When Sybil first came out, fewer than two hundred people worldwide had ever been identified with conditions that today would be labeled multiple personalities. They were so rare that they were considered medical curiosities, like Siamese twins and giants. Most sufferers possessed only one or two alter selves, and no one knew what had caused the splitting. Bad experiences could have induced it. But among those experiences, severe child abuse was never mentioned by the patients or their doctors. Instead, by the early twentieth century, people who exhibited dual consciousness were thought to be suffering from repressed sexual urges, which they denied by imagining that those desires belonged to other selves. Such people were diagnosed as hysterics.
Sybil was something completely new. Her history of sadistic incest and her enormous number of alter personalities made her brand of multiplicity unprecedented. After a tiny fraternity of psychiatrists became fascinated with the condition and started hunting for new cases, that brand turned into an epidemic. In 1980, multiple personality disorder was listed as an official psychiatric illness. Soon, mental health practitioners in America were diagnosing thousands of cases a year.
Almost all were female, and when they first entered therapy most had no alter personalities that they knew of. Nor did they remember being raped and brutalized as children. But during MPD treatment they developed just as many alter personalities, and just as many horrific abuse memories, as Sybil had—if not many more.
Many of these patients began filing lawsuits against their parents for having hurt them so terribly. They went on television talk shows to discuss their suffering, and celebrities joined the fray. Every MPD story unleashed more cases and claims of abuse.
Then a new group of patients surfaced, complaining they’d been wrongly diagnosed and suing their therapists for malpractice. In tandem with these lawsuits, thousands of hurt and angry parents said they were being falsely accused by adult children in therapy. Some brought suits against the therapists.
As a result of this backlash, which crested in the early 1990s, the media did a 180-degree turn from their former credulity about MPD. “Is it real or is it fake?” became the new question. Were the patients, and the therapists who treated them, honest and inspiring? Or were they liars and hustlers?
Some commentators, mostly scholars, tried to square the circle of these questions. It clarified nothing, they said, to argue about whether MPD was real or a hoax. A more useful way of understanding the phenomenon was to recognize that the feeling of being inhabited by other selves has very deep roots in our culture and history. Look at the Middle Ages, they pointed out. Many Catholics then complained of being possessed by Satan; Jews, meanwhile, suffered from invasion by dybbuks. Prayers and exorcism were the treatment then. And now, for people convinced they harbored alter personalities, the cure was supposed to be psychotherapy.
Scholars also pointed out that everyone is prone to “dissociate,” to focus so much attention on one event or idea that everything else falls by the wayside, unseen, unheard, unremembered. Think of what happens while watching a really good movie. You are aware of nothing around you, least of all the other people in the theater. Think of “highway hypnosis,” driving a habitual route and arriving at your destination without remembering that you exited from the interstate. That is dissociation. It is common and perfectly normal.
But some individuals experience a far more intense kind of dissociation, focusing on one thing so intently that they behave as though in a trance, spending long periods doing and saying things they often don’t remember later. In many cultures, people are thought to be visited by benevolent or evil spirits when they display these behaviors. Anthropologists have a term for them: “idioms of distress.” Idioms, because trance behavior is considered to be a kind of language. Distress, because what’s being communicated, albeit in a masked way, is feelings of pain. The pain may be emotional or it may be physical. Either way, sick people feel possessed because possession states are their society’s idiom of distress.
But how, in modern America, could an educated person in distress come to feel she was possessed? How could Sybil have learned to feel and act as though she had multiple selves, when no one else in her world was doing this? An explanation was provided in the early 1990s by a prominent, elderly psychiatrist who had known Dr. Wilbur years earlier and had sometimes treated Sybil when Wilbur was out of town. The old doctor remembered Wilbur telling him that she wanted to write a book about multiple personality disorder. He also remembered Sybil mentioning to him that Wilbur wanted her to act as though she had different selves inside her. He speculated that Wilbur—who had once boasted to her patient that she was “stronger than Mother”—had pressured and coaxed Sybil to develop alter personalities.
