HI! MY NAME IS…
Sybil – Flora Rheta Schreiber
Published in 1973, non-fiction book Sybil caused a stir in the US when this “true story” of a woman with 16 separate personalities went on to sell six million copies. The book seized upon public interest in ‘multiple personality disorder’ (now known as ‘dissociative identity disorder’) stirred by 1950s books and films, such as The Three Faces of Eve and The Bird’s Nest. Sybil was made into a popular television movie, starring Sally Field, in 1976, and efforts to further monetise the ‘Sybil Brand’ via merchandising including t-shirts, stickers, and boardgames is reminiscent of the 1890s ‘Trilbanya’ sensation surrounding fiction’s ultimate suggestible ‘hysteric’, Trilby.
Hypnotism – and ‘hypnotism’ and simply the power of suggestion – seem inextricably linked to the emergence, and practical investigation, of multiple personality disorder. It’s not my place to speculate on ‘chicken or egg’ moments in popular culture, patriarchy versus feminism, capitalism, and ever-developing psychiatric and psychological insights. (Hence I’ll use the vintage term to distinguish from modern concepts of ‘dissociative identity disorder’ out of respect for those living with that condition.) But here is a useful New York Times article from 2023 on the book’s 50th anniversary, which examines Sybil’s place in the American imagination and the exploitation of mentally distressed women for popular public consumption, plus the ‘truth’ versus the fiction of the case and its literary product.
I picked up Sybil wanting, first, to unashamedly consume it as the ‘true’ and ‘positive’ story that it was sold as. Multiple personalities pop up in Victorian and earlier mesmerism ‘cases’, and I’m able to read, say, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde without prejudice. The New York Times piece points out that Sybil was written “to women’s magazines’ then-loose reporting standards, with pseudonyms granted and facts changed or completely fabricated”. I wanted to pretend I was a woman in 1970s America who trusted in such editorial ‘standards’ and who would have been fascinated by this insight into the female psyche (albeit a strange one).
‘Sybil’ is a pseudonym for Shirley Ardel Mason (1923-1998), an art teacher born and raised in Minnesota who initially sought treatment for blackouts and ‘lost time’ from psychiatrist Cornelia B Wilbur. The book is narrated in the third-person, with Sybil our protagonist and heroine. Author Flora Rheta Schreiber’s writing style is cooly transportive and engrossing, and the discovery of Sybil’s personalities deftly woven into the shocking backstory of her abuse and neglect at the hands of her parents. The present-tense efforts of Dr Wilbur – portrayed as both a professional trailblazer and above-and-beyond personal saviour to Sybil – provide the book with momentum and hope. This lightens Sybil’s present-tense struggles, as she comprehends her ‘disorder’, ‘reintegrates’ her personalities, and builds a fuller adult life, while Schreiber and Wilbur persuade her – and us, as readers – that this years-long treatment process has reached a satisfactory(ish) conclusion.
Sybil’s parents were strict Protestant Christians, and so the first mention of the use of hypnotism is her father’s pastor advising against seeking psychiatric treatment for their daughter. The pastor fears the use of hypnosis, drugs, and other disapproved-of techniques, and Sybil shares in this fear of hypnotism and modern psychiatry in general. She is forbidden from consuming or creating fiction because of their religious beliefs, and religious fervour, distrust of Roman Catholics, and terror for the coming Armageddon preached by her late grandfather feature strongly in Sybil and some of her alters’ personas. It is only much later in Sybil’s treatment that Dr Wilbur, who has used hypnosis on other clients, decides to try it. It’s particularly used to age regress Sybil to explore younger personalities, and then to ‘progress’ her age to help Sybil mature and reintegrate the apparent fractured parts of herself – presented, of course, as a conclusive treatment success.
Schreiber and Wilbur both courted publicity and sought professional status via this case. Sybil is Schreiber’s In Cold Blood: after initially finding her writing style too florid, I came to appreciate how novel a read it must have been; especially for women who lived – perhaps mostly vicariously, just as Sybil did – through women’s magazines. She and Sybil wrote the book in close collaboration and, while the poetical details of, say, a childhood personality’s recall of a traumatic memory may smack of artifice and inauthenticity to modern literary fluency, it really is transportive. Schreiber doesn’t even mention her role until near the end, so she acts as an invisible portal into the most intimate, shocking recesses of this woman’s fragile mind. If I, as my imagined 1970s reader, had developed a penchant for ‘true life’ magazine stories, and all the surreptitious perverted pleasure that those small snippets of human suffering and disfunction bring, I’d be blown away by Sybil.
