Originally appeared in the New York Review of Books.
By MIKKEL BORCH-JACOBSEN
Only seldom can we date the emergence of a psychiatric syndrome
with such precision: Multiple Personality Disorder (or MPD, as it
is known to psychiatrists) was born in 1973 with the publication
of Flora Rheta Schreiber's book Sybil.1 Not that Sybil was the
first book ever devoted to a case of multiple personality, far
from it: Sybil belongs in fact to a well-established genre that
includes, among others, Theodore Flournoy's From India to the
Planet Mars (1899), Morton Prince's The Dissociation of a
Personality (1906), Corbett H. Thigpen andHervey Cleckley's The
Three Faces of Eve (1954) -- not to mention Stevenson's Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).
But Schreiber's book was, as Ian Hacking points out,2 the first
one that firmly tied multiple personality to child abuse, a
notion that had gained widespread recognition in the 1960s and
that was to become an essential feature of present-day Multiple
Personality Disorder. As the psychiatrist Frank W. Putnam writes
in his authoritative textbook on MPD: "It was not until the
1970s, that the first reports clearly connecting MPD to childhood
trauma began to appear in single case histories. Among the first
and best-known was the case of Sybil, treated by Cornelia Wilbur
and dramatized by Schreiber."3
A journalist specializing in psychiatric issues and a regular
contributor to Science Digest, Flora Rheta Schreiber described in
her book the strange case of a young woman, "Sybil," who had
developed no fewer than sixteen separate personalities in order
to cope with severe physical and sexual abuse. In addition to
having been exposed to her parents' love-making in classic
Freudian style, Sybil had suffered bizarre and perverse sexual
abuse at the hands of her mother, in a manner that is more
reminiscent of Freud's earlier "seduction theory." The mother,
for instance, would have her watch while she was masturbating
other young children; she would force odd objects into Sybil's
vagina, or again, hang her in the air, insert an enema tip into
her urethra, and fill the bladder with ice-cold water.
Sybil, the main personality, had no memory of all of this, but
her other "personalities" did, and they dutifully informed
Sybil's New York psychiatrist, Cornelia C. Wilbur, in the course
of a treatment that relied on hypnosis, "abreaction" -- the
cathartic release of anxiety through reliving intense experiences
-- and the administration of heavy doses of countertransference.
As a result of this unorthodox treatment, which Schreiber
described generously as "the first psychoanalysis of a multiple
personality,"4 Sybil's sixteen selves eventually fused, thus
forming a seventeenth and cured self. "The New Sybil" was born,
after hard psychoanalytic labor that took, according to
Schreiber, eleven years and 2,354 office sessions.5 Although
names and facts had to be disguised for the sake of
confidentiality, Schreiber insisted that her book was based on
empirical data, such as Dr. Wilbur's case notes and tape
recordings of analytic sessions, Sybil's diaries and
correspondence, and family and hospital records.
This gothic tale of abuse was no fiction, as Dr. Wilbur warned in
the book when Sybil compared herself to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:
"Dr. Wilbur slapped her hand in her fist. 'That's not a true
story,' she said. 'It's pure fiction. You are not at all like Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson wasn't a psychoanalyst. He created
these two characters out of his literary imagination. As a writer
he was concerned only with spinning a good yarn.'"6 The New York
Times soon ranked Sybil among the ten best-selling nonfiction
books of the year, and the book was quickly turned into a
Hollywood movie with Joanne Woodward, the former cinematic
incarnation of The Three Faces of Eve, in the role of Cornelia
Wilbur. ___
Schreiber was deluged with letters from women thanking her for
helping them understand that they were "multiples,"7 and it was
not long before pioneering psychiatrists like Ralph B. Allison,
George Greaves, and Eugene Bliss started finding
cases of multiple personality among their patients. Within a few
years of the distribution of Sybil, there appeared a number of
best-selling biographies of multiple personalities clearly
modeled on Schreiber's book: The Five of Me (1977), Tell Me Who I
Am Before I Die (1978), Michelle Remembers (1980), The Minds of
Billy Milligan (1981), to name only a few. As Frank W. Putnam
writes:
What became of the three main characters of this success story?