In light of this accusation, even more questions arose. What had gotten Dr. Wilbur, herself, so interested in the idea of multiple personalities? And if Sybil—the basis for the modern MPD diagnosis—was a product of therapist suggestion, what about all those tens of thousands of patients who had walked into the offices of other mental health practitioners and walked out thinking they had several beings living inside them? And what about all of us book readers and TV watchers? Why had we found the Sybil story so credible?
I remember when Sybil first came out. I was in my early twenties, and my girlfriends and I wondered if multiple personalities could invade us. “Could you, like, just be walking around minding your business?” we would ask each other. “And all of a sudden five days have passed and it turns out that different people were inside you the whole time? People who act devil-may-care when you’re usually shy and cautious, who tell jerks to go to hell though you were raised to be polite, who converse in foreign languages that you never learned well—even people who are men instead of women? Could this actually happen?” The prospect was terrifying—and irresistible.
In the early 1990s, I was a journalist writing about child-sex-abuse panics: day care teachers falsely accused of molesting preschoolers, and women in therapy recovering memories of tortures too bizarre ever to have happened. I thought about Sybil again, of course. I wondered what her real story was.
Almost twenty years after that, I finally got a chance to find out. In 2008, while browsing on the internet, I was surprised to learn that Sybil author Schreiber’s papers were archived at John Jay College, a quick subway ride from where I live in Manhattan. I also learned that the papers are open for public inspection, and I made an appointment to take a quick look.
What I found was shocking but utterly absorbing. The papers revealed that Sybil’s sixteen personalities had not popped up spontaneously but were provoked over many years of rogue treatment that violated practically every ethical standard of practice for mental health practitioners.
Dr. Wilbur had approached Sybil’s health problems with a predetermined diagnosis that brooked no alternative explanations. In her therapy she had made extravagant, sadistic use of habit-forming, mind-bending drugs. And she had treated the patient day and night, on weekdays and weekends, inside her office and outside, making house calls and even taking Sybil with her to social events and on vacations. She fed Sybil, gave her money, and paid her rent. After years of this behavior, the archives revealed, the two women developed a slavish mutual dependency upon each other. Toward the end of their lives they ended up living together.
I also learned that I was not the first researcher to examine the incriminating papers. A professor of comparative literature on the West Coast had teamed up with an assistant and visited John Jay almost a decade before I laid eyes on the material. Afterward he had written several pages about the archives in a book criticizing psychoanalysis. But he’d written in French, and the book was published in Paris. Practically nobody in America read it.
And even if they had been able to, the French book offered little insight into larger questions that were beginning to fascinate me. Why, for instance, when Sybil was first published, had so many millions of people like myself, most of us young and female, so fervidly embraced as truth a story whose mythic qualities should have immediately made us skeptical? How had we been so naïve?
The answer, I realized as I read more files, lay in the lives of the women who had created Sybil: not just the patient, but the psychoanalyst and the author. They were my mother’s and grandmothers’ ages, from earlier generations than mine. Yet I suspected that the frustrations they’d endured as ambitious women in a prefeminist age, and the struggles they’d mounted regardless, had infused the Sybil story with a weird yet potent appeal for young women like myself who were being whipped back and forth by new ambitions and anxieties. To understand myself and my friends, I wanted to know more about the three pioneers: Dr. Wilbur, Flora Schreiber, and Sybil.
All were long dead, but I began using census and other historical records to reconstruct their childhoods, young adulthoods, and experiences as professional women in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and beyond. I tracked down relatives, friends, and colleagues who were still alive. I interviewed these people by phone and traveled through North America for face-to-face meetings. Periodically, I took my notes and returned to John Jay. Comparing the archival material to what I’d found outside the library yielded new insights and lines of inquiry.
**
Then there was Sybil herself. Even if she’d never been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder or horrific child abuse, my research revealed, she still would have struggled terribly in life. She would have fought to escape a milieu that discouraged her artistic abilities. She would have felt sad, angry, anxious, and confused about who she was. She might have made art that expressed these feelings, art that could have reached a high degree of professionalism if she had spent her time perfecting her drawing and painting skills rather than languishing for years in psychotherapy.
With competent medical care, she might also have learned a physical cause of her troubles, then received effective treatment instead of broadcasting the pain in her mind and body through the “idiom of distress” of MPD.
