A Clash of Personalities
Is This the Clearheaded Examination of Sybil We've Been Waiting For?
Tools
Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case
by Debbie Nathan
(Free Press, $16)
My best friend in high school wasn't allowed to attend sex-education classes. Her fanatically Christian family strictly prohibited it, and she was relegated to the gym while the rest of us gaped at Nova's The Miracle of Life, not in wonderment but in horror at how they fit those little cameras up the pee holes of those poor suckers. When we returned to the gym, my friend would ask what we learned that day, and "We watched a video from the inside of the human body" didn't really sound that cool. The recounted session had to be worth her while, so we embellished: "Yeah, we watched this show where people were totally doing it, and they would, like, show the guy's penis going into her twat and then you could see the stuff come out—it was like Endless Summer II!" I don't remember why we referenced Endless Summer, but we sold the story. Our motives—like Debbie Nathan's in her new-in-paperback book Sybil Exposed—were quite pure, even if our delivery was a bit jazzed up for effect.
A good sell can turn the stinkiest turd of a story into a sparkly moneymaker. Although based on a series of exaggerations about a fairly banal mental-health case study, Flora Schreiber's 1973 book Sybil contained all the grotesque ingredients of the modern blockbuster: violence, sex, victimization, betrayal, and human suffering. People are invariably attracted to misery, and Sybil gave this misery a name: multiple personality disorder. Bringing multiple personality disorder into the public sphere granted an identity to the emotional conflicts of millions of men and women. Real or imagined, the public empathized with Sybil's story.
Stranger Personals
Sybil Exposed is Nathan's not-awful attempt to discredit the "facts" at the foundation of the Sybil phenomenon. The 1973 book was loosely based on the life of psychiatric patient Shirley Mason. Her accounts of horrendous childhood abuse and the resulting multiple personality disorder diagnosis exploded onto literary and academic circuits, and the silver screen (twice!). And it ushered multiple personality disorder into popular culture. Sybil is a cultural icon ripe for a proper debunking, and Nathan deconstructs it with an equal amount of reliable sources and colorful conjecture.
The primary mission of Sybil Exposed is to discredit its key players: Mason, her psychiatrist Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, and Sybil author Schreiber. And rightly so—it's obvious from Nathan's interpretations of quoted letters and audiotaped psychotherapy sessions that the bulk of Schreiber's text was a loose interpretation of Wilbur's treatment notes, which in turn were based on the very questionable presence of Mason's multiple personalities. Given the lingering effect of Sybil's influence over generations of multiple personality disorder patients, Nathan's exposé is an important one, but her story reads more like a hard-boiled detective narrative than a respectable piece of investigative journalism.
Nathan had access to the necessary ingredients for a solid exposé, including letters from Mason buried for years at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and interviews with living acquaintances. It seems to me the letters reveal that Wilbur, Mason, and Schreiber consciously manipulated Mason's personal issues to create a supremely successful empire. It cannot be denied that this was a shitty thing to do to an empathetic public. However, Nathan forces the issue into more than 200 pages of text, gluing together her hypotheses with a clever amalgamation of conjecture. Addressing a period in Mason's adult life when she spent a great deal of time playing with baby dolls and writing greeting cards to her psychiatrist, Nathan writes: "[Mason] signed the cards, 'Shirley, Inc.' hoping against hope for their literary and marketing success" (emphasis mine). True, these activities are not those of a typically functioning grown-up, but Nathan reaches beyond the substantive and claims to know the inner thoughts of a long-dead Mason.
It would be smarter to let Mason stay dead and discredit the foundations of Sybil's diagnosis in a tidy little Variety article on the grisly horrors of pop medicine. Instead, Nathan questions the validity of an entire religion in order to demonstrate the negative effects of Mason's Seventh-day Adventist upbringing on her concepts of normality. Yes, this religion is weird. But to introduce the theme by describing the 19th-century founder of the church as a "barely educated farmer named William Miller"? Right. Unlike all those other religions founded by Harvard alumni. Nathan takes these weak shots at a potentially strong thesis—ostensibly to pad her story—and in the effort to create a hardcore exposé, she produces a silly, tabloidish version of the truth.
Just as Sybil was built on the shifting sands of ambition and manipulation, so is Sybil Exposed. Nathan's exposé could have been a valuable investigation into a fad that had lasting impacts on thousands of lives. It could have done its job with class and finesse. Instead—like Sybil—it's a floppy rendition of what might have happened, and when we're talking about a very real player in the field of mental health, that's simply not enough. 
If I wished to be as unfair and unflattering as she, I could take the facts of Nathan's work and her professional affiliations and weave a far more damning narrative around them, suggesting some rather nefarious connections and motives.
A few facts:
As recently as October, 2011 Nathan was listed as a board member of an organization that gives $100,000 a year to the legal defense funds of convicted pedophiles, including Father Paul Shanley, the most notorious figure in Boston's Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal.
Child pornography and domestic child trafficking are mutli-billion dollar businesses. There are networks of people who have high stakes in keeping survivors silenced and out of treatment. Confusing the public about the natural responses to repeated and ongoing sexual trauma, like multiple personality, and engendering distrust of trauma therapists, are integral to those aims.
