You could certainly argue that no popular book about mental illness has done more damage to
more families than this one: Sybil. With the exception of the
infamous medieval text
Malleus
Maleficarum.
Who profits? The royalties from "Sybil" were split
three ways, between Sybil, Schreiber, and Wilbur.
According to the Associated Press, Sybil wrote a letter to Wilbur denying that
she had multiple personalities.
"Wilbur had decided she was going to make the Sybil case
into a book, because she couldn't get it published in professional
journals..." From an interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel.
My emphasis.
But then, Dr. Spiegel "believes" in hypnosis. But then,
Dr. Spiegel describes hypnosis as something more like a some kind of
self-induced "trance" state-- not what you see in the movies.
Incidentally,
in the same letter in which Sybil denies having multiple personalities, she
also admits to making up the stories of horrendous abuse. Where do you
put that?
1998-08-19 [Updated 2011-12-05]
Update April 2008:
An impressive
interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a psychiatrist who treated Sybil for
a short time, and refused to participate in the book. He observes that
the idea of Multiple Personality Disorder only took hold in the U.S.
Links to More Information about the Sybil Myth
Other
Hollywood Disorders
Recovered
Memories
Update: May 2003
Someone reading this website recently asked me a few questions about this story. I confess that I didn't provide
enough details for anyone to check into the facts, or to do
an intelligent search on the subject. Here they are:
Sybil's real name was Shirley Ardell Mason.
She was born January 25, 1923 and died of
breast cancer February 26, 1998.
Her psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur,
died in 1992, so she isn't around to defend herself. But other analysts who have listened to tapes of her
sessions with Mason say that Dr. Wilbur was suggestive in her therapy and that she used hypnosis.
Flora Rheta Schreiber, the author, also died
in the early 1990's.
The psychiatrist who also treated her and concluded that the
multiple personality disorder
label was a fraud was Dr. Herbert Spiegel. I read an
interview with him in an interesting article in the April 1997 New York Review of Books,
in which he stated that Sybil was merely a "suggestible hysteric".
Another analyst, Dr. Robert Reiber,
actually listened to tapes of the sessions between Sybil and Wilbur and concluded that
Wilbur planted the idea
of "multiple personality"
into Sybil's head, possibly out
of some kind of misguided
therapeutic strategy, and possibly
for dumber reasons.
Wilbur claimed that Sybil was "cured"--
the book and movie both build up to that startling miracle moment when she "reintegrates" her personalities, but, as in
so many similar stories that
have been popularized on TV and books, that is not quite the truth. Shirley
Mason followed Wilbur to Lexington, Kentucky, and
continued to receive therapy for many years.
I would check the archives
of the New
York Review of Books. In fact, here:
"On Being
the Proper Multiple" By Sara Lambert. Even if you actually have the
psychiatric MPD condition, it is completely unnecessary to behave like Sybil
in order to be authentic or believed. Please don't use the Sybil book
or film as a role model, and please do read this article if you have or think
you have MPD." From a
website
on Sybil, added 2011-12-05.
More unconscious humour: at one point, the real Sybil (Shirley
Mason) wrote a letter to Dr. Wilbur insisting that she did not have multiple
personalities. Some critics have made much of the letter and Wilbur's
dismissal of it. But then again, which personality wrote the
letter.... (To her credit, Dr. Wilbur published the letter in "Sybil".
)
Multiple Best Seller Disorder
About 25 years ago, I read a book by Flora Rheta Schreiber
called "Sybil". It was about a woman with multiple personality
disorder. The good psychiatrist. Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, was able to identify 16 different personalities
within the consciousness of one troubled young woman. Some of the personalities knew about
the other personalities; some did not. The personalities came
into being as Sybil's way of coping with dreadful abuse at the hands of her
own mother. It was an awesome book-- I was fascinated.
The book created a sensation. It spawned a television movie
starring Sally Field, and host of television talk show episodes. It was a big factor
in the gradual popular acceptance of the idea of multiple personalities and
repressed memories, both caused by child abuse, which,
indirectly, led to a lot of the ideas about repressed memory syndrome and
the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare in the 1980's.
Some experts in the field have never accepted the idea of repressed
memories, and, as more evidence emerges, many more people are beginning to
have doubts. At the very least, most professionals have become
cautious about it.
And now it looks like we should start to question
the idea of multiple personalities as well: it seems that "Sybil" is a
fraud.
First of all, a psychiatrist who worked with the real
Sybil, wrote a book questioning the idea that she had multiple personalities. Now a
psychologist, after listening to the tapes of the sessions Dr. Flora Schreiber had with
Sybil, has concluded that the "multiple personalities" were actually
constructions by the psychiatrist to help Sybil explain why her behaviours seemed so
strange to herself. It seems that patient, doctor, and writer got carried away with the
idea, and, hey, it made good television (and lots of bucks), so why not go with it?
It should be noted that Shirley Mason had read "The Three Faces of Eve",
one of the first books on multiple personality disorder (or Disassociative
Identity Disorder, as the DSM called it for a while) before becoming
multiple personalities herself.
Well, every time you get tempted to think we humans are
pretty smart, it helps to think about something like this. A lot of people, educated
and not so educated, were completely fooled by "Sybil", and, to this day, there
are a lot of psychologists out there eagerly diagnosing patients as having multiple
personality syndrome or as having repressed memories, on the basis of bad science.
And, remarkably, a lot of patients who insist they are MPD-- remember-- an
acronym means it's true-- which of course makes ridiculous the claim that
they are.... MPD.
*This title is borrowed from the album by Ian Hunter.