Flora Rheta Schreiber subsequently wrote a second best-selling
book, this time on the Philadelphia cobbler Joseph Kallinger, a
serial killer whose crime spree she claimed was the result of
child abuse.11 She was unsuccessfully sued by the families of
Kallinger's victims12 and died shortly thereafter. After the end
of Sybil's treatment, Cornelia C. Wilbur moved on to a medical
position in psychiatry at the University of Kentucky, Lexington,
where she conducted research on multiple personality,
dissociation, and altered states of consciousness with Arnold
Ludwig and others. She died in 1992, after a career as a cult
figure within the MPD movement. As to the elusive Sybil, all
efforts to crack the wall of secrecy that surrounds her have been
in vain so far. Some say that she holds an academic position in
an art school, others that she owns an art gallery somewhere in
the Midwest. In 1987, in response to an inquiry from a reader,
the Boston Globe reported that Dr. Wilbur "confirms that Sybil is
indeed alive."13
With Schreiber and Wilbur now gone, very few people are left who
seem to know her true identity. One of them is Herbert Spiegel,
M.D., coauthor with Abram Kardiner of an important book on
traumatic war neuroses14 and a recognized specialist in hypnosis.
Although bound by medical confidentiality, Dr. Spiegel was
willing to discuss with me his memories of Sybil, whom he knew
well at the time when she was in treatment with Cornelia Wilbur.
What follows is a transcript of the interview I had with him in
his New York City office in May 1995.
MIKKEL BORCH-JACOBSEN: How did you meet Cornelia Wilbur?
HERBERT SPIEGEL: I didn't know her very well. I had seen her at
meetings at the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, and she knew
that I had done a lot of work with hypnosis. I got a phone call
from her one day, telling me that she had a patient that she had
been treating as schizophrenic and she had a peculiar feeling
that this was not schizophrenia at all. She asked me if I could
examine the patient and help her clarify the diagnosis.
MBJ: That was Sybil?
HS: Yes, that was Sybil.
MBJ: When was that?
HS: This must have been in the late Sixties. As I'm thinking
about it now -- and here's a commentary on the accuracy of memory
-- it could be maybe the mid-Sixties. I remember seeing Sybil
over a period of about four years. Then by the time the book came
out in 1973 quite a bit of time had passed.
MBJ: So this was approximately ten years after the beginning of
Sybil's treatment. I say "approximately" for it is not entirely
clear when Sybil entered into analysis with Wilbur. In the book
by Flora Rheta Schreiber, we read that Wilbur had had her in
treatment for a brief time in Omaha in the summer of 1945, and
that the analysis properly so-called started only in October
1954, when Sybil moved to New York to study art at Columbia
University.15 But in an interview she gave to Moshe Torem shortly
before she died, Wilbur states that she started seeing Sybil in
1952.16 Do you have any idea of when the treatment actually
began?
HS: I have no idea. I never inquired about that. Wilbur just told
me that she had known her for a long time.
MBJ: Wilbur's diagnosis had been of schizophrenia, right?
HS: Yes, but as I said, she was beginning to doubt whether or not
[Sybil] was schizophrenic. She wanted to know if I could
hypnotize a schizophrenic. I said no, usually schizophrenics are
not hypnotizable, but it would be useful to test that out,
because that could help sharpen up the diagnosis.
MBJ: So before consulting you about the case, Cornelia Wilbur had
unsuccessfully treated Sybil for a schizophrenia for a period of,
let's say, over ten years?
HS: I guess you could make that inference.
MBJ: She was using classic psychoanalytic treatment, I presume?
