LibraryLady
Emeritus
Shortly after I graduated from high school, I read a book by Flora Reta Schreiber called Sybil. Many of you are probably familiar with it. It tells the story of a young art student in New York in the 1950s and 60s who, with the help of a loving and sympathetic psychiatrist, discovers that she has 16 separate personalities. After years of therapy and nurturing from the doctor, she is able to fuse these disparate personalities into a new and whole person and go on to live a fulfilling life.
Along the way, Sybil is forced to recover the memories of horrific physical, psychological, and sexual abuse at the hands of her schizophrenic mother. Her aloof father manages not to notice the broken bones and other symptoms. Her narrow and strict religion discourages seeking psychological help. The small Wisconsin town in which she was raised is bound around with small town values that hide other dark secrets.
I was wowed by the book. I even read it again a few years later and began to notice some odd things about it. It seemed a little contrived with the second reading. But still, I was impressed with the story.
A movie was made with Sally Field and Joanne Woodward, an impressive cast, but they changed the story a lot, and it didn’t really capture me the way the book had. After that, I really didn’t think about it much.
As I grew older, as we all know, I developed a skeptical perspective and did a lot of reading about false memories and other abuses by some therapists, trained and not.
A couple of nights ago, when I watched a remake of the story with Tammy Blanchard and Jessica Lange, which stayed a little closer to the book, but added a feminist perspective with the doctor, Cornelia Wilbur, fighting with a male colleague who dismissed Sybil’s problems as hysteria and “women’s issues.”
It made me wonder just how much of this story held water. As it turns out, not a hell of a lot. And, in spite of that, it has had a profound impact on the practice of psychiatry in the United States.
The male colleague dismissed as a “skeptic” and chauvinist (yes they used the word skeptic in the second movie) turns out to be a doctor Herbert Spiegel. Here’s what he had to say in an interview in 1997. In this quote, he’s discussing why Sybil was diagnosed with MPD:
You’ll notice that reputable medical journals would not publish Schreiber’s and Wilbur’s articles on the case.
Wilbur taped her sessions with Sybil, whose real name was Shirley Mason, and some of those tapes were turned over to Robert Rieber of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He didn’t actually listen closely to them for many years, but when he did, he was shocked to discover that they revealed a deception. Wilbur had actually suggested the different personalities to Sybil and named them herself. This was confirmed by the patient when she saw Spiegel and asked him, “Would you like me to be Helen?” explaining that Dr. Wilbur had named her different moods and difficulties.
This is a long post but it has an important point. After Sybil was published in 1973, the diagnoses of Multiple Personality Disorder increased dramatically, with patients informing their doctors that they had MPD and the doctors accepting that diagnosis. Most of these patients cited the story of Sybil which was on the New York Times bestseller list and had an extremely wide readership. It became an accepted diagnosis on the basis of a book that was not true.
How many of Sybil’s horrific memories were false and induced by Dr. Wilbur’s hypnosis and use of sodium pentothal is impossible to say. All three protagonists in the story, Shirley Mason, Cornelia Wilbur, and Flora Schreiber are dead. It must be said that the three women remained very close until their respective deaths and that Mason found a secure and loving friendship which helped her live her life. The doctor and the writer were not pure villains. But their eagerness to write a bestseller has created a whole category of illness which is probably much more rare than believed or might not even truly exist.
A cautionary tale.
Along the way, Sybil is forced to recover the memories of horrific physical, psychological, and sexual abuse at the hands of her schizophrenic mother. Her aloof father manages not to notice the broken bones and other symptoms. Her narrow and strict religion discourages seeking psychological help. The small Wisconsin town in which she was raised is bound around with small town values that hide other dark secrets.
I was wowed by the book. I even read it again a few years later and began to notice some odd things about it. It seemed a little contrived with the second reading. But still, I was impressed with the story.
A movie was made with Sally Field and Joanne Woodward, an impressive cast, but they changed the story a lot, and it didn’t really capture me the way the book had. After that, I really didn’t think about it much.
As I grew older, as we all know, I developed a skeptical perspective and did a lot of reading about false memories and other abuses by some therapists, trained and not.
A couple of nights ago, when I watched a remake of the story with Tammy Blanchard and Jessica Lange, which stayed a little closer to the book, but added a feminist perspective with the doctor, Cornelia Wilbur, fighting with a male colleague who dismissed Sybil’s problems as hysteria and “women’s issues.”
It made me wonder just how much of this story held water. As it turns out, not a hell of a lot. And, in spite of that, it has had a profound impact on the practice of psychiatry in the United States.
The male colleague dismissed as a “skeptic” and chauvinist (yes they used the word skeptic in the second movie) turns out to be a doctor Herbert Spiegel. Here’s what he had to say in an interview in 1997. In this quote, he’s discussing why Sybil was diagnosed with MPD:
You’ll notice that reputable medical journals would not publish Schreiber’s and Wilbur’s articles on the case.
Wilbur taped her sessions with Sybil, whose real name was Shirley Mason, and some of those tapes were turned over to Robert Rieber of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He didn’t actually listen closely to them for many years, but when he did, he was shocked to discover that they revealed a deception. Wilbur had actually suggested the different personalities to Sybil and named them herself. This was confirmed by the patient when she saw Spiegel and asked him, “Would you like me to be Helen?” explaining that Dr. Wilbur had named her different moods and difficulties.
This is a long post but it has an important point. After Sybil was published in 1973, the diagnoses of Multiple Personality Disorder increased dramatically, with patients informing their doctors that they had MPD and the doctors accepting that diagnosis. Most of these patients cited the story of Sybil which was on the New York Times bestseller list and had an extremely wide readership. It became an accepted diagnosis on the basis of a book that was not true.
How many of Sybil’s horrific memories were false and induced by Dr. Wilbur’s hypnosis and use of sodium pentothal is impossible to say. All three protagonists in the story, Shirley Mason, Cornelia Wilbur, and Flora Schreiber are dead. It must be said that the three women remained very close until their respective deaths and that Mason found a secure and loving friendship which helped her live her life. The doctor and the writer were not pure villains. But their eagerness to write a bestseller has created a whole category of illness which is probably much more rare than believed or might not even truly exist.
A cautionary tale.
