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‘Sybil’ 50 Years Later – The New York Times

Turning 50 isn’t easy for any woman, and “Sybil” is no exception.

Citing the most carnival barker of its various subtitles, this bruised classic–“The true and astonishing tale of a woman possessed by 16 separate personalities”–has been published in 1973. critically dismissedit’s sandwiched between Lillian Hellman and Howard Corsell on the bestseller list like a dinner party nightmare. It ended up being two different TV movies. I held a workshop as a musicalquoted with ; psychiatric literaturedebunked, dissected, defended.

Widely reported to have sold over 6 million copies, this work has remained valiantly in circulation all these years, but you can’t blame it for looking a little frayed around the edges.

“Civil” is part of a long American parade of books about mentally distressed women, preceded by “I Don’t Promise Rose Gardens” and “Bell Jar” in the 1960s, and in the 1990s. takes off his cloak and confesses “Girl, Interrupted” and “Prozac Nation”. With the signature face covering, it harassed her teenage girls (and possibly some boys) from the bedroom shelf. Divided Like a shard of a broken mirror or a broken mirror jigsaw puzzle pieces.

I too was intrigued by the mirror cover, but completely bewildered by the text. She returns to that world as an adult only to find the “Sybil” burdened with all the scholasticism and skepticism that has come to surround her. The book is a cautionary tale of historical curiosity and the delusions of popular culture, questioning what witnesses to the diagnosis of the current epidemic, the “TikTok tic,” deserve closer interrogation. It makes me think.

As Walt Whitman wrote in his enthusiastic Song of Myself, “Civil” overnight pathologicalized the idea that one could “contain many.” The heroine had an extreme trauma in her childhood and she developed a series of different personalities to deal with it. With the help of a kind doctor, she will integrate them into her one identity and become complete and mature.

It was a remarkable story — and one that was strangely relatable in this moment of women’s liberation and gender role shifts. For some reason, it was similar to The Exorcist, which came out the same year. Anjoli perfume commercial When a PR model takes home bacon and frys it in a skillet, it never lets you forget that you were a man.

Originally titled “Who’s Sylvia?” It was written by Shirley Ardell Mason of the Dodge Center in Minnesota, working closely with Mason’s longtime psychoanalyst, Flora Lata Shriver. Cornelia Wilbur. What do the three women have in common? Magazines: The same domestic work bible that Betty Friedan effectively scrutinized in The Feminine Mystique.

Forbidden to make fiction by her strict Seventh-day Adventist parents, Mason cut letters and words from copies of the Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping as a child. “Like a kidnapper preparing a ransom note,” he wrote. “Civil Exposed,” starring Debbie Nathan, her forensic investigation of the trio in 2011, draws extensively from Schreiber’s papers at John Jay College.

Schreiber aspired to a literary career, and although she was briefly romantically involved with playwright Eugene O’Neill’s eldest son, she wrote celebrity profiles and pop psychology articles for publications such as Cosmopolitan. And Wilbur, who treated actor Roddy McDowall in a book he co-wrote about the causes and “treatments” of male homosexuality, longed for the kind of wide audience that magazines were attracting at the time.

Written according to the loose reporting standards of women’s magazines at the time, allowing pseudonyms and altering or outright fabrication of facts, “Civil” is best read as a case study in the form of “a fragment of analysis of a hysterical case.” be the best. More famous and interrogated Dora than as a horror story). And indeed, Schreiber admired the success of Truman Capote’s Cold Blood, and from the beginning she aspired to write a “non-fiction novel.”

A shocking detail of abuse at the hands of a supposedly schizophrenic mother – a cold water enema administered to young “Sybil Dorset” while suspended upside down on a light bulb cord on a kitchen table. In Schreiber’s words, it is one of “mother’s services.” Influenced Term — Beyond that of Stephen King’s novel Carrie. Sybil allegedly had beads stuck in her nose. A button hook inserted into her genitals. And she was blindfolded and locked in the trunk.

Rather than being telekinetic, she develops a supernatural ability to play different personas. Struggling with her job and love, she becomes disconnected from reality and finds she is “losing time”. During one session, she begins speaking in her country accent and she calls herself “Peggy”. The number and variety of these various characters, including her two male carpenters named “Mike” and “Sid”, grow exponentially, becoming “alternate entourages of themselves.”

The real-life cases we discuss here relate to medical malpractice and press malpractice. Wilbur crossed the line from transference to entanglement by modern standards. She sneaked into her patients’ beds, administered electroshock therapy with an outdated device, and dosed her with pentothal (a barbiturate then mistakenly thought to function as a truth-detecting agent) until she became addicted and spooked. I took it on a road trip as well.

Wilbur refused to reconsider the diagnosis after being handed a distressing letter by Mason saying he had “substantially lied” about his mother’s torture as well as a different self, Nathan reported. The psychiatrist claimed her patient was in a state of “resistance” to the horrifying truth.

When Schreiber traveled to the Dodge Center to play Capote and looked through Mason’s medical records, she found many inconsistencies. However, all three women were too emotionally and financially invested in the project to abandon it and even founded a company called Sybil Inc.

The concept of multiple personalities is still big business. During the brief run of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from 1980 to 1994, cases surged among women, followed by another discredited book, Michelle Remembers. caused a frenzy of memories recovered by Perhaps never before, or since, has the medical profession been so closely intertwined with medicine. Story. What could be more dramatic and compelling than having a main character and a multitude of supporting characters come together in one body?

Hollywood had already picked up the best-seller The Three Faces of Eve, based on the case of Christine Costner Sizemore. The film brought Joan Woodward an Oscar in 1958. (Woodward would play Wilbur in the first “Sybil” TV movie), multiple personalities became mainstream on talk shows, Schreiber and Wilbur appeared on Dick Cavett’s show, and Oprah Winfrey declared: It’s been a long time. It’s the “90s Syndrome”. one of her guests Trudy ChaseChase identified 92 separate personalities whom he called the military.

There are many memoirs about the condition, including Chase’s bestseller When Rabbits Bark.The real-world ‘Sybil’ friends have arrived and sequel, to exhibit her paintings.Furthermore, cinematic depictions ranged from the sublime (Edward Norton “Primitive Horror”) nonsense (of Jim Carrey) “Me and me and Irene”).

Few people remember Michelle, but Cybill endures with every caution. As a footnote to the overall story, her psychiatrist also considers the case of acquitted “campus rapist” Billy Milligan, who is said to have 24 personalities as told by author Daniel Keyes. bottom.

The Crowded Room, a 10-episode miniseries inspired by Milligan, start streaming Coming to Apple TV+ next month. Mental health sands may be ever-changing, but when mined for material they are bottomless.

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