HS: Well, I don't know how classical she was. I never went into
that with her. My contacts with her were only about Sybil. I must
tell you, Wilbur was not an easy person to talk to -- as a matter
of fact she was like an angry woman. Even after working together
with her on Sybil for several years, we would see each other at a
meeting and I'd be pleased if she said hello, but then she'd just
pass on by. There was something peculiar about her as a person.
MBJ: Your account doesn't tally at all with the account of the
case that we find in Sybil, for there Schreiber claims that
Wilbur met "Peggy," one of Sybil's alternate personalities, as
early as December 1954, that is to say two months after the
treatment supposedly started.17 But you are saying that after
approximately ten years of analysis with Sybil, Wilbur was still
considering her as a schizophrenic and had actually no clue
whatsoever about the case?
HS: I remember vividly the first conversation I had with her
about this. She said that she had treated Sybil for a long time
as a schizophrenic, but that she was having some doubts now and
wanted to know whether Sybil was hypnotizable. That is all I
know.
MBJ: So she didn't mention multiple personality to you?
HS: Not at that time. No.
MBJ: What happened next?
HS: I examined Sybil and discovered that she was highly
hypnotizable. As a matter of fact, I was so intrigued with her
high hypnotizability that I asked Cornelia if it was okay if I
did some age-regression studies on her. Cornelia said yes, so I
used Sybil for a lot of studies. That's when I developed a
rapport with Sybil. Then Cornelia called me up one day and said
she had to be out of town for about a week. She was concerned
about the occasional suicidal impulses that Sybil had and wanted
to know if I could take over as a surrogate therapist during that
period, which I did. I saw Sybil maybe about three times
during that week as her surrogate therapist. This happened
subsequently, for in the meantime I had been seeing Sybil on an
entirely different basis. Cornelia was doing the therapy, and I
didn't get involved with what she was doing. I was doing research
with Sybil, using her as a demonstration case at our classes in
hypnosis at Columbia University's College of Physicians and
Surgeons.
MBJ: Where you did age-regressions?
HS: Yes. She was very hypnotizable, what I call a "grade five."18
On a zero to five scale we can classify most levels of
hypnotizability. The top group -- the hypnotic virtuosos -- are
about 5 percent of the population and they show extra phenomena
that we don't ordinarily see even in good hypnotic subjects. For
example, they have the ability to regress in time and they will
report past experiences in the present tense. It is as if they
"ablate," or remove from memory, the period of time from, say,
their fourth birthday to the present time, and you have an
expression of what was there up until the age of four. For most
people, to get them to a fixed point in time, we use something
that has an affect potential. You can't just say, "I want you to
go back to January 14, 1916" -- that doesn't mean anything. You
will say to the subject: "You are getting younger and younger.
You are now nineteen, eighteen, seventeen years old, twelve years
old, seven years old," and then: "This is your fourth birthday."
Now, Sybil had all the other phenomena of being highly
hypnotizable: she had amnesias that you could command her to have
for certain events; she had post-hypnotic sensory motor
alterations on command; you could stimulate hallucinations with
her, which only the hypnotic virtuosos can ever achieve. But when
I regressed her to her fourth birthday, she didn't show that same
kind of precise orientation in time and space that other patients
did. I was puzzled, so I called Wilbur about that, and it turned
out that Sybil was not allowed to have birthdays. She was a
member of some kind of Protestant sect out in the Midwest where
they didn't celebrate birthdays. So I shifted to Christmas of her
fourth year, and then we got the same effect that other people
would have when you regress them down to their fourth birthday.
MBJ: When did you learn about Sybil's alternate personalities?
HS: Not at the beginning. Our understanding was that she was not
going to tell me that much of what was going on in the therapy.
But one day during our regression studies, Sybil said, "Well, do
you want me to be Helen?" And I said, "What do you mean?" And she
said, "Well, when I'm with Dr. Wilbur she wants me to be Helen."
