'Sybil' is one big psych-out (multiple personalities was multiple lies)

“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.

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.

20+ years ago I was working in a public library in the Chicago area. One particular woman (Hispanic, 40ish, shaven head) who came into the library occasionally was obviously not rational. I don't remember any details except the time she told us we had to allow her to make as much noise in the library as she wanted, because "my brother is a lawyer and my sister is a cosmetologist."

This was the person who convinced me demon possession was real. When I looked in her eyes, what was looking out at me wasn't human, but something feral, evil, and mocking.

I had a similar experience later with another library patron: same sense of a calculating, evil, non-human presence in the eyes.

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She started to say in a very female voice, “He’s coming”. Then she “changed”. I don’t know how else to describe it. Her voice became that of a mans.... Her throat and face changed appearance.

The throat and face changing when her voice changed makes perfect sense, because it's the shape of the mouth and throat that create a particular voice. That's why impressionists, when mimicking a particular personality, sometimes take on some of the facial features of that person: the shape of the face is part of imitating the voice.

It makes sense that a demon would be able to control the shape of the mouth and throat to a greater extent than any human impressionist.

Sybil’s real name was Shirley Mason. She was a jittery girl who grew up quivering in a Minnesota family of Seventh-day Adventists who believed that the world was about to end and that any fiction divorced from God’s truth was a sin. As a little girl, she was so terrified of God’s watchful eye that, when she made up stories, she hid this habit from her parents. She was also made to participate in a health fad of the day, the “internal bath,” or enema. She developed a germ phobia and at one point examined her hands obsessively.

Lest anyone think this nuttiness was confined to early 20th century 7th Day Adventism (and the health nuts of Battle Creek, Michigan), see the role of the enema in Germany and Austria in the era leading up to WWII.

More from Lloyd deMause:

“It must not be imagined that phrases such as “the victims of Reaganomics” are purely metaphorical. An effective sacrifice requires a real Man Eater and real deaths. lt is not too dif-ficult to determine the approximate number of additional deaths brought about during Reagan’s Time of Sacrifice. A careful statistical analysis has been made by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee of the average increase in mortality rates during recessions for suicide, homicide, cardiovascular deaths and other indices of mortality affected by economic activity. Extended to the present period, these rates show that approximately 150,000 additional deaths can be attributed to the effects of Reaganomics.(18) To this figure must be added the deaths attributable to Reagan’s budget-cutting efforts - mainly those aimed at the tens of millions of women and children helped by government programs-such as the deaths caused by the reduction in child nutrition programs, in Aid to Families With Dependent Children, in nutrition programs for low-income pregnant women, in the Federal School Lunch Program, in funds for handicapped children, in disability benefits and so on. The direct cutting of such aid easily pushes the death toll for Reaganomics far over the150,000 figure.(19) Finally, this figure does not include the indirect deaths produced by such effects as the reduction in environmental protection enforcement, cuts in aid to philanthropic organizations, including UNICEF, the loss of health insurance by millions of unemployed workers, the deaths in underdeveloped countries affected by the Reagan recession and many other similarly lethal actions.”

http://web.archive.org/web/20021118183115/http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/reagan/rp51x61.htm

Politically he's pretty funny. But I'm referring to his site for the historical and anthropological references. For instance, imagine what kind of society is typified by this kind of behavior:

The fear that the infant would become a “tyrant” over the mother was so common that any child’s crying was “exclusively described as ‘screaming’ [and the mother told to] remain hard and relentless” toward her baby and never to talk to or hold it in her lap so that “after a few nights, the child will understand that its screaming will have no effect and is quiet.” 33 (Even rats who are tied up and never handled in their early years grow up vicious.)34 Since “the small child has a notorious smell,” mothers often put them, swaddled, in a bag, which they hung on the wall or on a tree, while the mothers did other things.35 Since the pedophobia of the mothers continued after their infants were out of swaddling clothes, there were many other restraint devices available to assure that the child would not be a demanding “tyrant,” such as tight corsets with steel backboards and steel collars, long straps around the body to restrain the child,36 anti-masturbation cages, etc. Painful enemas were routinely applied in daily rituals that were actually sexual assaults on the anus, beginning around six months of age, before sphincter control is available to the infant,37 with the mother or nurse sometimes tying the child up in leather straps and inserting the two-foot-long enema tube over and over again as punishment for its “accidents.” 38 Many cities had special enema stores that German children were routinely taken to in order to be “fitted” for their proper enema size. German preoccupation with feces was so widespread that Alan Dundes wrote an entire book about it (Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder…short and sh-tty).39

Since the child’s “real” nature was considered sinful, their free will had to be broken, and beating was the main way to accomplish this. Psychohistorian Aurel Ende’s extensive analysis of German autobiographies was entitled simply “Battering and Neglect” because, as he put it, there was “no bright side” to report about the universal German practice of beating children into obedience.40 Beating, said one German doctor, must begin early, even in infancy, and “consistently repeated until the child calms down or falls asleep…[for then] one is master of the child forever. From now on a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture, is sufficient to rule the child.” 41 German parents were often described as being in a “righteous rage” during the beatings while they “hammered obedience” into them, and the children often lost consciousness. Schools were beating factories: “At school we were beaten until our skin smoked.” 42 Hitler's father routinely battered him into unconsciousness. 43 Children regularly had to be dragged violently to school screaming, they were so afraid of the daily batterings that were inflicted there, and childhood suicides were frequent in reaction to beatings or such practices as “cold water bathing” that was often practiced to “harden” them.44 Childhood suicides in Germany were over three times higher than in other European countries.45

It was the darndest thing I have ever witnessed. Now, working in hospital Security, we were “use” to fighting people on PCP, delusional etc... but not like this. A person on PCP is violent and extremely strong; however, the facial appearance, throat, voice etc... don’t change. What was startling to me was that this poor woman was highly educated. She was a research scientist at a local government hospital. From talking to one of the psych nurses later, the woman managed over the years to suppress “him” but was having difficulty at the moment and she admitted herself. It gave me an uneasy feeling then and it still does simply because I don’t understand it.

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