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The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case
Free Press
October 2011
On Sale: October 18, 2011
320 pages
ISBN: 143916827X
EAN: 9781439168271
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 it—starring
Sally Field and Joanne Woodward—about 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 women—the
willing patient, her ambitious shrink, and the imaginative
journalist who spun their story into bestseller gold.
From horrendously irresponsible therapeutic
practices—Sybil’s psychiatrist often brought an electroshock
machine to Sybil’s apartment and climbed into bed with her
while administering the treatment— to 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. Sybil’s 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-memory”–based 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 fraud—albeit 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 woman’s life turned psychiatry on its head and
radically changed the course of therapy, and our culture, as
well.
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