I said, "Who's Helen?" "Well, that's a name Dr. Wilbur gave me
for this feeling." So I said, "Well, if you want to it's all
right, but it's not necessary." With me, Sybil preferred not to
"be Helen." With Wilbur, it seemed she felt an obligation to
become another personality. That's when I realized that Connie
was helping her identify aspects of her life, or perspectives,
that she then called by name. By naming them this way, she was
reifying a memory of some kind and converting it into a
"personality."
MBJ: In her book, Flora Rheta Schreiber describes how Wilbur,
starting in autumn 1959, would age-regress her patient with the
help of hypnosis and then have the various alternate
personalities "grow up" until they reached the same age as the
actual Sybil, the "host-personality."19 But if what you are
saying is true, Wilbur didn't do any of this before sending Sybil
to you. Do you know whether Wilbur had ever practiced hypnosis
before that?
HS: To my knowledge, Connie knew little about hypnosis, and that
is why she asked me to see Sybil. In my conversations with her
she was profoundly ignorant of the whole hypnotic phenomenon. Had
she known enough about hypnosis in the first place, she would
never have sent Sybil to see me at all.
MBJ: Again, this doesn't tally with Schreiber's account. In her
book, Schreiber writes: "Before she [Wilbur] had become a psychoanalyst, she had
used hypnosis successfully with other patients. Now [Autumn 1959]
she would experiment with hypnosis in analysis. Once again
shedecided that she was ready to pioneer."20 To your knowledge,
is this an accurate account?
HS: Well, it's not consistent with what Wilbur told me.
MBJ: In other words, Sybil's alternate personalities appeared
only after Cornelia Wilbur had started dabbling in hypnosis and
not five years before, in 1954, as is claimed in the book. This
is of course a crucial point, since we might well suspect that
Sybil's multiple personality was a byproduct of hypnosis. Would
you say that it was Connie Wilbur's uncontrolled experiments in
hypnotic age-regression that ultimately created Sybil's alternate
personalities?
HS: It could be that, but I think there was another factor, too.
Sybil told me that she had read The Three Faces of Eve,21 Thigpen
and Cleckley's book on a case of multiple personality. She was
very impressed with that book. One outstanding feature of highly
hypnotizable subjects is their histrionic way of making
statements. I have the impression that Sybil learned from reading
this book that she could express her agonies and her stresses in
life through the histrionic display of multiple personalities,
especially if it were encouraged by the therapist.
MBJ: Still, it strikes me that Wilbur's use of hypnosis in the
treatment mimicked the age-regression studies that you had done
at Columbia University with Sybil.
HS: There is a difference, however. When I used regression
studies with Sybil, I was not interested in getting historical
data about her life. I was only testing her to see how she
responded to standardized tests. I was not involved in these
horrendous stories about how she was allegedly abused as a child.
Not that I was surprised to hear that, because I knew that her
mother had been a patient in a psychiatric hospital and I assumed
that she was schizophrenic. Sybil having had a bizarre, erratic
mother, I could easily accept the idea that she had been
physically hurt by her. I didn't interpret her mother as being
intentionally cruel. She was a psychotic.
MBJ: Did Sybil ever mention to you all these memories of sexual
abuse?
HS: Occasionally it came up. But I was interested in Sybil as a
researcher, not a therapist. The days when I would see her as a
surrogate therapist my function was to contain, not explore. I
purposely made no explorations into that kind of history.
MBJ: Wilbur and Schreiber claim that they were able to
corroborate all of Sybil's allegations about the mother's sexual
and sadistic abuse. Do you have any knowledge of this?
HS: No, I don't. Judging from the quality of their pursuit of
accuracy when they were dealing with me, my impression is that
some gestures were made. But I don't know how thorough Wilbur and
Schreiber were in corroborating their data. Don't forget, they
were writing a story.
MBJ: As far as these episodes of sexual and sadistic abuse are
concerned, it seems that Sybil recanted at some point in the
course of the analysis. We know this because Flora Rheta
Schreiber quotes in her book a letter that Sybil supposedly sent
to her analyst on August 17, 1959, in which she wrote:
Now Schreiber presents this letter as a
symptom of denial on the part of Sybil, stating that she lost
time for two days after having written it. Is it not possible,
however, that Wilbur forced the issue by refusing to take Sybil's
recantation seriously?