But none of that happened. Instead, the woman who became Sybil fell in with a psychiatrist and a journalist, and the three saw their project, a pathbreaking book about female mental suffering, burst upon the world with perfect timing. They were a blessed sisterhood.
This being America, however, they were also a business, and in one box of Schreiber’s archives at John Jay College I found the records of their enterprise. They named it Sybil Incorporated, and the contract they signed designated a three-way split of all profits and spin-offs from their book, including Sybil movies, Sybil board games, Sybil tee shirts, Sybil dolls, and a Sybil musical.
On paper Sybil Incorporated looked industrious and optimistic. But in the real world it was conflicted and Faustian. The three parties made money and for a while changed the course of psychiatry. But to do so, one had to give up her friends and become a recluse. Another lost control of her success and ran through her fortune and reputation. A third used her medical credentials to aggressively promote a diagnosis that, ultimately, hurt women far more than it helped them, defining their conflicts as pathological, curable not by living more actively in the world, but by taking to their beds and swooning with trance and medicine.
How was it that the three women did not foresee the risks? Why had an otherwise reputable psychiatrist helped to concoct sixteen alter personalities in a patient? What made a seasoned journalist charge ahead with her writing even as she realized that the story she was crafting contained more falsehoods than truth?
And what about Sybil? How, exactly, did she take on that parade of personalities? If she used them to speak an idiom of distress, what, exactly, was she trying to say? After the best-sellerdom and the Emmy-winning movie and the glitz and brouhaha, did it bother her that no one knew her true identity? What kind of emotional shape would she have to have been in that she would go along with anything a doctor and a journalist cooked up for her? Did she understand the full implications of what they were cooking? How did she help stir the pot?
Sybil affected millions of readers, thousands of psychotherapists, and the tens of thousands of people they diagnosed. It spurred the writing of hundreds of articles and scores of medical texts, and resulted in dozens of movie, television, and book spin-offs. The three women behind this amazing proliferation each had a life and a self full of conflict.
What follows is a cautionary exposé of their—and our—grand and disordered multiplicity.
**
Another old timer added her skeptical two cents’ worth. Pearl Peterson Lohrbach had been Shirley’s teacher in fifth grade. That was the same year when, according to Sybil, the little girl had awakened in school one day, utterly disoriented. The book said she didn’t know where she was because she had just emerged from a two-year blackout, and that during that whole time her body was controlled by alter personality Peggy.
According to the book, Sybil’s grades dropped drastically after she “came to” in fifth grade. This happened because it wasn’t she who had learned things during the third and fourth grades. It was Peggy who had, then Peggy left, along with the multiplication tables and other knowledge she’d acquired in Sybil’s place.
Nonsense, Lohrbach told Norris. She’d often seen Shirley Ardell Mason daydreaming, and sometimes she talked about her imaginary friend Sam, whose name she concocted from her initials. But Shirley had never exhibited sudden behavior changes, much less alternate personalities. Nor had her schoolwork varied. Term after term, her grades stayed just the same.
4In fact, everyone scoffed at Sybil while speaking with Norris. But privately, some were extremely unsettled. What had happened to their neighbor when she was a girl? People like Pearl Lohrbach and Dessie Engbard were haunted by the possibility that the story was true and they had been too ignorant or insensitive to notice Shirley’s suffering.
**
As Gray had noticed during their lunch, all was not well with Flora by late 1975. During media interviews she seemed self-confident, upbeat, even glamorous in the $1500-dollar dresses she now wore thanks to the enormous royalties she was earning. In private, however, Flora was worn out, anxious, and angry with most things related to Sybil.
