wilbur had moved to New York City from the northern Midwest. Sybil thought that maybe a handful of sessions, a little psychiatric reunion, would help keep her steady. Dr. Wilbur agreed, and the pair resumed meeting.

  Shirley Mason grew up in a Minnesota farm town where her Seventh-Day Adventist parents prohibited novel reading, story writing, and making drawings with weird colors in them—all activities that Shirley loved. Pretending was also expressly forbidden, but Shirley had imaginary friends named Vicky and Sam, though the rigid, self-lacerating piety of the church sometimes made their company difficult to enjoy. She had an intimate and confusing relationship with her mother, who sometimes alternated between bouts of nervous energy and long episodes of impenetrable depression. Shirley’s adolescence was nervous and difficult: she missed school, frequently came down with colds and other minor illnesses, and worried her house would burn down or blow away while she was out for walks. She washed her hands furiously after reading—she thought the pages carried venereal disease or cancer.51

  Although Mason’s nervousness eventually developed into social anxiety and anorexia, she maintained a quietly tenacious scholarly ambition into adulthood, and it was this shared trait that drew Mason and Cornelia Wilbur to one another. The best evidence of Wilbur’s ambition is the fact that in prewar America she went off to college with the intention of studying chemistry, a field that at the time held strong aversions to including women in any capacity. Wilbur’s interests eventually landed on psychiatry, and she became fascinated by the diagnosis and treatment of hysteria. Wilbur’s father had been a chemist and an inventor, and although she may have resented his efforts to keep her from attending medical school, she admired her father’s achievements and sought to live up to them with achievements of her own. When Wilbur had early success in the treatment of hysterics, she believed she had found a line of work to which she was exceptionally—even uniquely—well suited. Years later she would describe her clinical abilities as those of a “genius” and “a magician.” She also referred to herself as a maverick. In the years preceding her move into psychoanalytic practice, Wilbur consistently found herself working, sometimes recklessly, at the experimental frontiers of clinical psychiatry. She conducted a number of experiments with barbiturates, administering large doses of these powerful drugs to psychotic patients and noting the results. Wilbur was interested in shock therapy, and she also assisted on some of the first couple of hundred lobotomies performed in the United States. Debbie Nathan, in her history of the Shirley Mason case, described Dr. Wilbur as “a kind of Rosie the Riveter for mental illness.”52

  Mason’s second round of therapy with Dr. Wilbur proceeded without incident until one day in late winter, when Mason sat down and began telling Wilbur about some odd situations she had gotten into. Mason said that on multiple occasions over the course of her life, she had suddenly found herself in antique shops with no memory of having gone to any antique shop. She would often be surrounded by broken merchandise she could not remember having touched. Or, she said, she would end up in some hotel or unfamiliar part of the city—again with no idea how she got there—and then would try to find he
r way home. Wilbur thought these stories were extremely interesting. She told Mason that she was experiencing fugue states, in which a person could behave like a completely different person for hours or even days at a time, and then sent her patient on her way. By this point Wilbur had also given Mason prescriptions for Demerol, Edrisal, Daprisal, and Seconal, the last of which is a highly addictive barbiturate. A week and a half later, Mason arrived at Wilbur’s office for a weekday appointment, and there seemed to be something different about her. “I’m fine,” Mason said, “but Shirley isn’t. She was so sick she couldn’t come. So I came instead.”

  “Tell me about yourself,” Wilbur said, and Mason replied, “I’m Peggy!”53 That Mason should have turned out to have Multiple Personality Disorder, of all things, was very exciting on its own—the condition was vanishingly rare in the 1950s. But within two sessions Mason had displayed four separate personalities. Wilbur had never heard of a documented case of four separate personalities. She decided to psychoanalyze all of them.