HS: Very possible. You see, that is one of the biggest
difficulties with working with the concept of causation in
psychotherapy. It is the grand illusion that we have inherited
from Freud. Freud's concept was that you had to get the truth,
and unless you get the truth no therapeutic effect can take
place. So, in the pursuit of the truth we become engaged in
storytelling and we impose our hypothesis on the patient by the
way we ask our questions. Highly suggestible people will of
course respond in a way that can please the doctors, especially
if there is a good rapport between them. That is why I think it
is an illusion to believe that we can establish a valid causation
for multiple personality, or for almost any kind of psychiatric
illness.
MBJ: So you would say that Wilbur repeated Freud's mistakes?
HS: Yes, I think that she was influenced by the Freudian model of
showing causation. Freud was the one who really promoted this
concept.
MBJ: I find it odd that you are not mentioned anywhere in
Schreiber's book, in spite of the fact that you clearly played a
crucial role in the case. The only place where your name appears
is in the acknowledgments, which I would like to quote here: "Dr.
Herbert Spiegel, who did age regressions on Sybil and described
her as a 'brilliant hysteric,' gave several hours to a valuable
discussion of this case, which he knew first-hand."23 How come
Wilbur and Schreiber didn't credit you for your role?
HS: I think they were both angry with me because I refused to
collaborate with them on the book. Wilbur had decided she was
going to make the Sybil case into a book, because she couldn't
get it published in professional journals. So she engaged
Schreiber, who was a professional writer, and they both came to
see me to ask me if I wanted to be a coauthor with them. That was
the original proposal: since I had all this information about the
case, would I join in with them? We didn't spell out the fine
print, because we didn't even get to the big print. I said, "Hmm.
That's interesting." I had a lot of stuff to show them. But
toward the end of our discussion, they said they would be calling
her a "multiple personality." I said, "But she's not a multiple
personality!" I think she was a wonderful hysterical patient with
role confusion, which is typical of high hysterics. It was
hysteria. Back in those days, Multiple Personality Disorder was
not yet in the DSM. To me, a multiple personality meant you had
to have an "alter" -- that is, a distinct alternate personality
-- that was enduring, assuming control over the person for a
considerable period of time, and that there was an amnesia
barrier between one alter and another, as in the case, reported
by William James, of Ansel Bourne, an American who forgot his
identity and developed a second personality.24
I didn't see this at all in Sybil. I saw her "personalities"
rather as game-playing. I wasn't angry at Cornelia about this. I
thought this was an ingenious way of identifying different
episodes and events in Sybil's life, and if they wanted to label
it or name it in a given way, that was fine. But I thought this
was all emerging simply [because of] Connie's wanting to make
sense out of the disparate life experience that Sybil had. I
could change Sybil's state of awareness just by regressing her to
this and that, but that didn't make her a multiple personality.
It didn't mean that a personality was enduring or was taking
charge of her life. So I told Wilbur and Schreiber that it would
not be accurate to call Sybil a multiple personality, and that it
was not at all consistent with what I knew about her.
Schreiber then got in a huff. She was sitting right in that chair
there, and she said, "But if we don't call it a multiple
personality, we don't have a book! The publishers want it to be
that, otherwise it won't sell!" That was the logic behind their
calling Sybil a multiple personality. I gathered from what Schreiber said that
she had already been thinking along those lines after she had had
her first contact with Wilbur, and that Wilbur, as a result,
intensified the importance of what had started off as a casual
thing, because it would make a sellable book. So I said, "OK, go
ahead, but I don't want to be identified with that." Both women
were very angry. I offered that they could have the data, but
they felt so angry with me because I disagreed with them on their
diagnosis that they refused. I never heard from Schreiber after
that. I ran into Cornelia Wilbur at a psychiatric meeting
somewhere, and where ordinarily she would at least nod and say
hello, this time she turned her head the other way.