She hated being upstaged by Connie, and she resented having to share book and movie money with her. She toyed with the idea of exposing Shirley, writing her agent that she was “fed up” with protecting her and tired of acting as Connie’s “patsy.” No longer, Flora vowed, would she be “the fall guy in relation to both these despicable women.” The agent tried to calm her. Friends at John Jay College, and her cousin Stan Aronson—the one she had hit in the head as a child, and who was now a neurologist—became concerned about the stress she was under.11Whenever she started thinking about the conflicts with her collaborators, Flora’s mind turned to thoughts of sexual perversity. Just weeks after Connie’s husband, Keith Brown, died in 1976, Connie and Shirley breezed into New York City and unceremoniously dumped Brown’s belongings in the trash. Flora was struggling with the fact that her long time paramour, Stuart Long, was dying at the time of cancer, and the indifference that Connie and Shirley showed toward Keith Brown’s death convinced her that the two women were lovers. She got it into her head that this had been true even back in the 1960s, when Connie had first approached her about writing a book. If she’d known they were together back then, Flora complained to friends, she would have proposed a fifty-fifty royalty split instead of one-third and two-thirds.12She decided to find another big project, one that she alone would control.
**
Shirley was often alone in the house after Brenda was kicked out, while Connie spent days and sometimes weeks at meetings and conferences organized to turn the treatment of MPD into a specialty. In 1983, she was able to enjoy the fruits of her labors when a new professional organization was born: the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation. The ISSMP&D held its first conference a year later, featuring presentations like “Inpatient Management” and “What to Do till the Friendly One Comes: Managing an Angry Alter.”17At the conference, Connie spoke about “Multiple Personality Disorder and Child Abuse: An Etiologic Overview.” The title suggested that the talk would be a snooze: after all, her longtime axiom, that alter personalities were invariably created by severe child abuse, was by now so entrenched that her colleagues were starting to dub it “the post-Wilburian paradigm.” But up on the podium, she launched into a circus of weirdness as she described a woman patient who’d recovered memories of her family as an organized cult of vicious assassins.18
That idea had been born in the popular culture in 1980, when the best seller Michelle Remembers19 came out, a book about a patient who had suddenly recalled that her parents were Satanists who had led their coven in sexually torturing little Michelle when she was only five years old. It was co-authored by Dr. Lawrence Pazder, a Catholic psychiatrist in Canada, and Michelle Smith, Pazder’s patient and later his wife.
Michelle Remembers told of ritual crimes in endless, gory detail. Marketed as truth, it became an instant bestseller. Seven years earlier, Sybil had awakened in many disturbed women the idea that they, too, possessed multiple personalities. Now, among this same demographic, Michelle Re-members evoked phantasmagoric memories of sexual torment by evil groups—everyone from devil worshipers to the Ku Klux Klan.
“How would you like to be exposed to multiple murders as an infant and a child, since your grandfather formed the first Klan and your father formed the second Klan and the family literally owned the town?” Connie asked rhetorically at the 1984 ISSMP&D conference. “I don’t know how many murders this child saw … she tells me that a group of individuals in that part of the United States killed every single black person that came within their purview and they killed a great many … whites that were itinerant farm workers, including the children.”20The KKK had apparently been able to erase all evidence of their murders, Connie continued. They dismembered the corpses and put them “in these large burners on the farms that are used to burn trash from the harvest.” During therapy, she added, her patient also remembered being forced by her father to slit victims’ throats with a knife. “Blood was caught in jars and often times, everyone shared in drinking the blood,” Connie said, adding that the killers would cut off a body part “and pass it around for everyone to take some, in order to eat it.”
“I don’t think that we can possibly deny the truth” of the patient’s story, Connie concluded. “These are not allegations. They’re descriptions of behaviors that she was forced to participate in.”21Though some conference attendees might have been shocked by Connie’s story, it is safe to say that most were not surprised. By 1984, almost every therapist at the meeting had patients who’d recovered memories of chillingly sadistic and bizarre group crimes—or they had colleagues whose patients had these recollections.
Soon even children were telling these stories. By the mid-1980s a wave of sex-torture allegations was washing over preschools and day care centers throughout the United States. From California to Massachusetts, teachers, teacher aides, and babysitters were accused of enacting intricate, organized rapes on children barely old enough to tie their shoelaces. The charges terrified early childhood educators, driving untold numbers from the profession. Dozens of public child care facilities were shuttered.