My admiration for Schreiber’s Truman Capote moment aside, Dr Wilbur comes across as misguided and cavalier in her approach. She doled out ‘truth serum’ barbiturate shots to the point of addiction as well as at-home electric shock treatments using an old machine, and it’s unclear whether Sybil was, to her, a vulnerable patient, a scientific subject, an ‘artistic’ muse, or a pitiable quasi-friend. Was Wilbur alone in this ‘gung-ho’ psycho-hypno medical (mal)practice and self-promotion? Probably not. But she was a woman.
The book sparked controversy, with various exposé books released. Psychiatrist and hypnosis professor Herbert Spiegel weighed in. He saw Sybil in Wilbur’s absence, found her to be highly hypnotisable, and used her for a number of studies as well as in demonstrations in his hypnosis classes at Columbia University. He claimed Sybil was a ‘hysteric’ who produced ‘personalities’ based on Wilbur’s prior coaching – eg, “Helen” was a label for certain aspects of her life and identity, rather than a separate ‘person’. Discourse about the book centred on whether Sybil was lying about her personalities, as if a simplistic, binary ‘confession’ would be forthcoming from such a fractured and interfered-with mind. Spiegel comes across as petty and unethical in claiming he had audio and film recordings that supposedly proved Wilbur the architect of Sybil’s multiple personalities and that the case was a fraud. He lost or withheld the evidence, and only made these claims after all three women were dead. Reputationally, however, the trio were not helped by the formation of their company, ‘Sybil Inc’, to capitalise on their success, in terms of public perceptions, irrespective of Spiegel.
Sybil’s legacy, as a key shaper of public perceptions regarding identity, psychiatry, psychology, and hypnosis, and the complexities of the female/human mind, lives on. “The notion of multiple personalities has remained big business,” writes Alexandra Jacobs in the May 2023 New York Times piece I’m referencing – written to promote the then-new Apple TV miniseries on a fictional multiple personality case, The Crowded Room. “During its brief tenure in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from 1980 to 1994, cases mushroomed among the female populace […]. Perhaps never before or since has the medical profession been so entwined with story. What could be more dramatic, more compelling, than a protagonist and numerous supporting players in one body?” Indeed!
The real Sybil, Shirley Ann Mason, remained largely anonymous until her death in 1998, when she was exposed by a historian of psychoanalysis. She did not marry or have children, but left behind over 100 signed and unsigned paintings made by her and her ‘alters’. She gave some conflicted statements across the years, but, according to her last letters, died believing she had multiple personalities. She also died a devout Seventh-day Adventist; the religion that so restricted her and promised her only plagues, war, and the doom of all mankind. My sense is that Schreiber saw – with whatever degree of artistic license the trio agreed on – that to use psychoanalysis and hypnosis, and to trust in this psychiatric process, was to fight story with story. But ‘multiple personality disorder’ became the destination rather than a psychic ‘spaghetti junction’ to pass through en route to a whole and healed future. And Wilbur’s creative – if dangerously rogue! – approach to harmonising extreme and damaging religious beliefs with successful psychoanalytical intervention failed.
Here’s hoping Mason found comfort and meaning in the unique camaraderie of this endeavour in spite of its controversies. Her (wrathful) ‘God’ was clearly the most stubborn of all her ‘personalities’ to overcome. So perhaps the simple gift of a new, unifying personal narrative was all she ever wanted? Mason’s role in the story of Sybil as a publishing sensation, if not in whole truth, certainly trumps the true horror stories of her past and splintered present. Personality is just a construct, and this chaotic cast of ‘Sasha Fierces’ and ‘Slim Shadys’ undeniably propelled Mason forwards in spite of her quiet desperation to socially comply.
The ultimate sadness of Sybil is, for me, that Mason sought a ‘cure’ for just the sort of creativity we welcome and celebrate today in the infinite ‘selves’ of artists like Beyoncé or Eminem. As we hurtle towards an AI-fuelled future ‘led’ by incompetent male toddlers through tangles of nonsense, I can see the appeal and peace in being unremarkable, forgotten, boring – in being unwritten.