MBJ: This reaction on their part seems to indicate that they
expected much from you and that they considered you as a very
important player in the case, doesn't it?
HS: Well, they did ask me to join them. But after I refused, they
decided that they could do without me. I suspect they did no more
than what most do when writing up their reports -- you make up
your own stories.
MBJ: With the benefit of hindsight, do you regret having taken
that position?
HS: Had I known at that time that this was going to start a whole
new cult, a whole new wave of hysteria restated in a new way,
would I have wanted my name more closely associated with it? No,
I'm embarrassed by it all! I think this chapter of MPD will go
down in history as an embarrassing phase of American psychiatry.
Other countries are not taken in by it, except possibly some
Dutch people who came over here and learned about it here, but
basically it's a hysterical response to hysteria.
MBJ: In her book, Flora Rheta Schreiber describes herself as one
of Sybil's friends, whom she allegedly met in 1962, eleven years
before the book appeared. In her interview with Moshe Torem,
however, Wilbur relates how Schreiber, when she approached her
about the possibility of writing up the case "for popular
consumption," "said she would not begin the work until the
patient was completely integrated as one individual."25 Do you
think that this pressing and obviously market-oriented request
for a therapeutic happy ending played a role in Sybil's eventual
"fusion" in one personality?
HS: Yes, I do think that way, and it is quite consistent with the
way other fusions take place. When the hospital insurance starts
to run out, or when families say, "Look, we've spent enough money
on this, we can't pay for this anymore," that's when fusion takes
place. It also is consistent with another whole point of view: is
it really necessary to dissect, reify, and label all these alters
to get a fusion? This so-called "fusion" is a putting together of
what was artificially broken up in the first place. When I have
people with transient dissociations where they temporarily lose
their sense of identity -- which is consistent with a "grade five
syndrome" -- I put them together. I fuse them right away, just as
Pierre Janet did. The point is to help restore a sense of control
as soon as possible. I would also like to say that all of this
multiple personality business rarely takes place when financial
resources are not available or when the patient has no legal or
social reason to evade responsibility. It seems to be related to
the amount of money the patients have to indulge in this kind of
invalidism of histrionic display. Then when that money starts to
run out, or the legal issues are resolved, the fusion takes
place. That is a sad commentary on the motivation of some
therapists.
MBJ: In her book, Schreiber claims that Sybil, once cured, stayed
for two weeks with her mother, Esther, before moving to another
part of the country where she had been offered a position in an
academic institution. But according to Brett Kahr, a close friend
of Schreiber's whom I interviewed two years ago in London, in
reality Sybil stayed for more than a year with the two women and
became very close to Esther Schreiber, all this while Flora Rheta
Schreiber was writing the book about her. In view of your having
known the real Sybil and her need for attention, what are your
thoughts about this close, quasi-familial
relationship between the author and her "subject"? Don't you
think this somehow tainted the objectivity of the alleged "case
study" -- especially as Sybil was offered a third of the benefits
to be generated by the book, as I happen to know through Brett
Kahr?
HS: Yes, Schreiber told me too that Sybil was going to get part
of the royalties. Now as to their living together, I think that
was therapeutically good because Sybil had not had the comfort of
living in a protective atmosphere. To have the protection of two
women who were seriously concerned with her and looking out for
her was probably a very good therapeutic experience for her. As a
matter of fact I've often felt that that would be a good model
for a lot of therapeutic programs if it were practical. It's not,
but it would be great. Using the transference that Sybil had with
both the therapist and the writer who was going to glamourize
this whole thing with a new sense of recognition obviously
influenced the story they told. At least this had the advantage
of giving Sybil a period of time in which she could be relatively
secure. Another interesting aspect of the treatment that Connie
offered was in itself a good therapeutic thing. Sybil often
stayed with Wilbur and did work for her in her apartment while
she was in treatment. That kind of supervisory containment,
supportive care, intertwined with a part-time living together --
I think that there's something to be said for that. Somebody who
has such a fragile sense of integration as Sybil had may just
need that.