Within a few years, thousand of adults would be investigated nationwide for crimes against the little children. Some 130 would be charged. Oddly, authorities would find no evidence. Some of the children said they had been raped with knives and gun barrels, but they never had corresponding wounds. Nor had any parents or other adults walked into these nursery schools unannounced and witnessed the abuse. Children talked of seeing their classmates assaulted, but the classmates didn’t remember being hung upside down, having objects inserted in them, or being forced to chant to the Devil.
Experts came to the defendants’ trials to tell the juries why so many of these children had at first denied they’d been tortured. They needed psychotherapy and repeated interrogation in order to disclose the abuse, the experts said, for the same reason that Sybil had needed her psychoanalyst for so long. Just as Sybil had been bizarrely violated as a little girl and forgot the assaults because of psychic splitting, children nowadays were being attacked, and they were protecting themselves by dissociating, or “losing time.” When a child said abuse hadn’t happened, the experts insisted, that was proof that it had happened. The “victims” were given various treatments, including drugs and hypnosis. Dozens of adults were convicted. Some got centuries of hard time. 22By the time of the ISSMP&D’s annual conference in 1987, speakers were lecturing about “Treatment of Victims of Ritualistic Abuse” and “The Satanic Cult in Rural Mid-America.” The ISSMP&D’s big new idea, that cults were breaking children’s minds into pieces, was invoked by people who had joined Connie in founding the organization and the multiple personality movement. More than six hundred therapists were attending ISSMP&D conferences to learn how to ferret ritual abuse memories from their patients.23
That same year—1987—the DSM appended “disorder” to “multiple personality,” creating the popular acronym MPD. The 1980 DSM had characterized the illness as “extremely rare” and possibly caused by child abuse. The new one described it as “not nearly so rare as it has commonly been thought to be,” and caused “in nearly all cases” by child abuse, often sexual. Furthermore, older requirements that alter personalities be “complex,” “integrated,”24 and mutually amnesiac for each other were dropped. Now, mere fragments of behavior, little tics that popped up for a few seconds and of which the patient was fully aware, qualified as alter personalities.
It became common for MPD sufferers to possess scores, even hundreds, of alters (one was reputed to have 4,500). Not all were human; some weren’t even alive. Patients reported gorillas and lobsters, as well as unicorns, angels, and—if the alters were immobile and voiceless—trees. Supernatural-sounding claims sprang up. A person with MPD, it was said, could have one alter with blue eyes and another with brown eyes. Such a person could be diabetic but have a personality whose insulin levels were normal. Even blood types could change.
The media was all over these “facts.”25 Breathlessly, they repeated ISSMP&D speculations about MPD as a late-twentieth-century epidemic. Before Sybil, fewer than a hundred people over the past two centuries had been identified in Western medical literature with conditions resembling MPD. By 1984, only four years after the condition was first listed in the DSM, an ISSMP&D leader was suggesting that 25,000 Americans suffered from it. Another leader estimated that 3 percent of the population had MPD—over seven million people.26
Therapists flocked to the field, and specialized wards opened, including at Chicago’s prestigious Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital. These facilities were far more reputable than Connie’s Open Hospital had been. But they used the same irregular treatments that she had: massive doses of mind-bending drugs, including barbiturates injected into veins.
Looking at the new statistics, the new wards, and the influx of therapists eager to specialize in MPD, Connie felt vindicated. Years ago, her father had called her stupid. Now she’d been recognized by the APA as a Distinguished Psychiatrist. Colleagues celebrated her for launching “a scientific revolution.”27Sybil, one of them wrote, was “the most important book about a psychiatrist and patient ever written.”28 Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur was one of the greatest physicians in America, if not the world.
