Turning 50 is rarely easy for a woman, and “Sybil” is no exception.
This tarnished classic – “the true and extraordinary story of a woman possessed by sixteen separate personalities,” to quote the most carnival barker of its various subtitles – has been critically rejected since its 1973 publication; sandwiched on the bestseller list between Lillian Hellman and Howard Cosell like they’re at a nightmarish dinner party; made into two different television movies; workshop done as a musical; cited in psychiatric literature; debunked, dissected and defended.
Widely reported to have sold over six million copies, she’s bravely kept circulating all these years, but can’t be faulted for looking a little frayed.
“Sybil” is part of a long American parade of books about women with mental health problems, preceded in the 1960s by “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” and “The Bell Jar”, followed in the 1990s – the mantle that goes off – through the confessionals “Girl, Interrupted” and “Prozac Nation.” It haunted teenage girls (and certainly some boys) from their bedroom shelves, with its signature shells of a face divided as if they were the shards of a broken mirror, or broken into puzzle pieces.
I too was intrigued by that mirror cap, but was perplexed by the text. Coming back to it as an adult, all I can see is that “Sybil” was weighed down by all the scholarship and skepticism that surrounds her, like rattling, oversized accessories. The book is a historical curiosity and a cautionary tale of mass cultural delusion that makes one wonder what current fashionable diagnoses – witness the “TikTok tics” – would warrant further investigation.
Seemingly overnight, “Sybil” pathologized the idea that one “could contain multitudes,” as Walt Whitman wrote in his lavish “Song of Myself.” The heroine had suffered extreme childhood trauma and developed a range of different personalities to deal with it. With the help of an observant physician, she would integrate them into one identity and make them whole and mature.
It was a remarkable story — and at this point of Women’s Lib and shifting gender roles, a strangely relatable one: somehow a piece featuring “The Exorcist,” released the same year, and that crazy Enjoli perfume commercial featuring a spoke model that fry the bacon in a pan and never let you forget you were a man.
Originally titled “Who is Sylvia?” (the publisher thought that name was too Jewish), “Sybil” was written by Flora Rheta Schreiber in close collaboration with her subject, an artist and teacher who in real life was Shirley Ardell Mason of Dodge Center, Minn., and Mason’s longtime psychoanalyst Cornelia Wilbur. What did the three women have in common? Magazines: The same bibles on domestic slavery that Betty Friedan so effectively scrutinized in “The Feminine Mystique.”
Forbidden from making fiction by her parents, who were strict Seventh-day Adventists, as a child Mason instead cut out letters and words from copies of Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping and rearranged them, “like a kidnapper holding a ransom note.” prepares,” wrote Debbie Nathan in “Sybil Exposed,” her 2011 forensic investigation of the trio, which draws extensively on Schreiber’s papers at John Jay College.
Schreiber, who aspired to a literary career and once dated the eldest son of playwright Eugene O’Neill, wrote celebrity profiles and pieces on pop psychology for outlets like Cosmopolitan. And Wilbur, who had covered the actor Roddy McDowall – Case 129 in a book she co-authored on the causes and “treatment” of male homosexuality – yearned for the kind of broad audience that magazines then attracted.
Written according to the loose reporting standards of women’s magazines at the time, with pseudonyms assigned and facts altered or completely fabricated, “Sybil” is best read less as a case study in the form of “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” more famous and questioned Dora) than as a horror story. And indeed, Schreiber, who admired the success of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”, aimed for a “non-fiction novel” from the start.
The shocking details of abuse at the hands of a presumably schizophrenic mother—cold-water enemas administered while young “Sybil Dorsett” hangs upside down from a lightbulb cord above the kitchen table are one “matinal maternal ministry,” to use Schreiber’s degraded terminology—surpass those in Stephen King’s novel ‘Carrie’. Sybil had supposedly pushed a bead up her nose; a button hook inserted into her genitals; and was blindfolded and locked in a suitcase.
Instead of telekinetic powers, she develops a supernatural ability to take on different personas. Struggling with work and love, she finds herself distancing herself from reality, “losing time.” During one session, she starts talking in a country accent and identifies herself as ‘Peggy’. The number and variety of these various characters—including two male carpenters, “Mike” and “Sid”—expand exponentially into an “entourage of alternate selves”.
The real case studies here are of medical and journalistic malpractice. By any modern standard, Wilbur crossed the line from transference to entanglement. She crawled into her patient’s bed to administer electroshock treatment with an antiquated device, dispensed Pentothal (a barbiturate mistakenly believed to act as a truth serum) to the point of addiction, and took her on creepy road trips.
Presented with a remorseful letter from Mason that she had “basically lied” not only about the different selves, but also about her mother’s torture, Wilbur refused to reconsider her diagnosis, Nathan reported. Her patient was in a state of “resistance” to the terrible truth, the psychiatrist insisted.
When Schreiber tried to play Capote, visited Dodge Center, and reviewed Mason’s medical records, she discovered many differences. But all three women were too emotionally and economically invested in the project to give it up and even start a company called Sybil Inc.
The idea of multiple personalities has remained big business. During his brief tenure in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from 1980 to 1994, cases mushroomed among the female population, along with a fever of recovered memories fueled by another since-discredited book,” Michelle Remembers.” Perhaps never before or since has the medical profession been so intertwined story. What could be more dramatic, more compelling than a protagonist and numerous supporting players in one body? (The manual now describes the condition less suggestively, as dissociative identity disorder.)
Hollywood had already reaped “The Three Faces of Eve,” a bestseller about the Christine Costner Sizemore case; the film earned Joanne Woodward an Oscar in 1958. (Woodward would play Wilbur in the first “Sybil” TV movie.) The multiple personality phenomenon became a mainstay of talk shows, from Schreiber and Wilbur appearing on Dick Cavett’s to Oprah Winfrey appearing on declared it “the syndrome of the ’90s.” One of her guests, Truddi Chase, identified 92 separate personalities, which Chase called The Troops.
Memories of the condition, including Chase’s bestseller “When Rabbit Howls,” abounded. Friends of the real “Sybil” came up with sequels, in which she exhibited her paintings. Further cinematic depictions ranged from the sublime (Edward Norton in “Primal Fear”) to the ludicrous (Jim Carrey in “Me, Myself & Irene”).
Few remember Michelle, but Sybil, with all her cautionary addenda, perseveres. As a further footnote to the whole saga, her psychiatrist also played a part in the case of Billy Milligan, the exonerated “Campus Rapist” who was said to have 24 personalities, whose story was told by the author Daniel Keyes.
“The Crowded Room,” a 10-episode miniseries inspired by Milligan, will stream on Apple TV+ next month. The sands of sanity may be always moving, but when mined for material, it’s bottomless.