MBJ: But couldn't you say that such an arrangement, apart from
influencing the narrative told by the therapist and the writer,
also created an artificial bond between all these people?
HS: Yes, sure. It became a folie à trois. But from the
point of view of the patient, it may have been quite beneficial.
MBJ: So you would say that the writing of the book was
therapeutic?
HS: Yes, I think it was. As a matter of fact, I think having
Sybil appear in front of the classes at Columbia was a
therapeutic thing for her too. She felt so important. She looked
forward to it. It gave her a sense of being an important person.
One of the very interesting and persistently subtle qualities
about a highly hypnotizable person with "grade five syndrome" is
that they have an ongoing sense of inferiority. It is as if when
something goes wrong they feel immediately that they are at fault
-- in contrast to the borderline personality disorders, where if
something goes wrong, it is always your fault. Sybil was a good
artist, and she was exceptionally bright -- she had an IQ of 174
-- but she never made good use of it because of disruptive
influences in her life. To get this kind of support over a long
period of time enabled her to go out on her own after the book
went out. It's unconventional, but I would regard it from the
patient's point of view as favorable for her.
MBJ: One final question. Why didn't you speak out about all this
before quite recently?
HS: Because I was never asked, as you are now asking me. I did
discuss this with my students and colleagues, but did not feel
pressed to put it into print until now. Also, I think it is
important to tell this story now that there is such mischief
going on with the abuse of "recovered memories." To me, the role
of therapists in this whole phenomenon of multiple personality
and victimization is more intriguing than the patients
themselves. The therapists, with some exceptions, have become
unconscious con artists. They are taking highly malleable,
suggest-ible persons and molding them into acting out a thesis
that they are putting upon them. I'm intrigued by that, for you
can't do that with obsessive compulsives, you can't do it with
schizophrenics or depressed people. But you can do it with highly
hypnotizable people.
I think in this respect that the MPD phenomenon of Sybil is an
artifact that was created by Connie Wilbur. Another interesting
thing about this is that most of the central enthusiasts involved
in the Multiple Personality movement do not know much about the
subtleties of high hypnotizability and the histrionic
personality. They think that hypnosis is something you do to
somebody. They don't have the basic understanding that hypnosis
is a phenomenon that frequently goes on without formal
instructions intended to induce a hypnotic state. You don't
hypnotize another person; all you do is identify their capacity
and then show them how to purposefully go into and exit from the
trance state -- if they don't come out of it spontaneously.
Formal induction ceremonies can elicit hypnotic phenomena, but
are not necessary. Most "highs" often enter spontaneous trance
states. Wilbur did not know that at all. With one or two
exceptions, most of the other luminaries in the MPD field know
very little about hypnosis. They all acknowledge that MPDs are
highly hypnotizable, but most of them do not even measure for
hypnotizability. They now have a "Dissociative Experiences
Scale," or DES, that Putnam and Bernstein have developed,26 but
that doesn't differentiate the highly hypnotizable person from
the psychopath, the borderlines, or the schizophrenics. It picks
up dissociation, but you need to measure suggestibility too. You
see, hypnosis involves absorption, dissociation, and
suggestibility. You have to have all three at high levels.
Dissociation alone is not enough to identify the hypnotizability.
If the MPD therapists knew more about hypnosis, their diagnoses
would be more accurate. As it is now, they don't even know how
they are molding their outcomes. They manipulate both the highly
hypnotizable and the psychopath. The "grade fives" are highly
suggestible and gullible, and they just do what they're cued to
do, quite innocently. They seem like pure multiples after they're
coached. But most of the patients that the MPD experts have in
the wards are not highly hypnotizable, so what they are actually
playing around with are borderlines and psychopaths who enter
into the game for different reasons.