  The book Flora Rheta Schreiber eventually wrote about Shirley Mason portrayed Wilbur’s treatment as heroic and pioneering: “The analysis, Dr. Wilbur decided, would have to be an unorthodox one. She smiled as she thought; an unorthodox analysis by a maverick psychiatrist. She did consider herself a maverick and knew that it was this characteristic that would stand her in good stead in dealing with this extraordinary case.”54 When it was finally published in 1973, Sybil included a list of the sixteen personalities that Wilbur eventually found inside Mason, complete with birth dates and personality characteristics. Victoria Antoinette Scharleau, born in 1926, was a “sophisticated, attractive blonde.” Peggy Lou Baldwin, born the same year, was an “angry pixie with a pug nose.” Mason had male personalities as well: Sid Dorsett was a carpenter and a handyman.55 Sybil describes Wilbur teasing out these personalities, one by one, gaining their trust, playing them off one another in search of information. It is a long and arduous process. Some of Mason’s personalities are so wary of Dr. Wilbur that she doesn’t even learn of their existence for months. The personalities know all about one another, however, and unbeknownst to the host personality—that’s Shirley—they argue and exchange information as part of a big, collaborative effort to help Mason survive the trauma that brought them into being in the first place. It takes nearly 150 pages, but eventually Mason’s personalities decide the doctor is worth speaking to. “Then Marcia Lynn, Vanessa Gail, and Mary put into execution an internal grapevine through which the message ran loud and clear: This Dr. Wilbur cares about us,” Schreiber wrote. “After that Marcia Lynn, Vanessa Gail, Mary, and everybody else held a conclave and decided that ‘We’ll go and see her.’”56

  Toward the middle of the book, Mary, one of Mason’s “alter” personalities, mentions a “pain” that all the personalities collectively feel. “What pain, Mary?” Wilbur asks. “You’ll know in time,” Mary replies.57 As Mason’s personalities presented themselves in therapy, Sybil suggests, they kept Mary’s promise in spectacular fashion. One alter tells Wilbur about midnight walks Mason took with her mother, Hattie. Filled with resentment toward the wealthier members of their small hometown, Hattie regularly crept onto the lawns of elite neighbors, “pulled down her bloomers, squatted, and with ritualistic deliberateness and perverse pleasure defecated on the elected spot.”58 At home Mason’s conservative, fundamentalist parents would bring their young daughter into the bedroom at night and force her to watch as they had sex.59 In the woods Hattie would gather up neighborhood children and take them to a secluded place. “‘Now lean over and run like a horse,’ [Hattie said]. As the children squealed with delight at the prospect, Hattie would motion them to begin. Then, while the little girls, simulating the gait of horses, leaned over as they had been instructed, Hattie from her perch on the floor, revealed the real purpose of the ‘game.’ Into their vaginas went her fingers as she intoned, ‘Giddyap, giddyap.’”60

  In 1962 Cornelia Wilbur would serve as one of the editors of an influential study of homosexuality identifying the phenomenon as an “illness,” one most frequently caused by improper mothering, and this belief is reflected in Sybil’s descriptions of Hattie’s abuse.61 Hattie orchestrated lesbian orgies in the forest. Hattie separated Mason’s legs with a wooden spoon, suspended the small girl from the ceiling, upside down, and then administered enemas. “‘I did it,’ Hattie would scream triumphantly when her mission was accomplished. ‘I did it.’ The scream was followed by laughter, which went on and on.”62 Sybil described Hattie’s motivation for these abuses as her pathological hatred of men. “‘You might as well get used to it,’ her mother, inserting one of these foreign bodies, explained to her daughter at six months or at six years. ‘That’s what men will do to you when you grow up. . . . They hurt you, and you can’t stop them.’”63

