Posted on 10/17/2011 6:51:30 AM PDT by decimon
“Sybil,” the shocking true story of a woman shattered into 16 distinct personalities that helped her to dig up repressed memories of monstrous childhood sexual abuse, sold nearly 7 million copies when it was published in 1973. A serialized version ran in newspapers around the nation as readers gasped at “scenes of Sybil’s demented mother defecating on lawns, conducting lesbian orgies and raping her daughter with kitchen utensils. This kind of sex and perversion had never before been published on the ‘women’s’ pages,” writes author Debbie Nathan in a new book. “Sybil” was adapted into an Emmy-winning 1976 TV miniseries starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward that was viewed by one-fifth of the American public.
And it was an utter fraud.
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Shirley continued, “I do not have any multiple personalities ... I do not even have a ‘double’ ... I am all of them. I have essentially been lying ... as trying to show you I felt I needed help ... Quite thrilling. Got me a lot of attention.”
The therapist, who was already talking up her prize patient at psychiatry conferences, dismissed the letter as “resistance” and pushed on with the drugs and the therapy -- this time, five days a week. Soon Shirley was again putting on a split-personality show in Connie’s office. No one else except her roommate was ever treated to these performances.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“The ‘blackout’ of memories (where even when it IS brought up, you still don’t remember) is another thing. I don’t buy that.”
That’s what repression is, by definition. Everything else you describe is part of normal, non-neurotic memory.
No its not. They’re talking about original sin, they just are forbidden to call it that.
An alternative name for the book was “When Attention Whores Get Together.”
—This has nothing to with the subject at hand, really. People not bringing it up doesn’t constitute repression.—
We’re both mincing words. I’ve discovered a couple of “shocking events” from my past that I was “repressing”. When someone asked about them though, I remembered them vividly. I may have been “actively” or “subconsciously” repressing them, but the fact is that they were significant, yet I never thought about them for decades.
Think about a highly skilled professional football player that represses the really bad game he had when he was in Jr High. He may subconciously avoid thinking about it. And he may be so successful that until he meets a guy at his 35th high school reunion that brings it up, he had forgotten all about it. He did do a form of memory repression. Especially since most of us would never forget such a thing and probably think about it every now and then, within the context of it being our career.
We’re talking about the business of human psycology. Words have “vague” meanings, and they like it that way.
...for fun and profit.
Bipolar (formerly known as manic-depressive) is a real malady. It has nothing to do with multiple personalities.
“She did ‘repress’ very many memories, which only began to come back as she began to deal with what happened to her”
Certainly something like that happened, but it wasn’t repression. It’d be more accurate to say that they were bad memories she didn’t like to think about. And they didn’t “come back,” they were always there. That’s the point. Either they’re in the memory or they’re not. There is no such thing as memories that are in you without them being in your memory.
“If you don’t want to remember something, you sure enough can ‘repress’ it by choosing to forget it.”
No, wrong. You can’t ever intentionally kick anything out of your memory, that’s absurd. It’s an automatic process. You can choose to quickly change your mind when something bad comes up, but that’s it. It never goes away because you choose so.
Even if it did, that wouldn’t be repression. Repression is not a choice, or if it is it’s your psyche, not your consciousness, that’s choosing for you.
So is multiple personalities a real disorder or not?
I remmeber seeing a TV medical documentary once where a man would sneeze and change into another personality. And they caught it on-camera once and it really amazed me.
He looked, sounded, and acted like an entirely different person. And I dont mean in the little ways- like a person just acting differently , you would have sworn it was a different person.
His facial features were changed, his mannerisms, tone of voice, everything. I remember thinking that I if it was not real, it was the most amazing acting I ever saw.
I cannot recall any benefit to the guy at all. In fact, one personality was trying to stop the other from buying a car they could not afford.
“We’re both mincing words”
No. Maybe you are, but not me. Pyschiatrists may not be scientists, but they do attempt consistency in definition, and their “repression” means something definite. I’m using their term; you are borrowing it to describe something else.
“I’ve discovered a couple of ‘shocking events’ from my past that I was ‘repressing’”
No you haven’t.