These patients are full of anger and guile. They feel victimized
and tend to blame others for their misbehavior. They then find a
doctor who can conjoin with them to develop a story of abuse
which appears to be a multiple personality disorder, thus giving
them a new kind of status in society. They will make use of all
this alleged or real abuse which took place in their life, as a
way of getting recognition: "Look, I'm a multiple!" They don't
have to do it on their own anymore. Nowadays, they have the
collusion of a therapist who is showing them how to do it. And
then they can have hospital stays for months to years that the
insurance companies pay for. But I understand that the insurance
companies are wising up and are cutting down on this. This may
well be the end of the whole epidemic that started with Sybil,
for I predict that the "fusions" will come much earlier now.
---
2 Ian
Hacking, "Multiple Personality Disorder and Its Hosts," History
of the Human Sciences 5 (1992), No. 2, p. 8.
3 Frank W.
Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder
(Guilford Press, 1989), p. 47.
4 Flora Rheta Schreiber,
Sybil, second edition (Warner Books, 1974), p. 13. Schreiber
forgets Anna O., the arch-patient of psychoanalysis, who was a
clear case of dual personality. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen,
Remembering Anna O: A Century of Mystification(Routledge, 1996).
5 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 15.
6 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 115.
7 Interview with Brett Kahr, director of the British
Institute for Psycho-History and organizer of the Flora Rheta
Schreiber Memorial, London, April 1993.
8 Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality
Disorder, p. 35.
9 Myron Boor, "The Multiple Personality
Epidemic:Additional Cases and Inferences Regarding Diagnosis,
Etiology, Dynamics, and Treatment," Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease 170 (1982), pp. 302-304.
10 Richard J.
Loewenstein, in the French TVdocumentary by Ilan Flammer, "La
mimoire abusie" (Arte, 1994).
11 Flora Rheta Schreiber,
The Shoemaker:The Anatomy of a Psychopath (Simon andSchuster,
1983).
12 See "Kallinger Victims Lost Privacy Suit over
Book," Philadelphia Inquirer, February 19, 1988, p. B7.
13 "Ask The Globe," Boston Globe, August 13, 1987,
Section:National/Foreign, p. 40.
14 Abram Kardiner and
Herbert Spiegel, War Stress and Neurotic Illness (Hoeber, 1947).
15 Schreiber, Sybil, pp. 41 and 56.
16 Cornelia B. Wilbur, with Moshe Torem, "A Memorial for Cornelia
B. Wilbur, M.D., in Her Own Words:Excerpts From Interviews and an
Autobiographical Reflection," Clinical Perspectives on Multiple
Personality Disorder, edited by Richard P. Kluft and Catherine G.
Fine (American Psychiatric Press, 1993), p. xxviii.
17 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 65.
18 Herbert Spiegel, "The Grade Five Syndrome:The
Highly Hypnotizable Person," The International Journal of
Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 22 (1974), pp. 303-319; on the
Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP), see Herbert Spiegel and David
Spiegel, Trance and Treatment, Clinical Use of Hypnosis (Basic
Books, 1978; American Psychiatric Press, 1989); and Donald S.
Connery, The Inner Source:Exploring Hypnosis with Herbert Spiegel
(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), Chapter 9.
19 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 384.
20 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 384.
21 C. H. Thigpen and
H. Cleckley, The Three Faces of Eve (McGraw-Hill, 1957). Flora
Rheta Schreiber mentions that Sybil had also seen the movie based
on this book; see Sybil, p. 381.
22 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 374.
23 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 18.
24 See William James, The Principles of Psychology
(Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 369-371.
25 Wilbur and Torem, "AMemorial for Cornelia B. Wilbur, M.D., in
Her Own Words," p. xxix.
26 Eve M. Bernstein and Frank W. Putnam, "Development,
Reliability, and Validity of a Dissociation Scale," Journal of
Nervous and Mental Disease 174 (1986), pp. 727-735.
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