Sybil Exposed (3 page)

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.

All this work deepened my sense that
Sybil
was as much about the conflict between women’s highest hopes and deepest fears as it was about a medical diagnosis. Women during the later decades of the twentieth century were aflame, not just with analyses of sexism but also with a great yearning for the freedom to play new roles in life. Taking jobs once held only by men yet going home at night and still being saddled with housework. Postponing childbirth or avoiding it altogether but being told that the goal was still motherhood. Exploring sex outside of marriage (including with women), but worrying about being “sluts.” These dilemmas were so new and so acute in the 1970s—the decade when
Sybil
came out—that sometimes young women felt as though alien inner beings were doing their behaving, and not the women themselves. The idea of “multiple personalities” seemed not so strange an idea.

Seeking psychotherapy was not strange, either, even for people deeply critical of the idea that marrying and having babies was the only way to be normal, especially for women. Officially, American psychoanalysis had pushed that notion for years. Unofficially, many therapists had more enlightened ideas. In the 1950s, one of them encouraged budding poet Allen Ginsberg to explore and celebrate his homosexuality. In her book
The Feminine Mystique
, Betty Friedan quoted a psychiatrist reminiscing about a woman patient who was having dreams about being a teacher. Her real
problem, the doctor realized, was not penis envy but the fact “that it was not enough for her to be just a housewife and mother.” He encouraged her to become a teacher.

Dr. Cornelia Wilbur had always thought that she, too, was helping her female patients, my research revealed. She unfailingly pushed them to follow their dreams, even though the therapy she used on them was bizarre, requiring as it did that they become multiple personalities in order to receive her care. That was a stringent demand from a doctor. But Dr. Wilbur saw herself as a nurturer. She was a maternal figure writ large, and in the 1970s, when young women were rebelling against the conservatism of their own families, the Sybil story gave them a symbolic, modern mother.

Flora Schreiber, the author of the story, never seemed motherly. But she, too, perceived the heroine of her book as a woman in flux, moving from the backwardness of rural life and religiosity to the independence and reason of New York City. Like Cornelia Wilbur, Flora struggled to do transformative work during a time when women’s efforts to change the world were still laughed at.
Sybil
was her attempt to do serious nonfiction—even though, in order to be taken seriously, she resorted to making up “facts.”

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.