Nathan - Sybil Exposed

SYBIL: a name that conjures up enduring fascination for legions of obsessed fans who followed the nonfiction blockbuster from 1973 and the TV movie based on itstarring Sally Field and Joanne Woodwardabout a woman named Sybil with sixteen different personalities. Sybil became both a pop phenomenon and a revolutionary force in the psychotherapy industry. The book rocketed multiple personality disorder (MPD) into public consciousness and played a major role in having the diagnosis added to the psychiatric bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

But what do we really know about how Sybil came to be? In her news-breaking book Sybil Exposed, journalist Debbie Nathan gives proof that the allegedly true story was largely fabricated. The actual identity of Sybil (Shirley Mason) has been available for some years, as has the idea that the book might have been exaggerated. But in Sybil Exposed, Nathan reveals what really powered the legend: a trio of womenthe willing patient, her ambitious shrink, and the imaginative journalist who spun their story into bestseller gold.

From horrendously irresponsible therapeutic practicesSybils psychiatrist often brought an electroshock machine to Sybils apartment and climbed into bed with her while administering the treatmentto calculated business decisions (under an entity they named Sybil, Inc., the women signed a contract designating a three-way split of profits from the book and its spin-offs, including board games, tee shirts, and dolls), the story Nathan unfurls is full of over-the-top behavior. Sybils psychiatrist, driven by undisciplined idealism and galloping professional ambition, subjected the young woman to years of antipsychotics, psychedelics, uppers, and downers, including an untold number of injections with Pentothal, once known as truth serum but now widely recognized to provoke fantasies. It was during these treatments that Sybil produced rambling, garbled, and probably false-memorybased narratives of the hideous child abuse that her psychiatrist said caused her MPD.

Sybil Exposed uses investigative journalism to tell a fascinating tale that reads like fiction but is fact. Nathan has followed an enormous trail of papers, records, photos, and tapes to unearth the lives and passions of these three women. The Sybil archive became available to the public only recently, and Nathan is the first person to have examined all of it and to provide proof that the story was an elaborate fraudalbeit one that the perpetrators may have half-believed.

Before Sybil was published, there had been fewer than 200 known cases of MPD; within just a few years after, more than 40,000 people would be diagnosed with it. Set across the twentieth century and rooted in a time when few professional roles were available to women, this is a story of corrosive sexism, unchecked ambition, and shaky theories of psychoanalysis exuberantly and drastically practiced. It is the story of how one modest young womans life turned psychiatry on its head and radically changed the course of therapy, and our culture, as well.

DEBBIE NATHAN was born and raised in Houston, Texas. An award-winning journalist, editor, and translator, she specializes in writing about immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border, and sexual politics and sex panics, particularly in relation to women and children. Debbie is the author or coauthor of four books. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and has two grown children.

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Copyright 2011 by Debbie Nathan

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First Free Press hardcover edition October 2011

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Library of Congress Control No.: 2011009164

ISBN 978-1-4391-6827-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-6829-5 (ebook)

To my own blessed sisterhood:
Anita Nathan Beckenstein
Barbara Nathan Katz
Miriam Nathan Lerner

I felt a clearing in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.

Emily Dickinson

W HAT ABOUT MAMMA? THE WOMAN psychiatrist asks her patient, another woman, who is lying on a divan in the early 1960s. Whats mamma been doing to you, dear? I know shes given you the enemas, the psychiatrist continues. And filled your bladder up with cold water, and I know she used the flashlight on you, and I know she stuck the washcloth in your mouth, cotton in your nose so you couldnt breathe . What else did she do to you? Its all right to talk about it now.

My mommy, the patient answers groggily. She is in a hypnotic trance, induced with the help of the psychiatrist.

Yes.

My mommy said I was bad, and my lips were too big like a niggers she slapped me with her knuckles she said dont tell Daddy. She said to keep my mouth shut.

Mommy isnt going to ever hurt you again, the psychiatrist answers. Do you want to know something, Sweety? Im stronger than mother.

The transcript of this long ago conversation is stored at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City. The colleges library houses a cramped room called Special Collections, whose walls are adorned with lithographs of a gangster jumping to his death from a window on Coney Island, and prisoners rotting in cells at Sing Sing. Not far from the lithographs hangs a black-and-white photograph of John Jays staff in the 1960s, peopled by over two dozen men and five women. One of the women wears a serious expression and a plain, woolen coat. Interesting, that coat, comments a librarian. Its from before she got rich. Afterward, it was nothing but mink for her. Full-length mink.

The woman who got rich was Flora Rheta Schreiber, author of Sybil, the blockbuster book from the 1970s about the woman with sixteen personalities.