  Wilbur obtained these stories by slowly and methodically turning Shirley Mason, who never displayed her “alter” personalities to anyone other than her analyst and her roommate, into a drug addict. When Mason had a particularly bad day, Wilbur would regularly give her up to five times the prescribed dose of Daprisal, Amytal, Demerol, or any number of other medications, and as therapy progressed, Wilbur added a powerful antipsychotic called Thorazine. At the center of this pharmaceutical regimen was Sodium Pentothal, a barbiturate so renowned for its ability to lower patients’ inhibitions that it was colloquially, though inaccurately, known as “truth serum.” Wilbur administered Pentothal injections with such frequency and in such large doses that Mason would often come out of a therapy session unable to remember anything she had said. “Under Pentothal,” she once confessed in a letter to Wilbur, “I am much more original.”64 As Mason’s personalities multiplied, and as the stories those personalities provided became more horrifying and more lurid, Wilbur decided a book had to be written about the case. To ensure Mason’s cooperation, Wilbur said she would cover Mason’s living expenses in exchange for her full-time devotion to therapy. Mason agreed. She spent at least fifteen hours a week in Dr. Wilbur’s office, and as a consequence of the drugs she consumed, she slept for roughly the same amount each night. As Nathan put it in Sybil Exposed, “she was a professional multiple personality patient.”65 Mason would stay on the job for more than a decade.

  The prose in Sybil seems specifically designed to be put on a movie or television screen. “Forcing herself to keep moving,” Schreiber wrote, dramatizing one of Sybil’s post-fugue-state wanderings in Philadelphia, “she listened for sounds, for life. There was only the wind. Block after block along glassy streets failed to reveal a single street sign. The hope of a telephone became ever more vain.”66 Sybil the made-for-TV movie, starring Sally Field in the role that would launch her dramatic career, aired in 1976, but even the most optimistic network executive could not have reasonably dreamed that it would be watched by more than 40 million people, slightly less than one-fifth of the population of the United States. The book itself sold more than 7 million copies.

  One explanation for Sybil’s runaway popularity is that it provided an elegant companion narrative to the growing consensus that child abusers committed their crimes not because of social conditions but because they were mentally ill. The tendency to see abusers as pathological aberrations from a healthy norm made them more interesting and less frightening: they could either be treated and then returned to nonabusive normalcy or, in cases that resisted treatment, they could be cordoned off from society for the rest of their lives without any misgivings. In any case, one would not have to get involved in a tricky conversation about what many people regarded as parents’ right to subject their children to disciplinary violence if they wanted to. By giving the victims of abuse a mental illness of their own, Sybil accomplished much the same thing, pushing attention away from the circumstances that cause abuse to happen in the first place and toward the elaborate treatments that might be administered after the fact. Though Multiple Personality Disorder had not been subjected to anything like rigorous scientific
scrutiny, the reasons for its emergence and the narrative of its treatment and healing made intuitive Freudian sense to many people who heard Shirley Mason’s story: childhood trauma had produced mental illness in adulthood. Some of the readers who wrote to Schreiber took the book as a cautionary tale, and some understood Sybil’s ordeal as a metaphor. “Am I a whole person?” one letter read. “I spend a long time thinking about things. . . . I am confused on who to be. How will people react if I act my true self?”67 Another reader wrote asking for help—she loved her husband but couldn’t bring herself to have sex with him. “Ever since my first boyfriend,” she wrote, “I would turn [men’s] love into a kind of parental love and found it impossible to have any kind of sex with them.” Years of psychiatric treatment hadn’t helped, and reading Sybil made her think she had been dealing with a different problem all along. “I realized it’s the story of my life except for one thing,” she wrote. “I don’t think I have 16 separate personalities although some would say I have at least 3.”68 Other readers didn’t really know what they thought of the story other than that they found it absolutely captivating. “When I read that part,” one eighth-grader wrote, referring to a scene of sexual torture, “I got deeply involved like I was there watching.”69

  Sybil also occasionally touched on a fear of occult religions and rituals that was percolating around the country in the 1970s, and this aspect of Schreiber’s book became more important as the decade progressed. In 1966 a San Francisco musician and entertainment-world social butterfly named Anton LaVey founded a new religious sect based on pseudo-Nietzschean principles of individualism, hedonism, and epicureanism. He called it the Church of Satan. LaVey, who had been born with the name Howard Levey, had extraordinary showbiz instincts, and in Satanism’s early years he used these to turn his church into a media phenomenon. He published The Satanic Bible in 1969, following it with a companion guide to religious practice (The Satanic Rituals) and a how-to seduction guide for women (The Compleat Witch). He used nude women as altars, and he televised both a satanic baptism and a satanic wedding.