**
THE WAY THINGS WERE EVOLVING in the world of multiple personality disorder treatment, Connie was fortunate not to have lived past 1992. MPD was still at its apex then, a diagnosis so reputable and alluring that it had become part of the wallpaper of American culture. “This could be someone you know,” proclaimed Sally Jesse Raphael as she paraded multiples on her talk show, with their stories of childhood torture. “MPD: The Syndrome of the ’90s,” Oprah called one of her programs. 1
Oprah was right. By 1992 thousands of people, in every sizeable community in the United States and Canada, were in treatment for MPD. Bookstores sold memoirs by multiples: The Flock; When Rabbit Howls; Ghost Girl were a few titles. There were magazines, like Many Voices, to which multiples could contribute poems and artwork. A few courts even started allowing alter personalities to give testimony in criminal trials. In one such case, a young man was charged with raping a woman who he said agreed to have sex with him—the woman, however, argued that it was her child alter who went to bed with the man, and he should have realized she was incapable of consent. The judge swore in six of the woman’s multiple personalities as witnesses. The man was convicted.2There were entertainment stars who said they were multiples. Roseanne Barr appeared on talk shows to say that she had been sexually molested as a child but forgot about it until she entered therapy in her late thirties. She would later describe her twenty alter personalities. They included “Piggy,” “Bambi,” and “Fucker.”3
Barr characterized having alters as an illness, but celebrity feminist Gloria Steinem published an inspirational book for women, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, which lauded multiple personalities as a gift. MPD women, Steinem wrote, could learn many foreign languages. Not only that, they could “have two or even three menstrual cycles in the same body.”4 In her acknowledgments Steinem thanked Bennett Braun, a leader of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation (ISSMP&D), for his help.
In reality, however, the disorder was becoming half Trojan Horse and half time bomb. Critics sensed that the diagnosis was about to self-destruct, along with the therapists who promoted it. The FBI since the early 1980s had been investigating the claims patients were making about ritual abuse at the hands of Satanic cults and had never found any evidence for the existence of the cults themselves. Many psychiatrists and psychologists also knew that witch hunts had wrought terrible suffering on innocent people during the Middle Ages. Some of the calmer ISSMP&D people called in an anthropologist, Dr. Sherrill Mulhern, and asked her what was going on. In analytic detail, Mulhern warned that these therapists’ ignorance about patients’ suggestibility, combined with their naivete about “recovered memories,” had opened a Pandora’s box, releasing from the collective psyche some of Western culture’s most irrational (and dangerous) fears.5One new group was paying attention to Mulhern’s warning: 1992 was the founding year for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, or FMSF. It was begun by Pamela and Peter Freyd, a Philadelphia couple whose psychology professor daughter, Jennifer, had accused her father of molesting her for years, starting when she was very young. Jennifer had only recently remembered the assaults while in therapy. She had not been diagnosed with MPD, so she was not said to have “dissociated” into different alters. Instead, she had dealt with her sexual abuse as a child by creating “repressed memories” and only later recovering them.
The notion of repressed and recovered memories was being widely promoted by many psychologists and psychiatrists by the late 1980s, as well as by a bestselling self-help book for women with emotional problems, The Courage to Heal. But Freyd’s parents insisted their daughter’s memories were bogus. They began looking for other parents claiming to be falsely accused of abuse by their grown children in therapy.
After Peter and Pamela Freyd located dozens of these parents, they decided they were dealing with a false memory epidemic. They recruited an advisory board of experts, many of them older psychiatrists who had trained and started practicing in the pre-Sybil generation. They had researched the pitfalls of hypnosis and memory, and they had grave reservations about recovered memories, including those elicited under treatment for MPD. The Freyds unveiled the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to the press, and reporters requested interviews with aggrieved mothers and fathers. They were increasingly easy to find, because with every news article that came out about the FMSF, the new organization heard from more people saying they, too, had been falsely accused.6 One out of seven of these callers added that the diagnosis which had led to false memories was MPD.7As skepticism about MPD spread, the FMSF began hearing from another group: women who called themselves retractors. They had been in therapy, developed chilling memories of childhood abuse, then realized the memories were false. This change of mind typically occurred after patients were terminated from therapy because their insurance had run out or when they developed a modicum of independence from their doctors. That happened to Jeanette Bartha, a former activist in NOW, the National Organization for Women, and a champion fencer in college. In the late 1980s she developed depression and visited a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with MPD. By 1992 Bartha had spent six years in and out of hospitals, almost constantly wearing pajamas and lying in bed. Then her psychiatrist took a summer vacation. While he was gone, Bartha decided to put on street clothes and start exercising every day.
