Who profits? The royalties from "Sybil" were split three ways, between Sybil, Schreiber, and Wilbur.
According to the Associated Press, Sybil wrote a letter to Wilbur denying that she had multiple personalities.
You're Never Alone With a Schizophrenic*
About 20 years ago, I read a book by Flora Rheta Schreiber called "Sybil". It was about a woman with multiple personality disorder. The good psychiatrist was able to identify 16 different personalities within the consciousness of one young woman. Some of the personalities knew about the others; some did not.
The book created a sensation. It spawned a movie starring Sally Field, and host of television talk show episodes. It was a big factor in the gradual popular acceptance of the idea of multiple personalities, which, indirectly, led to a lot of the ideas about repressed memory syndrome in the 1980's.
Many people have already begun to question the idea of "repressed memories". And now it looks like we should start to question the idea of multiple personalities as well. It seems that "Sybil" is a fraud.
First of all, a psychiatrist who worked with the real Sybil, wrote a book questioning the idea that she had multiple personalities. Now a psychologist, after listening to the tapes of the sessions Dr. Flora Schreiber had with Sybil, has concluded that the "multiple personalities" were actually constructions by the psychiatrist to help Sybil explain why her behaviours seemed so strange to herself. It seems that both patient and doctor got carried away with the idea, and, hey, it made good television (and lots of bucks), so why not go with it?
Well, every time you get tempted to think we humans are pretty smart, it helps to think about something like this. A lot of people, educated and not so educated, were completely fooled by "Sybil", and, to this day, there are a lot of psychologists out there eagerly diagnosing patients as having multiple personality syndrome or repressed memories, on the basis of bad science. But hey, we used to believe the earth was flat too. We'll get over it.
© Copyright 1998 Bill Van Dyk
*The title is borrowed from the album by Ian Hunter.
August 18, 1998
Update April 2008:
Links to More Information about the Sybil Myth
Other
Hollywood Disorders
Recovered
Memories
Update: May 2003
Someone reading this website recently
asked me a few questions about this story. I confess that I didn't provide
enough details for anyone to check into the facts, or to do
an intelligent search on the subject. Here they are:
Sybil's real name was Shirley Ardell Mason. She was born January 25, 1923 and died of breast cancer Feb 26, 1998.
Her psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur,
died in 1992, so she isn't around
to defend herself. But other analysts who have listened to tapes of her
sessions with Mason say that she was suggestive in her therapy and that she used hynosis.
Flora Rheta Schreiber, the author, also died
in the early 1990's.
The psychiatrist who also treated
her and concluded that the
multiple personality disorder
label was a fraud was Dr. Herbert Spiegel. He gave an
interview in April 1997 to the New York Review of Books and said that Sybil was merely
a "suggestible hysteric".
Another analyst, Dr. Robert Reiber,
actually listened to tapes of the
sessions between Sybil and
Wilbur and concluded that
Wilbur planted the idea
of "multiple personality"
into Sybil's head, possibly out
of some kind misguided
therapeutic technique, and possibly
for dumber reasons.
Wilbur claimed that Sybil was "cured"--
the book and movie both build
up to that startling miracle moment when she "reintegrates" her
personalities, but, as in
so many similar stories that
have been popularized on TV and books, that is not quite the truth. Shirley
Mason followed Wilbur to Lexington, Kentucky, and
continued to receive therapy for many years.
I would check the archives
of the New
York Review of Books. In fact, here: