Sybil Exposed
Authors: Debbie Nathan
Acclaim for
S
YBIL
E
XPOSED
“Debbie Nathan’s fine, insistent mind will stop at nothing to get to the truth behind
Sybil
, no matter how many walls are put up.… Her research is beyond compare.”
—SUSIE BRIGHT, author of
Big Sex Little Death
“I’ve long considered Debbie Nathan to be the most important and unsung writer working in America today.
Sybil Exposed
affirms her brilliance. Using a fierce blend of investigative journalism and cultural criticism, she exposes multiple personality disorder as yet another lurid myth cooked up by the collective unconscious of our popular culture. The book is an astonishing achievement.”
—STEVE ALMOND, author of
Candyfreak
and
God Bless America
“Journalist Debbie Nathan has found a delicious, hiding–in–plain–sight historical saga to tell: the making of the most famous ‘multiple personality’ case and book. A troubled, impressionable young girl from a Sinclair Lewis–type small town; a brilliant, bullying female neuropsychiatrist in 1950s Manhattan; and a glamorous, frustrated feminist magazine writer who’d had an affair with Eugene O’Neill, Jr.; how these three disparate American women’s fates, fantasies, and ambitions came together to create a fiction that rocked the culture and continues to affect us today makes compelling and sobering reading. It’s as compulsively readable as it is cautionary–two traits rarely shared in one book.”
—SHEILA WELLER, award–winning magazine journalist and author
of the
New York Times bestseller Girls Like Us: Carole King,
Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon–and the Journey of a Generation
“What forces cause a diagnosis like multiple personality disorder to rise and fall within less than a generation? Debbie Nathan broke the story twenty years ago and now, in
Sybil Exposed
, she’s finally putting all the puzzle pieces together. Unless we learn the lessons in this journalistic masterwork, we are doomed to fall victim to the next fad and the next caring healer who claims to have our best interest at heart.”
—ETHAN WATTERS, author of
Crazy Like Us
“Debbie Nathan’s
Sybil Exposed
is a first–rate historical detective story re–creating the lives of the three protagonists of one of the most popular accounts of a psychiatric patient in American history. Nathan shows how the subject of the study, her psychiatrist, as well as the author of the book invented a biography to explain something that never existed: the multiple personalities of the patient. Anyone captivated by our contemporary ‘firsthand’ accounts of mental illness should read this story that illustrates how the demands of any historical moment shape such accounts and make them seem truer than true.”
— SANDER L. GILMAN, author of
Seeing the Insane
,
Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences;
Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University
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.
DEBBIE NATHAN
was born and raised in Houston, Texas. An award-winning journalist, editor, and translator, she specializes in writing about immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border, and sexual politics and sex panics, particularly in relation to women and children. Debbie is the author or coauthor of four books
.
She currently lives in New York City with her husband and has two grown children.
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PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. COPYRIGHT © 2011 SIMON & SCHUSTER
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