“The more I exercised,” Bartha would later recall, “the more I didn’t need medication … my mind started to clear.” But when she told her doctor about her improvement, “He said it was just another personality that probably wouldn’t last long.” Later, she told the psychiatrist, “Look, this uncle I told you had abused me wasn’t even in the United States at that time. It couldn’t have happened.” The psychiatrist ignored her. “Oh my God,” Bartha told herself. “He doesn’t believe what I can prove to be true! Why?” She quit therapy. Later she filed a lawsuit.8
Bartha’s civil complaint was settled out of court and the details were never reported on by the press. But other cases received plenty of publicity, including a massive lawsuit filed against Judith Peterson, a Texas psychologist known as an expert at using hypnosis and other methods to help clients recover hidden memories of trauma. The lawsuit against Peterson was brought by a longtime patient, Kathryn Schwiderski, whose husband was an oil-company executive in Houston. Kathryn had originally sought treatment from Peterson in 1985 because she felt depressed, but during their four years of therapy, Peterson had diagnosed her with MPD. The lawsuit claimed that Peterson and three other therapists had wrongly decided Kathryn was a longtime member of a Satanic cult who had participated in rapes, torture, electroshock, drugging, human sacrifice, cult programming, cannibalism, kidnapping, and murder. After this assessment was made, Schwiderski was placed in a dissociative disorders unit managed by Peterson.9Psychologist Peterson had reported Kathryn Schwiderski and her husband to Child Protection Services because of her statements during MPD therapy that they had hurt their children. Detectives investigated, no evidence turned up, and the case was dropped. Even so, the accusations—and confessions—tore the family apart. The Schwiderskis ended up divorcing.
The state of Texas closed Peterson’s dissociative disorders unit in 1993 after determining it had overused physical restraints, censored patients’ mail and phone calls (supposedly to protect them from “the cult”), and, in one case, refused a request for discharge from the hospital until the patient could prove “the cult” was not a safety risk. The Schwiderskis, meanwhile, launched a lawsuit demanding $35 million in damages, and not just from Judith Peterson. They sued two dozen other people, including several MPD heroes.
The defendants all denied the charges, but the litigation received substantial press coverage. Many therapists, especially those who treated MPD, were frightened. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association expressed doubt that hypnosis and drugs could help elicit dissociated or repressed memories, and cautioned that memories produced using these treatments were often not true.
The same year, reflecting widespread concerns that MPD had become a dangerous fad, experts working on the new edition of the APA’s diagnostic manual, the DSM-IV, gave the condition a new name so it would sound less alluring to the public. Now it was called DID, dissociative identity disorder. The new manual suggested that DID might be “overdiagnosed in individuals who are highly suggestible,” and warned about “overzealous therapists” promoting dissociation rather than curing it.10
Further, the DSM-IV commented, the high number of cases reported recently in the United States indicated DID could be a “culture-bound” syndrome—just like “falling out,” the term used when African Americans in the South suddenly become paralyzed for no organic reason and cannot see, though their eyes are open; or “spell” (also Southern), when individuals “communicate” with deceased relatives or with spirits, and sometimes show changes in personality. These terms and other idioms of distress made it into the DSM.11 But unlike MPD, they were shunted into a section describing the problems of marginalized people and immigrants. Some wondered if DID should be sidelined into that section, too.