Must I even construct the narrative at this point? It doesn't look pretty.
The reviewer freely admits that Nathan is making interpretations and engaging in conjecture, but then she accepts Nathan's central "interpretations" as valid. Let me suggest a different interpretation of the Wilbur's statements. She made them based on her desire that the public rediscover and appreciate multiple personality as a powerful, natural defense against extreme trauma. She wished to bring to light a case of extreme abuse and show it is a reality. She wished to help lessen the stigma leveled at her patient. I can make these inferences because I know people who knew both Mason and Wilbur and these are closer to what fueled their ambition.
What's most stunning about this review, however, is that it promotes Nathan's most damaging thesis: that multiple personality is a fad.
Multiple personality disorder, or Dissociative Identity Disorder, as it is now named (DID for short) is not a modern phenomenon. Cases of DID were first described in Western medicine in the 18th century. It was a major focus of study for the father of modern psychiatry, and various individual cases have come to public prominence over the last two centuries, one of which is the case of Mary Reynolds in the 1860's. References to analogous behavior and symptom clusters, such as demon possession in Christian lore, appear across cultures and eras throughout human history.
As to the science behind it, which any critic must ignore or discount in order to affect an opposition, I like to quote Dr. Richard Loewenstein, "This empirical base includes clinical case studies, series studies with structured interview data; studies of phenomenology, prevalence, memory, hypnotizability, neurobiology, imaging, and psychophysiology; and psychological assessment profiles, among others. These studies include samples of children and adolescents and cross-cultural samples from North America, Europe, Latin America, Turkey, and Asia."
That's right, it's cross-cultural. It's also been verified with neuro-imaging. As Kathy Steel puts it, “I mean, there isn’t [a] way for a fad to show up, I think, on a functional MRI or on a PET scan.”
An estimated 1-3% of the population has DID. As a member of that group, I can attest that we are already marginalized, stigmatized, and often silenced, by a variety of forces and actors, including the sensationalistic media, and former traffickers, perpetrators, and their allies. Attacks on DID are harmful, especially those offered casually, without reasonable argument or reference to opposition, and in informal contexts like a book review. These attacks seek to shift social consensus, in this case, away from the truth. At best they contribute to stigma and denial and keep the focus shifted from stopping perpetrators to questioning survivors by adding another level of discrediting "crazy" to the milieu.
I have to wonder, were Ms. Datz and her editors completely blind to these impacts or was that what motivated them? It wouldn't be fair to conjecture.
Lynn Schirmer
It appears that "Sybil Exposed" was not fact checked by others. In other words, we have to take Nathan's word for it that she correctly cited and interpreted each source. Many reviews at Amazon (see the one star and two star ones) have stated they found errors in her book's research and statements.
Sybil (Shirley Mason) definitely suffered from MPD. This is proven by accounts from her relatives, other professionals that worked with Sybil and even on p. 60 of Sybil Exposed, where it describes Sybil's roommate in 1942 seeing Sybil exhibiting symptoms of MPD before Sybil entered therapy. The book "Sybil Exposed" describes a dissociative fugue Sybil had in 1944 before entering therapy (p. 61). Yet all of this is apparently ignored by Nathan in her book's conclusions.
Sybil's childhood friends verify the fact that Sybil's mother exhibited odd behaviors, like defecating in neighbor's lawns and peeking in the neighbor's windows. One friend stated she believed that some of what was written in the original book "Sybil" about child abuse did happen. Sybil's father verified that the abuse occurred. Mason and Shreiber both died broke.
It appears that Nathan had an agenda to discredit the Sybil story as well as the MPD - DID diagnosis. Nathan leaves out important facts about the DID diagnosis, which has been proven to be caused by severe, repeated childhood abuse at an early age.
A better book to read about the Sybil story, written by a psychiatrist familiar with mental health issues is "SYBIL in her own words: The Untold Story of Shirley Mason, Her Multiple Personalities and Paintings" by Patrick Suraci Ph.D. This book verifies many of the above facts.
Thanks. Once again I am more informed by commenters deconstructing and debunking an article written by the Stranger's paid staff.
- Janet Thomas, Author of The Battle in Seattle--The story Behind and Beyond the WTO Demonstrations" and "Day Breaks Over Dharamsala--A Memoir of Life Lost and Found."
For example, note the report of Roseanne Barr's "twenty alter personalities" on p. 222. Nathan cites "A Star Cries Incest" in "People" magazine, October 7, 1991. There is no mention of 20 personalities. Nathan simmply made that up.
Here's just one example. The author mentions Roseanne Barr's "twenty alter personalities" on p. 222. The author cites "A Star Cries Incest" in "People" magazine on October 7, 1991. But there's no mention of personalities in the 1991 article.
We need a new category for this book. How about "fictionalized expose"?
Also by Melody Datz
Look at Those Gams!
Zoe Scofield, Rainbow Fletcher, and Other Choreographers at Co-LAB 5
Post a comment »
No Two Performances Will Be the Same
Ezra Dickinson’s New Piece About Mental Illness, His Mother, and the Streets of Seattle
4 comments »
Swan Lake Is So Goddamned Boring
So Why Do People Keep Flocking to See It?
66 comments »
RSS
Twitter
Comments (10) RSS