“When someone asked about them though, I remembered them vividly”
Why use the term “repression,” then? All that means is that they were in your memory, like everything else you remember. If they had been scarring you all along, it’s because you did remember them, not because they were locked somewhere in you which we call “the unconscious.”
“the fact is that they were significant, yet I never thought about them for decades.”
So what? I’m sure you’ve gone stretches without thinking of insignificant things you remember, either. If you think those memories were hurting you all along while you weren’t remembering them, and that’s what made them “significant,” you’re wrong. Either they hurt you all along because you did remember them, or you didn’t remember them and they didn’t affect you in the interim, or they hurt you long before and you’re just pretending that in the meantime their impact has been persistent. There’s no fourth option, having to do with memories that stop being memories and hurt you all along, whatever they are, without you remembering them, until you do remember them later on. That is what classical psychology thinks, and classical psychology is wrong.
I was in a horrible marriage to a deranged psychopath- I finally divorced her to protect my children from her. When she finally died in a car accident I can only remember relief of knowing she would never be able to come back and hurt them.
When I was seeing a court-ordered doctor for psychological eval for the divorce (he recommended I have sole custody and she not even be allowed unsupervised visitation) I remembered things I had completely forgotten because they were so horrible.
I have a recovered memory of someone owing me money but they’re still repressing it, what shall I do?
Don’t know about this case, but I know someone who seems to genuinely have two personalities. So I think that multiple personality disorder does exist, although it unusual.
The onset of the disease generally occurs within twenty-four hours of the loan.
“They’re talking about original sin, they just are forbidden to call it that.”
It’s their analog to original sin, you could argue. Anyone can see the appeal, so ingrained is mankind’s low self-esteem. You could also argue that they wanted to cash in, or that their theory of “alien powers” couldn’t sit by and let anything whatsoever go unexplained through the prism of psychology.
But it’s not “just” that. They had their own reasons, stupid reasons, to believe in it. Psychology’s version is also vastly different from the religious one, in ways I don’t need to elaborate.
“I remembered things I had completely forgotten because they were so horrible”
Think about that for a minute, though. Why would you not remember them because they were horrible? Isn’t that a good reason to remember them? Wouldn’t horror make them stand out? Aren’t there all sorts of memories you wish you could forget but keep popping up because they disturb you?
I posit that the main reason you phrase it that way, that you forgot because of horror, is because psychology has so influenced the culture, and so conditioned us to think that’s what happened. But think, if it was “completely forgotten,” how did you remember it? That doesn’t make any sense. If you remembered, then you didn’t forget. It’s that simple. The “unconscious” and “repression” are hocus-pocus. It wouldn’t ever occur to you to say you completely forgot something because it was horrible then remembered it later if you didn’t already believe in the theory of repression. Because there’s no reason whatsoever to believe in repression without a mountain of dubious and wacky theoretical detritus wearing you down.
Laz'd hit it them.
Board certified shrink here: I’ll stay out of this except to say that many, if not most, in the profession saw this whole phenomena for the hoax it was from the very beginning.
It’s an iatrogenic illness, fostered on susceptible people by therapists of dubious insight, training, character and motives.
When therapists send me these folks for medication management, I politely inform the patient that I will require them to be present, not their multiples, throughout each meeting with me, and that I will refer them on to someone else the very first time a multiple appears. Not once have I, under those rules, seen a multiple or any other regressive nonsense, and I have found out later in several cases that they’ve dropped the drama altogether and gotten on with their lives.
“He may subconciously avoid thinking about it.”
Avoiding thinking about something is not repression.
“He did do a form of memory repression”
No, that’s not repression.
“We’re talking about the business of human psycology. Words have ‘vague’ meanings, and they like it that way.”
If they do dilute the meaning of repression, it’s out of knowledge that it was a stupid concept to begin with, and bears no relation to reality. Things work this way a lot with Freud. He’s hailed as the messiah of the discipline, but if currently practicing psychiatrists ever went back to actually read more than a select few of his writings, they’d die of embarrassment.
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