Despite these reforms, the therapists were still under siege. In 1995, PBS Frontline aired a documentary about two other former MPD patients who were suing their therapists for misconduct similar to that which the Schwiderskis, in Texas, had described. A bemused New York Times TV critic compared the therapists, all of them ISSMP&D leaders, to “a coven.”12 A later Times article noted that as a result of her MPD therapy, one plaintiff, a woman from Iowa born in the late 1950s, had remembered having sex with President John F. Kennedy (the woman was seven years old when Kennedy was assassinated).13By the late 1990s, more therapists were sued, and some were indicted on criminal charges for misdiagnosing multiple personality disorder and satanic cult involvement in order to generate huge billings and defraud insurance companies. Therapists started refusing to treat dissociative identity disorder. They abandoned the ISSMP&D, too. The organization lost half its membership.14
Thus MPD came to be seen as some bizarre subculture and was snickered at in the press. “Devil Doc a Crock?” the New York Daily News head-lined an article about a therapist who performed an exorcism on a patient, complete with a fire extinguisher (“Sometimes Satan leaves a ring of fire, he explained”).15 Even Geraldo took it on the chin. He apologized for all those years of bringing multiples and therapists on his show to fuel the Satanic ritual abuse epidemic.16
With multiple personality disorder abolished from the DSM, the ISSMP&D dropped “MP” from its name, turning itself into ISSD, the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. At the same time, the group’s leaders revised their old advice to clinicians about how to treat the newly renamed condition. Previously they had urged their fellow healers to do anything necessary to help patients remember and relive their childhood trauma, no matter how much medication and hypnosis was required. New protocols were developed, specifying that no patient should be put into trance before signing a consent form which explained the risk of developing false memories. Therapists were also advised to stop glorifying alters. They were told to treat their patients as “whole persons” rather than collections of selves.17Amid the withering skepticism, there remained some diehard faithful. MPD was real, they insisted. They pointed to research, initiated in the early 1970s by Dr. Cornelia Wilbur and her colleagues at the University of Kentucky, purporting to show that alters could be detected using medical tests such as EEGs. Further, MPD proponents noted, some brain imaging tests on people diagnosed with MPD showed features not visible in the brains of normal subjects.
But the studies they cited were thrown into question as investigation continued. Old research claiming that one alter personality could learn things without the other alters knowing it, was shown to be faulty. And the earlier EEG data, suggesting that alters had different brain waves, fell flat when new studies demonstrated that brain waves vary significantly even in a normal person; the differences simply show mood changes.18
And while it’s true that MPD sufferers’ brains look different from those of people without the condition, one study has found that veteran taxi drivers in England show similar differences in their brains when compared to people who haven’t driven taxis. Another study indicates that professional musicians’ brains appear distinct from those of amateurs. Doing the same thing, repeatedly, and for a very long time, apparently changes cerebral structures. And by the time people with MPD have shown up in labs to be tested, virtually all have spent years presenting their alters to the world, over and over and over. They seem as accustomed to behaving like multiples as the jazz maestros are to playing Coltrane, or London cabbies to navigating Fleet Street.19The science no longer measured up, but there was still Sybil. Before she walked into Dr. Wilbur’s office, the faithful pointed out, the doctor had never heard of MPD. So how could she have suggested it to the patient? And what about the family physician, believers added, quoting from one of Sybil the telemovie’s major plotlines. Dr. Wilbur had fact-checked the clinical history by going to the little town where Sybil grew up and finding her doctor. He had pulled out Sybil’s old records containing solid evidence that she’d been battered and raped.
The problem was, no one knew if any of this had really happened, because no one knew who Sybil was. So in the late 1990s, a man known for digging up any dirt in psychiatry that he was interested in finding set his mind to learning Sybil’s identity, then uncovering the facts of her psychotherapy with Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur.
He was Peter Swales, a Welshman and a high school dropout who’d once been a manager for the Rolling Stones. A “punk historian,” Swales called himself, and while researching the life of Sigmund Freud, he’d become convinced that the founder of psychoanalysis was self-serving and dishonest. Examining old archives and letters, he had concluded that Freud had carried on a love affair with his wife’s sister, impregnated her, and arranged for an abortion under the guise of taking her to a health spa. Swales also uncovered the true identities of two of the women Freud had treated for hysteria, and he had demonstrated that Freud had greatly exaggerated when he claimed he cured these patients.20Swales was joined in his Sybil search by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington. As a longtime critic of psychoanalysis, Borch-Jacobsen had interviewed Sybil’s old backup psychiatrist, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, for The New York Review of Books. The title of the piece, published in 1997, made clear what Spiegel and Borch-Jacobsen thought of MPD. “Sybil,” the article was called. “The Making of a Disease.”21
But Swales and Borch-Jacobsen’s sleuthing was stymied. Sybil was assumed to be alive somewhere, and to protect her privacy, John Jay College librarians had sealed a container in the Flora Rheta Schreiber archives marked “Box 37.” It held Connie’s therapy records with “Sybil” and many other materials displaying the patient’s real name.
Debbie Nathan
Sybil Exposed
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